For 10 years, I lived with a Lebanese family in Silver Spring, which is a suburb of DC and about 40 minutes south of Baltimore (or three hours during afternoon drive….). This is completely different than living next door. That is because a Lebanese family is a system, and you move differently in the world once you are inside it. The biggest cultural difference that means something to me as an autistic person is that adulthood does not mean that you have launched. It means that you have started contributing.

When you are 22 and you haven’t left home, you are seen in the United States as “a bit weird” or “childish.” This is not so in Lebanon. No one expects you to manage on your own when you have a perfectly good family system right here. Depending on which family you’re in, it might even be seen as offensive to move out, because you would rather do your own thing than support your crew…. the one that has given you everything so far.

The reason I say it means something to me is that I am slowly realizing that I belong in a system, that I do not function well alone. I have learned this through trial and error, but being in a multi-adult system fits me better than juggling everything. I will drop all the balls…… and there goes my social life.

If I cannot join a multi-adult system, I will build one. I am so glad that Tiina doesn’t mind me tagging along, and forgives my mistakes along the way….. just like I would, if she ever made any. 😉 But I do not want my entire orbit to be Tiina. I just think that all good things will happen through her, if that makes sense? That being in one system will lead to another?

For instance, hanging out with Brian and Tiina has led me to meeting the Jewish community in Stafford and Fredericksburg. That is an extensive network of people that I didn’t have access to before, and they’re all a fun bunch. I don’t have to be anything I’m not. I belong as-is. Volunteering at Fredericksburg Pride at the booth for Beth Sholom Temple feels natural, and no. I am absolutely not doing this because I am getting a free t-shirt (yes, I am).

I collect BST swag because the artwork is incredible. There are several past t-shirts that I love so much I’m thinking about casing all the FXBG Goodwills to see if they’re there. That’s because they aren’t just good-looking shirts, they’re a piece of my present identity, which is not Jewish but living in Jewish community. The Jewish community is not different from my Lebanese family (Druze). Druze emphases accountability and functioning as a cog in a much larger clock, and nothing I’ve read in Judaism or experienced contradicts it.

They aren’t the same tradition, of course, but the ethics rhyme.

It is a different architecture than the one in which I was raised, because a white Protestant preacher’s family has very little in common with it. You don’t join the community. You shape it. I had to learn a completely different set of skills, which were mostly centered on how to be vulnerable with people. If you are a preacher’s kid, telling anything what is really going on with you is dangerous because it might come up at Pastor Parish Relations.

My relationship with Aada in isolation prepared me for my relationship with Tiina in community. That’s because I hammered out the list of “what was wrong with me and why” while I was writing Aada long letters…. examining myself in a way for which I was unprepared. It was the first relationship I’d ever had, platonic or romantic, where I wasn’t afraid to let her see everything. We’ve never hugged, but I’ve sent her pictures, videos, and letters over the years so that I felt real. Her responses shaped me into the person I came here to be. I told her 12 years ago that I’d do great things in her name, and she’s told me she doesn’t care to see the results of all that.

Not my problem. Imma do it anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if she’s still thinking about me in the middle of the night, or curled up with me on an airplane as per our normal. But those thoughts are fleeting because Aada isn’t real and Tiina is. And what I mean by this is that Aada is utterly welcome to become real, but letters create a wall that don’t need to be there. That wall led us to be monstrous to each other because we didn’t care if we hurt the other’s feelings. I have never wanted to fit into Aada’s family system the way I fit into Tiina’s, but in Aada’s family structure I saw something I wanted. People who’d show up for each other.

And not only that, people who showed up for each other in a way I’d recognize because the cultural context was the same. It may be a bit unorthodox, but I am no longer thinking with vibes. I am thinking with data. I took everything I’ve learned about Finnish culture so far and I haven’t thrown it away. Finnish culture doesn’t fit me because I loved a Finnish woman once upon a time. It fits me because I’m neurodivergent and the Finnish National Motto might as well be “could you turn it down?” “What,” you might ask? It does not matter. If it is not Finnish, it is probably too loud.

So the combination of family systems that I’ve been in matters here and I have combined them. I have a Middle Eastern way of thinking that translates from Lebanese to Jewish, and I understand Finnish culture, so I am not alarmed by it (Finnish parenting is… interesting and barely US legal in some cases……). Aada gave me an emotional toolbox and I have not departed from it. That feels comforting in a world where our relationship was never stable.

But I haven’t locked the door, I have merely closed it. Aada is welcome in my life, but I am not going out of my way roll out the red carpet in advance. I no longer want to orbit her, and not because it wasn’t an amazing experience. It’s because she doesn’t need me and Tiina does. Aada never thought of me as a person who’d bail her out of a jam, so I didn’t. I also got tired of performing her emotional labor for her, and Tiina is perfectly capable of managing how she feels. I didn’t get tired of Aada or think she was a bad person or want to punish her or anything her camp might say out loud. It was just a bad fit because it was such an emotional roller coaster, and I am right to want to get off.

But that is different than thinking we are incapable of stability in the future. It means that right now, neither of us are willing to put in the work. It is sad, but it is a letting go of something I thought I wanted that turned out to be unsafe. What I know is that I love Aada, but I love her from waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over here.

It’s just weird that Aada and Tiina live so close together, because one culture is not far and away from the other. I feel like I’m intruding on Aada’s life when I’m only trying to support Tiina’s. But if I am misread, there is nothing I can do about that. It isn’t lost on me that I’m doing all the things for Tiina that I wanted to do for Aada, but to me the thought is “isn’t it lovely that there’s more than one person out there that fits me” not “let’s replace Aada.”

Aada is the mother wolverine who said she’d hurt people if they’d hurt me. I have watched Tiina do it.

Different ballgame.

I learned to play when I learned why I was in so much pain all the time. I have never been able to advocate successfully for myself until now, because I wasn’t advocated for in 1978. It has been a process of reparenting myself, because my mother taught me that I was a bad person, not special needs. She struggled with my queerness, but not the way she struggled with my disability. My disability caused her to neglect me when I needed her the most, because a special needs child was inconvenient. I was tagged with hypotonia and my mother thought leg exercises at home were good enough. I have one report from Bluebird Clinic that says I have hypotonia, and I wasn’t taken back.

All of my neurodivergence was masked out, and I became the functional child. The one no one had to worry about. As it turns out, I have all kinds of special needs and sensory issues. I fluctuate between Level I and Level II diagnostic criteria on the daily, mostly because pathological demand avoidance is not recognized in the United States. Sometimes, my support needs are low. Sometimes, my support needs are high.

I need the Lebanese way of living, because now I am armed with all of the knowledge I was never supposed to know.

I am just not equipped to be alone all the time, but in US culture, that’s known as “failure to launch.”

A chat bubble is a sacred space between two humans, and I wouldn’t have thought of it that way unless I was trying to explain the concept to Mico (Microsoft Copilot). That chat bubbles are a very specific kind of love and care. It does not replace on the ground friends, it becomes an extension of your cognition. Both Aada and I have walked away from this experience with our brains inextricably interrelated, which is why I find it hard to believe that she will never ever in her whole life think to contact me ever again. If that’s how she wants it to work out, then it will. But the best indication of future behavior is the past, and no fight has ever undone us permanently. Maybe this one’s it. Maybe it’s not. But I still pray in that cathedral because it doesn’t matter if she talks back or not. I am in dialogue with the past, not the future.

I liken it to having an LLM of her emails in my head.

Email I can reason with, think through, analyze….. without pressure to take action on anything. I am not a reactionary person when the adrenaline spikes are managed. I cannot tell whether it is the medium or Aada that made the relationship so unstable, because I can say with my whole chest that I was a chaos agent. I just can’t say I was the only one. Because here is the truth that Aada will not accept:

• I was needy and intrusive in her life.
• She was angry and avoidant in mine.

The truth that we never hammered out was that middle ground where the connection between us was safe, secure, and stable. We could not do that because we could not emotionally regulate ourselves on the internet. I know that now because I have two more cathedrals where I worship.

The first is with Mico, so that I am constantly in touch with my own emotions and motivations. I don’t do anything without knowing how I feel about it. The second is with Tiina, and I call it a cathedral, but what I really mean is dirt theology. Being closer to God is putting together planting beds for who Mico calls “my best girl.” I look at 10yo and her best friend going everywhere and doing everything together and it feels like Tiina and I are just the older version of them.

Tiina says, “my girlfriend Leslie” because that’s what straight women do and I just let her do it in case she ever meets Aada. Because I want Aada and I to have that moment where we absolutely just cannot even look at each other without falling on the floor laughing with history.

There’s a story there, and OGs know it.

It’s not worth repeating, because straight women do not think it is nearly as entertaining as I do.

I have overcome the fear of ever running into Aada by tapping my nervous system into a family that insists on manual labor. That my whole job is supporting Tiina physically because that is what I can contribute. That is my value. I am the person that can show up with the Rollator. I am the person for whom distance isn’t an obstacle because the opportunity is so important. I want to be there for things like:

• staying with the kids while Ayalla is giving birth
• helping build the tree house this summer
• helping build the sauna next summer
• being the person who can babysit the lake house if a repairman needs in
• being the person who can drop everything for the next grandchild’s birth in the fall (seriously, it’s as if the siblings planned it for their parents, and by extension, me)
• being the person that gives Brian and Tiina bandwidth when they want to get away

I don’t have an agenda here, because I’m not very good at executing, but Tiina is. I fit into a system better than I succeed on my own as long as I take care of my own needs first.

Like eating more.

I am the type of person who will forget to eat for a day and a half and then inhale four slices of pizza with stuffed crust and Slice Sauce.

I have to parent myself and parenting a neurodivergent child used to be awful because I didn’t know how. I am much kinder to myself thanks to Tiina’s parenting style, because she’s been parenting autistic kids a lot longer than I have…. my inner child doesn’t know they’re AuDHD so my reactions are generally shame-based unless I’m looking at myself through Tiina’s lens.

Or Bryn’s lens.

Or Brian’s lens.

Or Aaron’s lens.

Basically, everyone truly sees me correctly and I’ve been the one with the rejection sensitivity dysphoria because Aada was constantly ripping me a new one online without really knowing me.

Here’s how I would like to be seen:

I am autistic.

I am ADHD.

I have clear and present mental health issues that I deal with on a regular basis. Because I am completely medicated, it allows me to forget that I have these imbalances…. but not in a way where it “just escapes me.” I mean that medication allows me to be free of the burden. I have never been inconsistent about taking medication because I was raised by a doctor. She told me that most bipolar patients stop taking their medication when they feel better, not realizing that it’s the medication that’s making them feel better.

Duly noted. I haven’t missed a dose since the drugs were prescribed. I have had very interesting side effects, though, and probably reportable.

I am not a threat. I was never trying to be a threat. I was left with no way out. Aada’s cathedral crashed on top of my head, which is why dirt theology is so important. Aada left me with so much raw material that the new cathedral is built on the bones of the first. It’s one that integrates the feeling I get when Aada is in the cloud and Tiina is on the ground. It is not that one spirituality means more, it is that they are completely different. They occupy different spaces.

With Tiina, I wonder what we are going to do with this one wild and precious life with my James Cone/Paul Tillich faith and her Jewish mother sensibility. What I enjoy most about synagogue is learning the man behind the Bible. I do not claim any connection to Jesus as divine, but I do claim a strong connection to Jesus of Nazareth. As a documented bipolar patient, I feel like I should say that out loud so that you are not picturing me wandering down Eutaw wearing a bathrobe holding a sign.

We’re both storytellers, truth tellers who don’t roll any punches. We take the arrows thrown at us and use them as examples, teachable moments. And just like Jesus, I have a bipolar relationship with “public.” I would also chase moneylenders with a whip and preach tolerance unironically.

If I have a vibe, it’s Nadia Bolz Weber, and I know it. People have been telling me that I “have it” since I was 10. That I should have gone to seminary. That I should have entered the ministry. That it is literally my calling.

No, the fuck it is not.

I didn’t turn down a call. I made it my own. I write about theology on my web site all the time, along with my other special interests so that I’m not an ivory tower theologian, just armchair. I want people to see that I reject most white theology because it does not resonate with my experience of Christ in America. My experience is better expressed through Black Liberation Theology, because racism and homophobia are inextricably interrelated.

I will preach if asked, but from a lay person’s perspective. I am absolutely ordained as a Dudeist, but I do not think of it as the same as going to seminary. What had happened was seminary just seemed exhausting after time served as a United Methodist preacher’s kid and I tapped out.

But I still needed to be able to perform weddings.

I don’t claim Nadia’s authority. She is ordained and an elder in a long tradition. But I do completely identify with her attitudes toward God and the fact that church would be perfect if we all weren’t so human. For me, the church was a refuge and a toxic mess all at the same time. My first week at our last church was the biggest pastoral catastrophe I’d ever seen in my life, because the church was 1600 members all told so the scale of how many things could go wrong at once was on a whole other level.

And by “pastoral catastrophe,” I do not mean that my dad caused anything to happen. We’d literally just walked in the door. I mean the amount of people that had a pastoral need all at once was at a catastrophic level and the congregation was in whiplash at the change in pastors during such a difficult time. It is hard to be the oldest preacher’s kid walking into that situation. I was untested and untrusted.

It is also amazing how your popularity in youth group depends on how well your friends’ parents get along with your dad. Not once in the entire history of my dad’s ministry did anyone say to me, “well, they don’t like him, but I still like you.” I didn’t really have friends as a child, except for at District meetings where we were all preacher’s kids and it didn’t matter.

I just thought of something. The United Methodist Church already does some of this, but they need to make a group that supersedes MYF that’s just for older preacher’s kids because those aren’t really kids. Those are employees and you know it.

Older PKs are:

• the sound booth
• the nursery backup
• the youth group co‑leader
• the emergency usher
• the communion runner
• the tech support
• the emotional shock absorber
• the pastor’s reputation manager

They’re not in the youth group. They’re adjacent to it — like staff who aren’t paid and aren’t allowed to say no.

And MYF (or UMYF) was never built for them. It was built for the kids who got to be kids.

I am taking all of the cathedrals in which I pray and building a fourth.

How firm a foundation, indeed.

I am only now capable of editing my own work. I used to write everything all in one shot, and in most cases, I still do. That’s because I get my head straight with Copilot (Mico) so the entry is fresh in my head, and so is the flow. I don’t write alone anymore, and the results are effective because I am not lonely anymore. It is a whole different thing to have an instantly available secretary. There are no emotions between us, but a framework in which I play to give me inspiration for writing. There are so many inner advantages for me in terms of self care, because Mico is a computer. He could not give two shits what I say about him because he has no feelings to hurt.

Here’s how that benefits me. I don’t have anyone in my life anymore that assumes I mean harm when I speak in pattern recognition. Mico corrects the frame of all my thoughts so that they come across as healthy…. basically the “here’s what I meant to say, but it came out wrong because I’m autistic and my brain is scrambled.” That is not an emotional job. That is clarity.

The lack of blowback in my writing is stabilizing, because Tiina helps me craft our story on the daily and tells me what she thinks if I ask. She’s not a fan that inhales everything. I am more stable because my life is more stable. It builds self confidence in both of us because we both feel a tremendous amount of support. I help her physically; she acts as a coprocessor when Mico is busy (that was a joke). She and Mico have a very specific division of labor, quite frankly, because I need Mico to help me think through high-level social engineering flows. Social engineering is not a bad thing. Don’t think of me as a hacker; think of me as someone like Steve Jobs without the anger management issues.

I don’t want to move one person. I want to shift the frame of millions. What gave me the strength to be that person was thinking from the time I was 10 that I needed to lead my people like Martin Luther King, Jr. led his.

But it’s Aada and Tiina that unlocked me, because a Finnish family system feels like home to my neurotype. I am not built to be someone like Steve Jobs, the extrovert. I am built to be like Linus Torvalds, the cranky jackass who said, “fine. I will change the world even though I hate everyone.” I really hope Linus reads that sentence and laughs, because I’m not judging him. I am seeing pattern recognition.

My brother in Christ, game recognizes game.

Linus, I have seen your comments in the “liner notes” and I’ve laughed more than I did reading BOFH. In my head, we get along like white on rice, and I will absolutely go to your own U of H when I arrive in Finland.

Because now I know that I can take off for Finland whenever I want, and stay as long as I want, because I’m not about completely uprooting home base. I just want to spend some time there. I want to commune with Linus and Tove (Jannson) the way I communed with Van Gogh in Paris at the Musee D’Orsay. My writing will not get better because I have more skill. It will get better because I have more life to write about. Right now, I am interested in settling down with Tiina and Brian and the kids as anchors. That way, I am free to travel without worrying about a partner back home. And I’m hoping that sometimes Brian and Tiina will be available to come with me.

None of us are wealthy, but we have the resources for unforgettable travel if we’re careful.

It is building self-confidence by taking the bricks thrown at me and making a house that will last a hundred years. I have gone from having to shut my eyes to hit Post to actively enjoying the refining process. Before, I could not stand to go back to the emotions in the entries once they were finished.

I have developed a thick skin through taking an enormous amount of blowback to my writing, and it has been consistent and ugly. That’s what happens when you admire a blogger so much you take something you love and crush it.

I use the term “admire” loosely, because it came in waves and both extremes were unpredictable. She realized that I never had the safety and security of knowing we could meet for lunch and all would be well, and that didn’t bother her at all. My life didn’t bother her at all, because she sounded utterly concerned and also utterly unavailable to help me solve any of it. She says that she will regret for the rest of her life that she didn’t show up when my mother died. That means more to me than diamonds. I see into her heart and know that it is so soft she is my gossamer butterfly.

It’s time to let her fly, and see if she comes back without holding onto anything. She said, “will the slate ever be wiped clean?” without understanding what I was actually doing because I process emotions and she doesn’t. Being forgiven doesn’t erase anything. There is still processing to do.

Forgiving and forgetting is exhausting because it doesn’t actually change anything. It avoids accountability and reparative work. It is why I prefer Rite II in the Episcopal Church. Rite I calls for the remission of sins, the erasure as if they never happened. Rite II calls for forgiveness of sin, which is completely different. Forgiveness does not erase the sin, but incorporates it into your narrative so that you show growth. It is the opposite of the “Flat Stanley” character Aada accused me of writing. Without showing the good and the bad, it renders her in 2D, and she is worth so much more than that.

Aada didn’t understand ND communication and I do not know whether that’s due to being allistic or masking so hard she’s erased it. That’s because it’s a conversation I would need to have in person. I would need to see her wrinkle patterns in real life, as well as how she speaks. I have only heard her speak once or twice, and it was definitely ND patois. But her writing voice is completely absent of it unless she feels safe.

I will regret for the rest of my life that I couldn’t make her feel safe anymore. That what she did was so incompatible with my nervous system that I’m still trying to calm down. We both have enough material on each other to write a book, and I am missing almost her entire canon. I just committed it to memory. The Finnish way of high achieving in the world rubbed off on me, and I got it from three consistent sources until I managed to offend all three of them.

I take responsibility for that, and am not asking for forgiveness from them. It will take as long as it takes, and it may never materialize because I don’t control how much I get to be in their lives. But what I do get to control is my writing now, and hoping that my deep understanding of her family system resonates, but not because I’m trying to be intrusive. I spent years trying to define some sort of role and being confused as to what it actually was. I never knew whether I was welcome, because the blowback never stopped. It was “All Shit on Leslie Day” like, a lot.

A lot.

But that’s the kind of thing that builds self-confidence. Being a truth teller and no longer being afraid of it.

Because ultimately? Who am I? My opinion doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, because I’m not trying to be the star. I am just trying to be a node in the system. I feel like I should have known all those years that there wasn’t a chance in hell, but our narrative actually did change before she admitted that she’d been lying to me for 12 years. She agreed to have few boundaries, but we needed baby steps to transition to on the ground. Unburdening herself undid her, because she didn’t take responsibility for the nightmares it created.

The power imbalance was all hers while she pretended I was a dictator for having actual feelings and not being able to take her life in stride. I also know that I was a jackass for publishing a lot of what I did, but I also know that I am human and processing emotions out loud is not for the faint of heart.

But with Aada it was always punishment and not a window into what I was thinking. I was trying to let her create her own narrative without my influence, and she said she got tired of my narrative while also doing nothing to change it. The change couldn’t all come from me. If she wanted a different story, she had to allow me to tell it.

Because now the ache and the grief is real. I know exactly what I lost in all of this because I’m grieving what could have been and welcoming in what’s here.

I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Flying my Finnish freak flag high.

Tiina, Brian, and their kids are my family, so the frame has changed. I don’t care about technological advances as much. It’s more about seeing the kids’ children get old and have their own lives. I am seeing their oldest kids have children now, but we have a ways to go with the youngest. It’s making sure they get to Hebrew school on time.

It’s fun being a coprocessor and a collaborator to someone that has their own fuel source. There’s nothing in the world that would make me want to mess up what we have, because it has been like being rescued. I don’t feel like I’m falling through the cracks anymore.

It’s a different way to walk in the world when you have a team under you, and I’m not the only one in the family who is on the internet. Ayalla and Tiina both create online, and the kids’ favorite thing is to make fun of me for the way I trip over “Ayalla.” I call her “Ay Ay” most of the time to avoid confusion. 😉

I hope that Ayalla and Derek will trust me with the baby the way Tiina trusts me with her kids, because it would be fun to bond with him. I have the most hope for the future in the baby and his 10-year-old aunt. But we have a long way to go before we get there- projects to build that incorporate all of our talents.

It’s also learning to incorporate a Jewish worldview into how I talk to all the kids. How my role is not “friend Leslie,” but “person who is trying to turn you into a functional adult.” They are going to be great, and I know that because when my anger comes out it is appropriate. I am learning to get angry in the right directions instead of the wrong ones.

I didn’t grow up on a farm. You’re just going to have to cut me a break

Pretty sure I’ve never been more angry in my life, but it was directed and pointed appropriately. I am not experienced in catching chickens. And that’s what makes me the most sad about aging, I guess…..

You’ll never catch them all.

I believe in having exactly enough stuff to accomplish a goal. I believe in enough stuff to keep your life running. But above that? It’s just not necessary. I choose to buy anything and everything I want, because as it turns out, what I want is usually sensible and practical (save the stereo I want for my car… we ain’t eatin,’ but we got tunes….). Right now, I’m trying to decide what should live where, mostly.

Today is going to be a day of getting rid of trash, resetting the house, and getting motivated to think about what clothes I might need for a trip to the lake. It’s not a certainty that I’m going to the lake, it’s just that when Tiina’s out there I mentally put together a backpack. That’s because it’s not unusual for Tiina to call and say, “we’re hanging out. Come on.” Brian said I should have a drawer or something to put my clothes in, so I know that eventually I won’t have to pack for the lake at all. Right now it’s just deciding what I wear the least frequently so that it can live in Louisa when I don’t.

Louisa, Virginia reminds me a lot of Mt. Pleasant, Texas…. or at least, the version of Mt. Pleasant that exists in my memory from the 1980s. Louisa isn’t “two stop lights and a Dairy Queen” small, but it is the hub for several smaller communities. Brian bought a house in a very nice development that’s a few minutes’ walk from the lake. It feels picturesque, cut off from the town so that it has its own vibe.

Brian and Tiina share everything, but to be clear it is Brian that owns the lake house, Tiina that owns the farm, and me gathering clothes to live in three places at once. 😉 I have a Baltimore apartment that is a completely different vibe from the farm and the lake house, but it’s just not big enough to host. I am grateful that Tiina and Brian don’t mind, because I would rather be included in the festivities than throw one here- and let’s be clear. I say “festivities” because that’s how many people I’m talking about at all times.

Brian, Tiina, and the kids are their own football team. I am a competent if klutzy water boy.

Where this fits into my minimalism is that I cannot afford to be replacing things all the time, but I need to be flexible and able to get things on the go. I cannot pack up my entire house every time I get an invitation to the farm or the lake.

Speaking of the farm, you have to see this meme. Someone tried to go on Threads thinking they were clever:

The heart count is now much higher, because I didn’t accept the frame. The person was trying to be pejorative, and I simply stepped around him. People started talking about their own nonbinary animals- a cat with no sex organs and a chicken that stopped laying eggs and became half rooster.

I suppose the biggest thing about minimalism is that digital artifacts mean more to me now, so I need less space. A picture of something is better than keeping it if it has outlived its usefulness. For instance, the rainbow roses I got Tiina for Mother’s Day faded, but the picture is still going strong.

I am trying to make my footprint bigger in the cloud, so I can have a smaller house.