Tag: death

Live, Laugh, Love

~ theantileslie ~ 11 Comments

What’s your favorite recipe?

Anyone who actually knows me knows two things. The first is that I don’t have any recipes, and the second is how much contempt I have for the phrase in the title because it is emotional shorthand for a whole mood…. the Karen special.

However, I do cook well. I can’t give you recipes, but I can tell you how I do things and you can cook like I do- I became a professional cook by tasting every step of the way. That’s why we don’t use measurements. We add until the gods have let us know that they are sated.

So much depends on what kind of technology I’m using. Cooking over a fire is different than gas and electric ovens/grills. You also cannot ignore the part of cooking that involves feel, because I get why we need to wear gloves. I believe others underestimate why it’s important not to wear them and just wash your hands constantly. A grilled steak or chicken breast will have a certain feel to it. Wearing gloves dampens our ability to detect it. Moreover, an open flame grill often made mine catch on fire and fuse to my skin. On an open flame, you really have no choice but to touch it because you cannot be certain that the heat is equal everywhere you place it.

To combat not trying to touch things, we risk presentation because we’ll have to cut something open to make sure it’s done in the middle. I do not want anyone to get served pork or chicken medium rare.

These are all of the things that run through a cook’s mind before we even start thinking about ingredients. You don’t buy the ingredients for the technology, you work with what you have.

I saute most things. I even prefer it to the microwave and toaster, because I would rather toast bread in the skillet with butter. I make a mean cheese toastie (grilled cheese). 😉

I start with lots of butter and herbs in a skillet on very low heat. Most of the time, it’s Montreal Chicken Seasoning or herbs de Provence. While that’s warming up, I butter some bread and add hot sauce, pico de gallo, or black pepper, along with two thick slices of cheese. I set the sandwich in the pan and it takes time. You don’t want the toast to be black and the cheese to be unmelted. Putting the lid on the pan for a few minutes during cooking will help the cheese melt with steam, but you don’t want to leave it on too long or the sandwich will be soggy. Low and slow is the name of the game. You can use softer cheeses to speed it up, like Gouda or Jack. You cannot increase the heat. You’ll know it’s time to flip when you see the edge of the bread turn the color toast you like. I prefer to get it very, very brown- almost black- because I think char stands up well to cheese.

To really up your game, make caramelized onions beforehand. Caramelized onions take a lot longer than you think. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever achieved perfection in under 45 minutes. That’s because caramelization is a process. If you help it along too much, they’ll have charred edges and not done enough in the middle. You have to put more butter than you think you need into a pan with way more onions than you think you’ll need (just like 20 pounds of spinach is almost enough to feed one person after cooking it) and just leave it on low heat. Don’t stir it as much as you think you need to, because the caramelization happens when onion touches metal. Think about how often you’re interrupting that when you turn things over.

Touching the metal is what cooks mean when they say “respect first contact.” That means put it on the grill and step back. Do not adjust, do not do anything. The process of caramelization has already started and moving it will rip the crust that has begun to develop immediately. If you respect first contact, the caramelization process will have created a crust so thick that the meat will lift off the grill on its own….. same for pancakes. I know to flip mine when I can lift up the skillet and the pancake slides around independently. I still use a spatula to flip, though, because generally there’s so much hot butter that it would splash in my face. Besides, I like to make my pancakes really thick and it would ruin them to be flipped with that much violence. I save that kind of movement for foods that can take it, like eggs.

Eggs are there for you when no one else is. I swear it. You can add an egg to anything and instant meal.

Eggs are another food where it’s best to respect first contact, but hold the butter to a manageable level. You want enough to coat the pan, but not enough to splash in your face if you’re trying to be me, the home version.

You can flip an egg in any frying pan, but I find that the smaller ones are easier. Not the ones marked “egg pan.” Those are so tiny it’s like playing with Barbie cookware. I mean the smallest normal-sized frying pan because it feels balanced in my hand. If you’re 6’6 and 280, you’re going to have a different favorite. Choose the one you like based on how it feels to you.

When I say respect first contact, I mean that the same thing will happen with eggs that happen with meat and pancakes. They’ll stick to the metal and develop a crust, lifting independently. When you can move the egg in the pan on its own, it’s safe to flip. How long you leave it after it has flipped determines whether it is over easy, over medium, etc.

I find that flipping eggs is infinitely easier than trying to guess when sunny side up is ready. It helps to put the lid on the pan for those, too, because it ensures that the bottom and the top cook evenly.

With scrambled eggs, I tend to respect first contact and break them up very little. I also undercook them a tiny, tiny, tiny amount so that they remain cheesy in texture. Very important sidenote: eggs don’t need anything. They don’t get fluffier with water or milk. You can add volume, but the flavor will thin out to an enormous degree. I would go with a drip of cold water before I’d add milk, but I wouldn’t do either unless I was almost out of eggs and needed to make them stretch.

Cooking is all about learning how to make things stretch, and not even from a financial perspective. It’s also learning how to make use of what you’ve already bought, because you had a creative idea for something…. where you rise to the level is forgetting everything you know and just looking into the pantry.

I always keep pancake mix on hand, as well as cheese, bread, butter, pasta, and the occasional frozen pizza, with which I almost certainly will make double cheese and double jalapeno before I bake it.

Everything I make has a ton of calories for two reasons. The first is that I don’t eat often and I walk everywhere I go. The second is that my stomach needs some help if I’m going to go balls to the wall with Scoville every day in search of relief from hideous allergies. I pad my stomach with the butter and cheese no matter whether it’s dairy or plant-based. A not dog with vegan cream cheese and kim-chi hot enough to blow your head off is just as tasty as beef or pork franks.

Another thing I do is buy spring mix when it’s on sale so that I can do warm salads. My favorite is to saute spring mix, carrots, Brussels sprouts, and kale in a combination of olive and sesame oils. Sometimes I add nuts, seeds, dried fruit if there’s no added sugar, etc. When the veggies have cooked for a little while and I can tell the stems are getting soft, I hit the pan with rice wine vinegar and close the lid.

When the veggies are entirely wilted, I push them to the sides of the pan and crack two eggs in the middle.

It’s done when the yolks are just starting to get hard. I like them best when the texture is gelatinous, not runny.

The egg and the rice wine vinegar play off each other extraordinarily well.

But recognize that there are certain things at home you cannot do well and pay the people that do it. For instance, I have no shame in admitting that it would cost me hundreds to do rotisserie chicken the way I’d really like to do it, or I could just go to Don Pollo. I don’t have to buy their sides, I can just add their chicken to what I do know how to cook well at home…. or, at least, I would if I did that kind of thing. The last time I went to Don Pollo was years and years ago, and I still remember the taste of the black beans and pico because it was served cold, like Cowboy Caviar (Texas black-eyed pea relish). I loved it because they’d taken the time to dice the jalapenos, so they were perfectly deseeded and none of them were bitter.

The other thing they have at Don Pollo that I could not do at home is fried yucca. It’s delicious and I wouldn’t even attempt it because I don’t want to own a deep fryer. I want them to own a deep fryer. 😉

If we’re talking about my personal favorite foods, let’s play the chef’s game. You’re on death row. What’s your last meal? There are no stipulations to this game. The food can come from anywhere.

I would start with bone marrow and crostini, paired with a simple red table wine.

Next, a salad filled with vegetables. Please do not fool around with an iceberg wedge and some bleu cheese. Put your back into it. I want a bright yuzu vinegar with some cracked black pepper. Heritage tomatoes. Romaine. Real food and not restaurant filler.

If John Kinkaid was going to outlive me, he’d know that as my chef, my last meal would be his. He could surprise and delight me, but I already know what he would make.

It would be a vegetable jambalaya and a Purple Haze from Abita.

Because it’s the end of the night, and I’m about to clock out.

The Day God Sent Me an Angel

~ theantileslie ~ 3 Comments

Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone.

As I’ve said before, I live in Maryland and Zac lives in Virginia. Therefore, going between our houses takes a little minute- on both sides. Zac would get stuck in traffic longer than it takes me to ride the Metro. Using public transportation, it takes me about an hour and 20 minutes. In Washington, that is definitely shorter than fighting through rush hour, even shorter if you also have to find a parking space. Finding parking will make you 20 minutes late even when you thought you were half an hour early.

Therefore, it makes more sense for me to go to him all the way around. He doesn’t want to be away from Oliver any more than I do, plus I like to hike and there’s a trail starting practically in his backyard. It also gives me a chance to talk to lots and lots of random strangers, but it never turns out the way either one of us thought. I am so emotionally open that people tend to spill everything to me whether they want to or not. They can look up at the end of that hour and 20 saying, “I can’t believe I told you all that,” and I am very confident in my ability. In fact, I believe that’s the one consistently true thing about me over my 45 years. There’s never been a time where I seemed “unapproachable.” I do not deal in small talk, and neither do others when they talk to me.

I think it was two months ago that this story takes place.

To get to Zac’s, I take the red line to Metro Center, then switch to blue to get out to Franconia-Springfield (interestingly enough, one stop past my old house in Alexandria, Van Dorn). It generally means I have two random encounters instead of just one. If I’m lucky, they’ll ask for my number or vice versa. This is because I’m always looking for new connections, no matter what kind they might be. It doesn’t matter what they look like or what they do for a living. Everyone is going through something in their own way. I just have to pay attention and notice when I really, really feel something. It has never been romance. It has been good stories.

I saw her before I talked to her. Biracial, hair in braids, white t-shirt, nice kicks. She looked to be about nine years old. Her younger sister and her mother were with her, but they were outside my purview at the moment because I noticed that something was up. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. So, I say what I always say when I feel eyes on me. “I like your shoes.” It’s the best conversation starter ever.

Her face lights up and we talk for a few minutes about nothing. Then, out of nowhere, “my dad is dead.” It was a non-sequitur of enormous proportions, but when you’re a preacher’s kid and empath, these non-sequiturs are par for the course. You just have to line up the shot. Your response cannot seem startled, especially when talking to children. I don’t want them to think they’ve said anything wrong. So, even though my internal monologue is “SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT,” outwardly I say, “I am so, so sorry. My mother died in 2016 and it is so difficult.” She nodded at me quietly.

Her mother looks at me and says “we lost him during the pandemic.”

The last three years dropped in my stomach like a rock because I hadn’t lost anyone close to me. It became real very, very fast. We move on to lighten the mood a little bit and her mother says, “hi. I’m Angel.” We go through the pleasantries of what we do for a living and she is infinitely interested that I’m a writer and wants to collaborate on a few things. But the whole time, I’m watching her daughter as she battles with what she just said. The truth bomb left a visible crater.

The subject turns back to her dad, where Angel and both daughters told me about him in reverential tones. When I saw that her oldest was nearing her breaking point, I said, “look at me. Your father is not dead. You are half of him. He lives in you.” I could tell my words ran deep, because she struggled not to cry. We pull into the next station and Angel asks if she can call. I tell her that she surely can and her daughter mouths, “thank you.” They exit and I cannot hold it together anymore. The pain inside all of them was enormous and I took it all on. I had to go through the process of blessing and releasing it, because that pain was not meant for me to carry. We are not close enough yet.

I can say “yet,” because Angel is the first person who has asked for my number that actually meant it. I think it must be a sign.

After all, it came with an Angel.

…because I had to.

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

One of the things that makes me frustrated about this time in my life is how crazy this must all seem to the outside world because I can’t be any more specific that I can right now. It doesn’t make any sense why an Internet relationship would make me react this way, and I can’t give you any more than “if you knew, you wouldn’t think I was crazy at all.” Nothing in my life is as it appears, I can only show you what I can show you. I need to protect my beautiful girl as much as I’m protecting myself, and these entries are just for me. They are written so that I can tell what kind of progress I am making, but not telling her story. Please remember that you are missing at least 50%, and I am comfortable looking like a total wack job in front of the whole world. All I can do is rest in my belief that no one else’s opinion matters. You’re just looking at my reputation.

I am looking at my character.

If you cannot see the difference, then you’re probably not introspective. When you dive into yourself, you see the difference between what others think of you and how little it matters compared to whether you can look in the mirror every day. How others’ opinions don’t pay your bills. How no one else is going to save you, so you have to find ways to save yourself. It’s a tangled web I’m weaving. It looks from the outside like I’m a fly, but I built this web by hand in a rainstorm.

The fact that there’s a chunk missing doesn’t make me feel good, but it’s not my work to sit with that. It’s my work to look at what happened and why. I feel like it’s an important story…. Critically so as we slouch toward a digital society where everyone lives and loves like this to some degree. Also, it’s an important story, but not unusual. It is to people who haven’t lived on the net since ‘99, maybe…. If you look up “geek” in the dictionary, it’s just a picture of me and Wil Wheaton.….. where was I going with this?

It’s not an unusual story, or at least, it doesn’t begin in an unusual way. Our deal was to be confidantes. I love women, so that kind of shit made me catch feelings (an inconvenient truth). She loves women, too, but not in the same way. She caught feelings, too. They just didn’t match, and yet that doesn’t mean her feelings are lesser than. There is no such thing as “the friend zone.” Either you love someone and want them in your life, or you don’t. If you think otherwise, grow up.

I have always felt this way. It’s just that as my life starting spinning out of control, she was the unlucky recipient of shit rolling downhill, and it wasn’t pleasant for either one of us. She kicked my ass, daily, in a way that truly hurt for all the right reasons. I was in the hospital for a few days because I couldn’t get in to see a regular psychiatrist quick enough to deal with acute suicidal ideation, and it was my beautiful girl’s idea. Just move under your own power. I did, and I’ve never regretted it.

I haven’t regretted it to the point that think her strident, no bullshit personality could have saved other people struggling with depression as well, because depression uses the very best lies against you to make you powerless against your own thoughts. No one loves you. You’re too much. You’re so much no one will ever love you. No one will ever be able to put up with you.

I find it interesting that her words made me go to that place sometimes and lifted me out of it in others. It all depended on what my disease wanted out of me that day, and it was relentless. Neurotypical people want to save you, and there is no way to do that. It’s not that they’re incapable. It’s that they don’t know how to fight brain gremlins, and if we already feel like you think we’re too much, we’re not going to help you or even let you know what they are.

I got to that place with my beautiful girl. When she cut off her emotions from me, it didn’t feel safe to open up to her anymore. We weren’t dealing with our mutual brain gremlins anymore, which made me feel like a freak show most of the time. She’s neurotypical, which means that even our brain gremlins are different. But that doesn’t mean hers are less valid. It didn’t feel safe to have a sounding board that was just me talking to myself, because for as much as I got out of workshopping my issues, what makes me feel safe in a relationship is mutually diving into things. Feeling supported as well as supporting others. She supported me and wouldn’t let me support her, so I always felt like “the younger one.” I have bipolar and ADHD, which leads a lot of people to attribute my behavior to immaturity, when in reality, it’s just different. You don’t get the same behavior out of people who literally have no idea how to function in society.

It’s exhausting to feel like you’ve given 350% to something and it still looking like you’re in kindergarten because everything went wrong at once because of some fucking brain chemical or another. At night, I’m not relaxing. I’m paralyzed with indecision and it reads as lazy.

Here’s why it’s so much effort to be alive. I have to remember to do everything. Nothing becomes habit, nothing gets easier. The morning routine is hard every day. It does not “get easier once you get used to it.” Ever. You spend the same amount of energy on every task, every day.

Because I’m not just ADHD, my bipolar and anxiety remind me all the time of just how unacceptable that is, and it’s not something I can change. I just have to manage it. If I designed a house, it would have all my shit where I could see it, because my mind doesn’t store where things go. My mind doesn’t store the memory of where I put things, even if it was just a few minutes ago. I have very little peripheral vision, so I can drop something next to me and spend 20 minutes looking for it, because where I thought the thing dropped is several feet from where I thought it would be.

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

Speaking of my mother, it’s a shame that I didn’t get to have the relationship I wanted with her until the very end. I think all the time what it would be like to have my mom as my beautiful girl…. The one I look to for love because I can…. The one who’d die to protect me and I’d feel the same. I would never have traded one relationship for the other. It’s just a type of female friendship that my mother and I would have enjoyed.

I’m not sure that I mentioned what it was like seeing my aunt Nancy at my grandfather’s funeral. It was my father’s father, and I knew in less than a second that she hadn’t come for her. Of course Lone Star, Texas is a tiny town and they knew each other, but she was bringing my mother’s spirit even though it was the other side of my family.

I choked up and tried not to cry the minute she started talking. She could have read the phone book and I’d be sobbing. That’s because there’s about the same age difference between my mom and Nancy as there is between Lindsay and me, so their voices are for all practical intents and purposes, the same. That voice is still in my head days later, and I’m glad that she comes to DC all the time. My cousin Nathan is a doctor in Alexandria, VA, about 40 minutes from me.

My aunt still has a house in Lone Star, very near my grandfather’s on Starlight Lake. Our family has agreed to all chip in and keep the Lanagan house so we’ll be neighbors even if I’d originally come to spend time with my dad’s side of the family.

Here’s the thing about Lone Star, Texas.

It doesn’t seem ideal until you realize that with a fast internet connection and being able to buy land for a dollar, it’s not so bad. I’d never want to be that isolated full time, but I get it. If I could get an affordable lake house somewhere, that’d be the end of it for me, too…. It just wouldn’t be in Texas, and I’m not sure there are any lakes in this area where the houses aren’t a million dollars…. Wait. Scratch that. They were a million dollars in 2001. Now they’re seven.

The great thing about buying land is that if you didn’t have a lake before you bought it, you can just put one in. 😛

(Oh, that would be so fun. I’d love swimming in water with actual fish.)

So, you can do all that in bum fuck, Texas, and nothing on God’s green earth would tell me buying property there would work out well. I would hate the politics. I’d hate the struggle. I left all that behind because Lindsay is strong enough to work with those people and try to get them to change their minds. I am a nervous wreck when it comes to that kind of stuff. In this case, I think it helps her that she’s straight because she has more clinical separation than I do.

Maybe in ten years I’ll be grouchy enough to rejoin the cadre of Texans screaming to get their state back. Dallas, Houston, and Austin are tired. Get your shit together, Texas. I realize that in some ways, Austin is the problem….. but they have the same issue as DC. The government is conservative as shit, and the locals are actually smart.

Speaking of Texas, I reconnected with a high school friend from HSPVA that lives in The District, so he’s even closer to me than when he lived in Virginia. He posted on Facebook that he needed a house sitter because his regular one was unavailable, and even though we hadn’t talked in legit years, I thought, “this is an Honors Band friend. You gotta do it.” He felt the same way, so we spent some time together on Saturday. I met his partner, dogs, and corn snake. I think it will lead to more down the road, as we both have mutual friends here, as well as having gone to PVA, so our friends come through all the time.

I learned something I didn’t know, and that’s always fun. My 10th grade science teacher gave Beyoncé a C. 😛

I wasn’t there at the time. It must have been either the year I left or the year after, because I don’t remember whether B was two years behind me or three (yes, I am older than Beyoncé. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice).

Since I’ll be in The District all week, I’m looking forward to having a home base in the middle of everything. The house is indescribably close to the Metro, easier to walk from one to the other than drive because you can cut through parking lots. It’s also a classic DC row house, just the perfect house I’d have picked for myself had I wanted to live in the middle of the city all the time.

I do not regret choosing to live in the suburbs, because for what I pay, what I get is RIDICULOUS. I chose to have the smallest room in a GIANT house. I love having a real kitchen and not a shitty apartment galley. The only thing I would change is the stove- it’s electric and not gas. When we had to replace the stove, I asked if we could switch, but our kitchen isn’t wired up like that. No big deal. I have friends who will let me cook at their houses….. even if they have All-Clad, DANA. 😛

That is an old, old joke. Dana’s All-Clad set is heirloom. Her great grandkids wouldn’t have to buy new cookware, and I was there when they were new. It took Dana a little bit to trust me with them, and it became a running joke. Here’s a story she doesn’t know. I invited a woman over to hang out while she wasn’t home, another cook so I thought she was sane. I told her that Dana would freak the fuck out if she used steel wool on the pans, so please don’t. I come in the kitchen and there she is, scrubbing the fuck out of our pans with exactly the thing I told her not to use. I didn’t care if she wanted to “get away with it.” I bitched her out and we’re not friends anymore, mostly because she thought I was crazy for telling her what to do.

It was a “keep my wife’s name out your mouth” moment.

It’s ok, though…. That I looked crazy.

I did it because I had to.

I’m Not Sure

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever had surgery? What for?

I’ve had classic little kid surgeries, but I don’t know if they count because none of them were what you’d think of when the phrase “major surgery” comes around. I had tubes put in my ears. I had the muscles shortened on one eye so it didn’t drift as bad. Nothing where I had to stay in the hospital, except for an allergic reaction. That was at least 30 years ago, and I never did figure out the trigger. Perhaps it was the stress of coming out. I was in fifth grade. It is not impossible, because it was so mystifying that Dr. Leaves thought it could be the pink dye in Benadryl.

With the benefit of time, I doubt it.

Right now I am doing emotional surgery on myself, which I have been doing all along as a blogger. I just feel like I’ve graduated from stitching myself up to removing diseased tissue. I am getting out all the good and bad things in my life, throwing them up here like a set of X-rays so that I can look at them dispassionately. It’s the only way I can direct myself, because I cannot feel this level of emotional pain and physically move without it.

I have come to a very good place. This morning, I am just empty. I have spent all my energy pouring everything out, and the tap is dusty. I have to wait for a rainstorm to access inspiration, and that is okay. When the inspiration to write is the ending of a major relationship (in terms of time, not romance), I write until I shut down.

It Is Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer.

Popular

~ theantileslie ~ 5 Comments

If you know me at all right now, you know Kristen Chenoweth is playing in my head. I remember going to see Wicked in Portland, and I think Bryn was with me. I’ll have to check with her when we talk later, because it’s early AM in Oregon. If she saw the notification, she’d get back to me and go back to sleep. I know enough to know that she’s barely moving right now, so maybe text her later. 😛

I’m writing about “Popular” because I noticed that “No Fish on Mondays” is rocketing up to the top of my leaderboard in terms of hits, an ego boost because I never thought I’d write anything more popular than my marriage article, and now there are two entries beating it…. although I would like to think that “The Art of War” is educational. Don’t say anything even remotely threatening in a Facebook post, because they will can your ass even if you make “kicking your ass” part of a statement on a COOKING CONTEST.

I’m reflecting on all that has happened between the marriage article and “No Fish on Mondays.” Holy Jebus. It’s a lot. I’m divorced from Dana, which was a mistake, but one that should have been taken care of years before it happened. There is nothing I could have done short term that would have turned us back around, because we weren’t smart enough to go to a therapist, jointly or severally. Nothing that happened from summer of 2013 on was a symptom, not a disease. We never talked about the underlying issues between us, so we floundered. It happens all the time.

I learned during that time what it was like to make a mistake that couldn’t be forgiven, and so did Dana. I do not mean this to say that I have not forgiven her on my own. We’re all good. She could call me at any time for anything. But what I won’t do is go out of my way to see her again. I don’t want to intrude on her life, either, and I’m doing it enough already. My only saving grace is that I was like this when she met me. I tanked my last blog because her sister chewed me up and spit me out, then it took four years to start this one because I had such a thin skin.

It took four years to rebuild any confidence at all. Four years of sitting silently where I could have been building something. Four years of possible recognition from better writers than me. Four years of not having a safe space to go where I could say anything I wanted, because upsetting the apple cart was not my bag. It was only then that I realized that very few people saw this space as valuable for me. That yes, I’m angry and irate, but also loving and giving to the point where I don’t take care of myself. Both of those things are true of everyone on earth. They just don’t let anyone know their process for going from angry to loving.

Because of course, part of anger is shock. We’re frightened of the things we don’t know, taking off into the unknown. So part of coming down from anger is taking a step back and looking at the circumstances and identifying where that anger is coming from. What’s the root issue, because it’s popping up everywhere? You need time to mellow out, and I’m the first one to tell you that because when I don’t chill, I make mistakes. I work too fast without thinking long term.

But in terms of what happened between the marriage article and now, I don’t think I have in all cases. I think that ending this Internet relationship will be better over time, because I was giving it so much time and energy that I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. That’s why I was so angry that she read a volume on what I was going through without acknowledging any of it except to say that it was 100% clear I wasn’t getting what I needed and to go find other friends.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t thinking of anyone else’s problems except for hers. She needed silence, and I was happy to give it. Fuck all the noise, I’m looking for a signal. Why I lived in all that noise for so incredibly long is beyond me except that I thought I could make it right. I didn’t. I was an asshole because she treated me that way. I’m sure she could say the same thing about me. Neither one of us turned off our defenses and kept them firmly in place, and trying to cross that divide was unwelcome. So, I just won’t. I would have been a nicer person had I just let it lie instead of being irate, and yet I couldn’t shake my anger. Part of my anger was “I really am worth it.” I know she sure was, and I was trying to prove it to her. But you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go, and I stopped myself from seeing it because I wanted to.

I’m not going to stop her from showing up, or asking for things. But I am going to stop pointing my attention in her direction as fast as I humanly can, and “humanly” is very important here. Ten years is not nothing. I am a completely different person than I was when we met…. in the extreme, actually, because back then I was married and my mother was alive.

My mother’s death put everything on hold for me except this one relationship, because I couldn’t emote in front of people. I could only emote in front of her. She was with me from airport to airport. She listened to my cries of “Jesus Christ, just come pick me up.” Load up the kids, get it moving. 😛

She listened to my cries of “I’m empty, and I don’t know how to fill it.” I asked her if I could ask her mom stuff (she’s a few years older than me, and she’s a mom, so it made sense then). Her reply is one of the funniest things I’ve read in my life. She said something about sure, as long as I didn’t expect what she said to be what my mother would have said. The incongruous image of them having anything in common made me literally roll on the floor. I said, “I think of you and my mother being alike the same way Tom Brady and I are both 43.” Exactly none of that takes away grief now, but it stands alone as a truly bright spot.

She did everything right, I swear. I’m just not strong enough. I’m not strong enough to look at the difference between 2013 and now and not feel an inch tall. I’m not strong enough to carry all of it. I need her. She needs me. She doesn’t think so, and I can’t prove it. So here we are…. adrift until something happens in her brain that she remembers who I am. I just don’t think she will, because she would be totally happy with my own breadcrumbs for all eternity while I sat in a loss I couldn’t fix and watched her be totally fine. She could just say go and find other friends. Not sure I’ve ever felt so much humiliation.

I am sure I am not very popular with her at the moment, but I cannot care about that. I will never get over it if I don’t write about it, and I want to get over it more than anything else in the world. You’d just have to know what my insides have looked like over the last 10 years to see why I needed to step back to stop torturing myself…. to feel this desperation that she’s the only one who would understand, but only if I was talking about someone else. That my words would roll off perfectly if they weren’t about her, and she could see anger for what it was- fear.

But it would turn into “ragging her about bad feelings from the past” when I had just written something I thought was really sweet, or I meant it to be. Those kinds of misunderstandings happened all the time, and it was tiresome. I never thought that the real issue was the one at hand, because surely I wasn’t always wrong, judgmental, and a dickhead. No one is always anything. And then to sit in all that anger and to say there’s nothing wrong while you’re seething? So that when I even make dumb jokes I’m wondering if you’re going to go beastmode and destroy me? Wanting me to write accurately about their vibe and won’t meet up in person? I’m an intelligent, impressive, asshole. One of those things is not like the other.

I felt so afraid, and didn’t want to live like that anymore. Nothing I said was getting through, I just kept hanging onto a void. Holding something that slipped through my fingers. And yes, of course I’m still furious in some ways, but not at her. At me. I’m the one who decided to make myself unopular in the first place.

Paw Paw

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

I would not be the person I am today without my father’s father, and I am slightly unmoored at his passing yesterday. I say “slightly” because he was 92. At that age, it’s never unexpected, and he was ready to go. He had a health problem serious enough that to put him through the treatment was to make his chances of survival worse. He said he wanted to see Mary, my grandmother, and we were all at peace with it. Still sad, but happy that he got to make his own decision.

It reminded me of the last time I talked to him about a death in my own family. I have never seen him come unglued, and he was sobbing when he told me he was sorry about my mother. I think it’s because he’d known her since she was a little girl, and losing your child does not follow the natural order of things. It doesn’t matter that my mom and dad divorced. He was just as much a part of her life while the marriage was happening. I am grateful for nothing about my mother’s death, but see a silver lining in processing that grief with him. It made me feel less alone. I’d known her for so many less years. We chatted about “Option B.” He said he thought it was written for younger people. I agreed in sympathy. By then, he’d lost my grandmother and we were both sad and lonely. Leaning on each other was a golden thread between us.

When my grandmother died, we became closer because of the phone. I hate talking on the phone, and he didn’t like doing it much, either. Not a computer person. So, there we were, the two biggest introverts on earth, not really wanting to talk to anyone and making conversation, anyway. We found connections in movies, writing, and that there were five Gospels including Rachel Maddow…… both very religious and very liberal, two ideas that don’t always make friends but should.

My granddad worked for Lone Star Steel, the largest company in his area while I was a baby, but has dwindled now. He was the corporate version of me, writing copy and taking pictures for the steel plant. Then, he began writing a story about our family when I was older, starting with the ancestors from Ireland/England and filtering down to me and the rest of our generation. That was the original idea that my story was worth something. My granddad wasn’t rich and famous, yet my dad has five volumes on where we came from and where we’re going.

I see my story as the same thing- I’m not rich and famous. I just live here.

Therefore, my story is not valuable to everyone, but to some it is priceless. My grandfather taught me that; write it tight, shoot it anyway. The fact that copy, pictures, and videos exist may not matter right now, but it will in five. Get people while they don’t know they’re on camera to make sure that there’s at least a record that someone was there, they don’t have to talk.

Music can say what you can’t.

I didn’t get much of my theological upbringing from him, but I did get his dry wit and delivery. If there’s anything my grandfather and I share, it’s being the quietest person in the room until we’re engaged…. and then it’s generally an acid funny comment that you may or may not have been meant to hear. 😉

My granddad gave me someone in the world I could look at and say, “yeah. I’m his. No DNA test needed.” My dad is more extroverted than I am. My grandfather is where I got my style…. which is mostly to be entertained by everything, just watching and absorbing. We both get into moods where we want to hold court, but that is not our default setting. We want to cook. We want to read. We want to watch videos of PBS and the BBC.

Seriously, go find something to do. “Two Fat Ladies” is on.

I’m going to close with a video, but not because it’s of me. It’s because he made it. The video is of me being born, but the first few minutes is all made up. That’s because I was born five weeks early (my mother says eight) and at 9:59 in the morning, so NO ONE was prepared. My mom hadn’t even gone through Lamaze.

And when you watch it, please remember my family. Nearly everyone in the video is gone except for me and my dad, which makes it all the more precious. Please note my grandfather’s voice in the beginning, because it’s one that I dearly love. Remember him as young and handsome and funny as he was.

I feel that I know intimately how handsome he is, because he helped make me. 😛

It Just Is

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

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.

I can hit the high B flat when I unplug.

Life Before The Internet

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday’s writing prompt was asking if I remembered life before the Internet, and I have to say “not really.” That’s because I’m the last generation born that didn’t have technology everywhere as a small child, but it started creeping in when I was older. Nothing felt like a leap, just solid movement forward. For instance, I had a computer in my room when I was eight. It didn’t connect to anything, and I was still obsessed with it. So, my memories of life before the Internet are limited to age 15 and under. As I age, those memories are slipping away no matter the subject.

I miss the simplicity of computers without networking, because I knew for sure my files were safe at all times. I didn’t have to worry about viruses because my computer was what we’d now call “air gapped.” That’s keeping a server offline on purpose so that no one can get into it that doesn’t have physical access to the machine. I air gap my desktop when I’m writing so that I can’t zone out. I put my tablets in airplane mode. I care about security, and have encrypted and password protected anything I’d hate for others to see, because no one is close enough to me to read them. In some cases, no one ever will be that close to me because I have to have that one space where I can say anything and come back and read it later. I teach myself about relationships by writing letters never meant to be read by them, because I’m through trying to solve our problems with their input. It’s what brings me closure faster than anything else. To reread my own words and be critically aware of the ways I’m participating, because I can’t do anything to control the outcome of another person’s reaction to something I’ve said. The only thing I can control is my own actions, and why at times the Internet is more of a threat than it’s worth.

I decided that if we were going to have this new form of communication, I was going to learn everything about it. I started using Linux because I thought of myself as a coder, but over time have realized that I just prefer the environment as a daily driver- just a menu and a terminal. HTML and CSS are not considered “programming,” per se… and I have a third grade education in SQL. I can read a program and tell what it is supposed to do easier than I can create one on my own. Speaking of SQL, databases have fundamentally changed the Internet, because all of the sudden script kiddies had access to information they never could have gotten without an inside job, like any rando with an A in hacking could try for the firewall at the NSA. There are dire consequences for it, but only if you get caught. A virus hidden in the RAM of a server is barely detectable, and affects computers all over the world simultaneously. That is why people were so reluctant to do online banking, and the only thing I miss about that is human interaction. No one has to be up close and personal with anyone they don’t know. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the US which we perpetuate in our relentless quest for personal freedom. The Internet has changed our DNA to fully believe that those small interactions don’t matter, and now half the country believes there’s such a thing as alternate facts, and that no truth is objective. There are no subject matter experts that rise above party, because we don’t have to know them. We live in echo chambers because we can….. at the cost of a loving society because if you don’t want to know a wide range of people representing all sorts of opinions, you won’t. You miss out on the pain of opening up and having your thoughts rejected, and the beauty of being changed by something the other person did.

I was born during the Carter administration, so my first real memories are of President Reagan. Therefore, I’d been born during the last time there was hope for bipartisanship that didn’t set out to emotionally destroy people, like the insurrectionists turning on Mike Pence and threatening his life…. People he had once thought of as his base pursued him relentlessly. When you escape with your life, you’ll never be the same. No one is taking responsibility for that, when they absolutely turned off their brains and stopped seeing real people, or real information.

It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times, because pre-Internet was pre-24 hour news cycle and the urge to keep up. There wasn’t the hunger for knowledge there is today, which has turned the Internet into America’s next civil war, emotionally speaking. The cult started with lies that spread while truth was putting on its shoes. It was too late to be objective because they’d been brainwashed to believe that everything in front of them was wrong except for one guy with no qualifications who made himself seem that important and for some reason other people believed it.

I don’t think that could have happened in the late 70’s/early ‘80s because interaction through face time and touch is key to not losing connection with them. It doesn’t create false courage, the ability to rip people a new one in public with no regard for real life consequences…. Even if it’s your mother.

In the entries where I’m taking my mom to the mat, it’s only now that I can reflect on her whole life without offending her. This is because she would focus on the negative instead of the positive. Would only see me as trying to hurt her rather than wrestle with real feelings on my own. She doesn’t need to know what I thought now, because I know we did our best and now there is no chance that anything will change. Something fundamental and precious was lost, but that doesn’t mean people don’t have problems that take time to resolve.

For instance, I can fully accept that not wanting me to be who I am because she thought I’d cause my father to lose his job was traumatic. I can also relate to her treating me that way because she didn’t want to make things harder for either one of us. She didn’t know the first thing about being gay, and relied on her own instincts. She didn’t know, and so it wasn’t malicious. That’s how we could be so close and so distant at the same time. We rejected each other over mutual fear, and resolved it toward the end of her life. I’m glad for that, but destroyed she didn’t live longer so I’d have more memories of complete peace and security. There were so many ups and downs that I own all of them, because when I became an adult, she was no longer responsible for my actions. I shrank back from her in some ways, because over time she hadn’t committed to learning anything about me and I didn’t want to press because she’s already shown me she wasn’t comfortable.

I think the Internet changed that, too, because she could see how mainstream being queer was becoming and didn’t feel like it was such a burden carrying what other people thought of me. Before the Internet, we talked through the Oprah Winfrey show. It’s the only thing we were both obsessed with at the time. I started watching when I was nine. I saw a gay person for the first time on her show. I saw a trans person for the first time. I saw a person with AIDS, and the families with their quilts.

So, by the time I actually came out to her, at least she’d welcomed gay people into her home through the magic of television even if she didn’t know she’d met a gay person before. That’s because it would be impossible to go your whole life and meet one. They just might not tell you.

Memories of my family reign before the Internet because we spent more time together. The thirst to connect virtually because it was easier became so vitally important. The Internet plays to my strengths, because I communicate better in writing. I just need to watch what I’m saying and how I say it…. Not so much with my blog, but with my letters. I’ll get all riled up about something and release too much fire. If they release more, I feel bullied and get angry. I pop off and say things before I’ve had time to think about it. I think the difference is that traditionally I haven’t been good at getting over the things I’ve said because they torture me…. This is because I can only do something about my own behavior, and I don’t see it until I’m outside the situation.

I feel like working on issues is key, because I don’t ever want our communication to come across as bullying again. I have often been close to people who think that working on issues is bad, and I have learned to walk away when I continue to feel bullied because I take responsibility for the times I pop off and get angry when other people don’t do the same thing. Their anger is completely justified, and mine is not. My words were hurtful, theirs were not. I’m just being a victim, they didn’t do anything. The fact that this is the pattern with which I am the most comfortable disturbs me, because I know I have a lot of work to do in the areas of being patient. Taking a step back.

The Internet changed me because I thought that being physically in the same room was equal to feeling emotions when I read. That’s because I tended to get frustrated when people were talkers and not writers. It’s not because I wasn’t willing to change mediums, it’s that their reaction was that their words weren’t good enough for me because they couldn’t write as easily as I could. Intimidated by me to an enormous degree, when I could care less how people communicate as long as they’re doing it. I don’t like when people tell me that my words are so intimidating that they don’t want to communicate at all. They don’t want to even try. Meanwhile, I am begging for them to show up. I don’t want to beg to people who use their lack of skill with writing to avoid talking about a situation at all. If you don’t want to write to me, I will try to keep from overwhelming you with reading… provided you’ll actually go for coffee or a cocktail. Tell me that working on something with me is important to you even though my medium of communication is the written word and yours is not.

Don’t let me be lonely even when we’re together. Otherwise, I count on interactions with people who don’t mean as much to me. I have to force myself to engage in small talk, otherwise, I won’t talk at all. I don’t have the safety and comfort of history with the tellers at the bank. It’s only sad when I want people to feel close to me and they don’t want me to feel close to them, and not because they don’t want it. They aren’t prepared to accept that my emotions are large on the page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are in real life. It’s because when I’m trying to convey an idea, I might not know your history with what I’m about to say and tap into an image you think is one thing, but I meant it as another. Like saying I wouldn’t want to have something and it comes across as “I think you’re bad” when I mean my quota is full on that particular desire. That you’re giving me all I need already.

In person, I could say that with my eyes, and do.

But I did it so much more frequently in my life before The Internet.

I Don’t Know, So I Don’t Know

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

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.

Note taken.

Anything Anywhere All at Once

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

What job would you do for free?

Link to audio.

I will do anything for the experience of having done it, because I am a firm believer that you don’t say something is bad if you’ve never eaten it…. and that statement has many transitive properties.

Most writers work for free while they’re doing something else for money, and everything I do for money feeds this web site in more ways than one. So whether I’m in Global Information Services or trying to be a cook, I’m still me. To really understand me, you’ll have to read “The Sol Majestic,” which explores the idea of ivory tower vs. hard work. I am both sides of the equation. I am blue collar and an academic because one feeds the other. I do not need a job that captures any more of my attention than is necessary to feed myself, because I don’t live on earth most of the time. My head is in the clouds, and I am constantly wandering for a foothold.

In the clouds, there are no footholds. Blue collar work is an anchor to keep me from flying too close to the sun. Brandon Sanderson says that if you want to be a writer, lay brick or similar, because you need something that your body can do independently of your mind. I agree, because you can get into a rhythm while at the same time giving your characters room to play. I only have two fiction projects in the works and trade off between them, and it’s slow going because I’m a blogger. It’s not that I’m a bad writer, it’s that I’m so inexperienced with style and structure.

At some point I will have to borrow structure from Jonna Mendez, former Chief of Disguise at CIA and in my opinion, the best non-fiction writer that ever lived tied with her husband. Here’s why. Jonna and Tony have the ability to capture what fiction does without writing it. Their books present like spy capers and you get lost in their movies, internal videos that play as you’re reading. I didn’t just read about trying not to get caught in Tehran and Moscow. For the length of the book, I lived it.

Then I met her in person and the books changed yet again, because not only could I picture her more completely in her stories, they were scarier because I really, really liked her. It’s one thing to read about strangers in peril… quite another when you have an emotional attachment to the story. It made me a bigger fan, though. I have two copies of each book by Team Mendez, autographed paper and Kindle.

If it seems weird that I have both, it’s that the Kindle versions came first and the autographs are keepsakes. Plus, I don’t like to write in the margins of my books and it’s not because I’m a purist and think writing in books is bad. It’s that if I want to make a note about something, I want data I can use. If I write a note by hand, I then have to type it. Wasted energy when I can just attach a keyboard to my tablet or Kindle (yes, Kindles support them). I wouldn’t have thought of this unless I’d reviewed so many books that it was necessary. So much easier to copy and paste text from my notes, and it syncs with Goodreads and a few other programs so I can access everything on every device I own.

I would like to say that I love reviewing books, but I don’t. I’m a voracious reader and therefore, my standards are extraordinarily high. I also don’t want to hurt any writer’s chance of making more money. Even if you’re a shitty writer, you still deserve to eat. It’s a different perspective for me because I am also a shitty writer who deserves to eat, so I probably empathize too much when I should be ruthless.

Speaking of which, I still owe Finn Bell a couple of reviews, because he’s one of my favorite writers in the entire world…. mostly because he writes characters and mysteries that you don’t want to end and there are too many questions running through my mind as to what happened after the story ended. I asked him about that, and he said he couldn’t tell me anything because he was keeping things tight for future stories.

I get it, and at the same time, “AAAAAAAAGH! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRIEST, FINN?!?!?!?!”

Speaking of priests, preaching is another job I’d do for free as long as I didn’t have to do anything else. It is ultimately the reason I changed my mind about starting a church. I realized that I was too immobilized by grief over my mother’s death to do things like pastoral care when I was the one that needed it so badly. You can become a wounded healer, but only up and to a point. It’s a balancing act of being empathetic and not getting your own crazy spatter all over your congregation. Don’t think it doesn’t happen. I have watched it on many an occasion and didn’t want that for myself.

It was hard enough coming unglued with no one watching except readers who weren’t in the room where I type. I could say what I liked and process “verbally” without feeling like I had a responsibility to keep it together for everyone else.

Here’s what you don’t know before your mother dies that you sure as hell know afterward. If you are the oldest, you are the new matriarch of the family and it might not be because your family wants or needs that. It’s your own mother lion protection mechanism because you were the one your mother trusted with “the rest of them.” You aren’t prepared for that kind of responsibility and if your siblings are also adults, they didn’t give it to you. You took it because that’s what you’ve always done… sacrificing self to take care of everyone that came behind you.

You feel alone in a way you never have, because now it’s all on you…. even when no one needs you and the responsibility is an illusion.

The phrase “even if no one needs you” is not wiping the blood off my cross or anything. It’s that at adult age, “need” is relative. For instance, I want people to want me, not fall apart because they think they can’t function without me. So many people confuse desire with need, and it ate my lunch for a while as I walked toward the new normal. The pace never accelerates. I have run toward nothing.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a sense of loss as great as continuing my own life afterward, because it was so painful. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to live because who cares? That’s the other part no one will tell you. When the person who brought you into the world leaves, a huge part of your tether develops a rip and you aren’t carrying a needle and thread.

Of course this is magnified by my bipolar disorder, but I do know these feelings are also universal. Specificity is measured in tiny increments.

I’d be a grief counselor for free. Nothing fills my soul faster than a mutual stitch and bitch, because if you haven’t lost a parent, there’s no way to understand. I am not being pedantic. You just don’t even know until you get there. It will hit you like a head on collision where you’re driving a Trabant into an oncoming train, and this is true whether you liked said parent or not, because those two people made you. I am not speaking literally. Adopted kids go through the same stuff.

It’s that the core personality is set by six years old, according to Erik Erickson, and generally your parents are there for that. Even your facial expressions and mannerisms take on new meaning when you realize that you are indeed looking at your mother (in my case) and you aren’t offended that she’s staring back, because you’re not a copy anymore. You’re what’s left.

If you haven’t lost a parent, you can empathize with me, but don’t you dare say you know how I feel. I wouldn’t even say that to another person who lost a parent. Just because their parent died doesn’t mean they’re having the same experience.

The one thing we have in common is that “hell is other people.” They don’t know what to say and you can’t get mad because you know they mean well…. even though when they say “I would fall apart if my mother died” you want to scream “WELL IT’S A GOOD THING I’M GOING THROUGH IT AND NOT YOU, JACKASS.” Don’t get me started. It isn’t helpful to get angry, just to say to people the best thing they *can* say to someone grieving is “I’m so sorry.” Don’t add anything. Let those words be humble and enough because they are….. and let me explain why.

When MY mother dies, it’s not your turn to have emotion. It will be your turn, but it is not in that instant. To focus on how you would feel if it happened to you is bullshit to someone to whom it has happened. It will come across as “God, I am so glad I’m not you.” It’s also frustrating for people to say that they don’t know what to say and avoid you when you are literally handing them a script with only two or three words.

When I was in the thick of it, just deep, deep grief, I needed people to do things for me. Two problems with that. I didn’t know what I needed and couldn’t ask for help because it was too much energy… both in the figuring it out and in the asking. I was alone in my room for months because no one is prepared to have their mom die. No one. At the same time, I wasn’t prepared in the slightest. It’s not like anyone could have predicted an embolism because the doctors didn’t know they needed to look for one. I can imagine the notes:

Patient is a 65 year old white female presenting with moderate pain and limited mobility in her left leg. Waiting for x-ray to confirm fractOH MY GOD SHE’S DEAD.

Speaking of “white female,” I’m laughing because one of the doctors I work with decided to create a macro in a word processor that would automatically change “if” into Indian female. Hilarity ensued. EVERYTHING in medicine depends on “if” and “it depends.”

My analogy for this is that all doctors are half programmer, half waitress. All of them. Doesn’t matter the specialty. It’s soft skills and “if, then.” So many medical problems are just spaghetti code (everything loops back around into a tangled mess).

And then you look at psychologists/licensed counselors and the spaghetti code analogy gets even stronger. People aren’t machines, and logic isn’t emotion.

It’s honestly why I’d cook for free, and I proved it when I was willing to do it for eight bucks an hour. I needed a logical job so that my emotions were a separate part of me. The place I kept to myself because I already had a place to vent and a partner to help carry the financial load (absolutely the most important reason to keep Dana in the back of my mind if and when I start making real money).

So if you ask me what I’ll do for free, I have touched on so many subjects that the answer is anything, as long as it serves a purpose. I think it’s good advice. You can have it.

Free.

Morning Choices

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?

This particular morning is thinking about Easter. Not only that there are a million metaphors for resurrection, but that you can choose them. You are capable of telling your energy which resurrections are necessary. Sometimes, you have to decide which hurts worse. Living with the idea that a situation is dead or overindulging the fact that it is alive and nourishing because you are wishing it into being. It’s a bubble. What happens when it pops and it doesn’t even resemble reality? What if the resurrection is metaphor for changing the story you’re telling yourself?

For me, it’s looking at relationships. For you, the thing that’s “alive” might be that you’re happy at your job. It’s up to you to decide if death and resurrection is worth more than life limping along. And yes, I will use death and resurrection because anyone who has ever attempted to change careers knows that’s exactly how hard it feels some days.

Which brings me right back around to morning routines. Morning is when my mind naturally works the best and most efficiently. In my world, mornings are absolute quiet, because I cannot think and do anything else. I dedicate myself to an idea completely and don’t move until I am capable of a complete thought, which leads to me either getting out a tablet and keyboard or Moleskine that already has a pen attached because Lord knows if I don’t keep it attached I’ll never see it again.

I start writing (or talking into the microphone, or making a video) between 0530 and 0700. The variance comes from my medication. I take a mood stabilizer which sometimes keeps me awake, therefore I sleep a little later some days to compensate. Truly, though, my best work is at 5:00 AM. It doesn’t matter if I got up or stayed up. If I notice my edge is slipping, I’ll take sleeping medication during the evening news because I know that myelin on my nerves and getting up when I’m naturally the most fighting fit in terms of writing will do me a world of good with self esteem.

For instance, in doing the post-mortem on this friend breakup, I realized that I’d lost myself before it even began and these problems predated anything I ever did to sexually harass her, which I absolutely did and for which I take complete responsibility. I was a mess, but my damage didn’t have to become hers and I’ll always be sorry for it. What I won’t miss is her blunt assessment of everything because it made her sound like such a hardass all the time, and because I loved her, I ignored how it made me feel. When I said something about it, I was abruptly invited to go to hell. I can point to that fight less than a week after we met.

I knew when I broke trust that it would be an uphill battle based on not just the original fight, but every fight after that. We had a fundamental issue with communication from the beginning, and I wish I’d kept her as a fan who wanted access and otherwise just left well enough alone. I’m just not smart enough to ignore that much dopamine in one place. I am also not the type of person that can squeeze my feelings back into a smaller container. I would much rather you just take your leave because you’ll pull back, but my feelings won’t. I will just put too much energy where it isn’t wanted for *years* because I believe that scar tissue is stronger, that our relationship will be better once we’ve actually talked through something big.

If your whole idea of relationships is that they deserve to die a horrible death once trust is broken, there’s not a lot of hope for me in that equation. I am so, so human. I will never live a life free of sin, and I forgive just as easily during the phase where we’re fighting it out in hopes of a better outcome. But I won’t yield until I hear something that rings *true.* One sentence is all it takes. One moment of real vulnerability.

The part of realizing that resurrection shouldn’t happen in this case is that my friend said she didn’t hold anything over my head, that we were all good, while at the same time treating me completely differently. A decade ago I knew things about her no one knew, and vice versa… compared with not mentioning that the guy she started dating but hadn’t met her kids yet was now her husband. If you want that marked a change in our relationship, it’s fine, but don’t pretend that everything is the same. It’s not and it never will be. Things being the same is just a story you’re telling yourself, or more accurately, the story I told me.

Her reaction was not trusting that I do love her for absolutely everything she is, not trusting that my love for her would extend to her husband as well. I would step in front of a bus for him, no questions asked, simply because she loves him. Everything that matters to her matters to me. Besides, if he’s any smart at all he already knows she’s too good for him. I don’t have to remind him…

I also know that her trauma reflexes caused her to react that way, because they told her that once I screwed up, I was always going to screw up. Opening her heart to me was always going to end badly. It’s true I needed time to recover. You don’t get hit in the face with that much fantastic every day. I took my leave, tail slung between my legs, and she kept reading.

I thought we were done for life and then I wondered how in the hell she knew my dad was going in for heart surgery (I really do think of this blog as letters to myself in the future and sometimes forget that looking up what I’m doing currently is a thing that people do). I should have known we were done when my mother died two or three days later and her response was an e-mail when she lived a half hour from me. Nothing was the same because we were both scared of each other. I got over it and eventually started letting her see everything again.

She continued to be shut down like a steel trap unless she was laying out her feelings about my other love interests/friends/reptiles of some sort. I am not devaluing this aspect of our relationship, because it made me feel guarded and protected. Not being able to see herself as clearly as she saw others made it feel as if I was on the outside of that protection in those instances, because I didn’t have anything helpful to say anymore. My rights had been revoked. It was a credentials fail all the way around.

Speaking of credentials, that’s one of the funniest conversations we’ve ever had. Her not knowing jack shit about computers and me teaching her how to irritate the fuck out of her IT Guys at work. Their misery is my happy place.

I’m processing out all this pain because hurt people hurt people. I don’t want to be capable of losing myself this way anymore, hoping against hope and trying not to breathe wrong. Remembering making her laugh is the best I can do right now, otherwise my rage takes my breath away. I don’t feel emotions at half-strength. I find that if I get as angry as I need to get and grieve as hard as I need to while it’s happening, it won’t come back in five years and bite me.

I am letting the death and resurrection occur within me as we speak, because I chose it. This one matters, and it is necessary. I know I’m lost, and I’m trying to get found because amazing grace does have a sweet, sweet sound. You’ll just never hear that hymn out of me if I can help it because I’ve sung it enough now for four lifetimes… most especially irritating at the tempo of a funeral dirge.

It’s not time for that…. Well, I suppose it is until Sunday morning. But the point is that come Sunday morning, it’s time for lilies and a pipe organ and a brass quintet and the Widor Toccata with the all the stops pulled out. I want to feel the bass in my chest. I want resurrection to burst forth as new as it ever has been.

Even though it is thousands of years old.

Now the morning routine is switching to making a cup of tea and regathering the strength to resurrect something else.

Without Tears

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

I am not sure that this entry will be written without tears, because I’m thinking about so many things that my emotions might leak. I might let the audio sit for a day or two, just to get some emotional distance. It helps the narration if I don’t have to blow my nose. Also, I’m sorry if the audio is poor. I have five housemates and I don’t have an “on air” light, nor would they pay attention to it. I am, however, surprised at just how much my Bluetooth mic picks up. The mic is literally in my ear, and it still picks up noise from all over the second floor. It helps me, though, because it keeps me from flooding out…. So that I can record an entry without tears…. 98% of the time.

I am positive that some people were confused at me crying over the death of Tony Mendez, but let me tell you why. I wrote about it, but it’s been long enough and I haven’t mentioned the connection more than once so it’s time for a rehash.

I wasn’t finished with grieving my mother when Tony died. Grief compounds. Therefore, I knew innately what his widow, Jonna, was going through in terms of having to tough out a public event all armored up while dying inside. My mirror neurons went off like crazy. My grief mixed with hers even though we didn’t talk about it. I took all of that grief home with me and mourned Tony and my mother simultaneously. Therefore, years later, when I think about grief, Tony and my mother both come to mind.

Mourning my mother was so great a loss that I put it deep down inside, hardly ever talked about it unless the other person in the conversation had already lost a parent. This is because the chance was too great that I would open myself up to further injury, because people have no idea what to say and often make it worse.

I will tell you right now that the only thing I actually wanted said was “I’m sorry.” I loved people that showed up and were willing to sit in the silence until I could emote.

Digging that deep was so incredibly hard that I still hadn’t cried as much as I needed to. Crying about Tony was only partially about Tony. The loss of a new book from him ever again really was devastating. But mostly it’s that the grief I felt regarding him was so much bigger than that. Grieving over him allowed me to process my mother’s death, because it was the entrance to a deep, dark cave, ripe for excavation. I just didn’t have any spelunking equipment.

Meeting Jonna was at least the hat with the light.

She broke me open in just the right way, at just the right time. Her armor was my armor laid out in front of me where I could take it in… where I could see my own actions in the third person omniscient.

So, when I talk about Tony Mendez, I can’t do it without tears.

Going through a breakup with a friend has been devastating, and yet not at all. It just depends on the day. Some days I think “no one is her,” and some days I just can’t. What has helped is a book called “My Other Ex,” stories of women who’ve lost their best friends and why “no one is her.” One thing they expressed universally is that with other women, you get so close you can speak without words, but there is no recognition of that type of grief.

I am an INFJ. I feel emotions so deeply that they’re capable of overtaking common sense, and I could write a seven volume book series on my dumbass attacks. Not only do I understand, I grok.

I understand so completely that their grief is my grief. Grief compounds. I cannot talk about that relationship ending without tears. So I compartmentalize, and armor up. No one is trying to see me cry in line at Whole Foods.

Armoring up is necessary only because if I don’t, I will just bleed out emotionally. In the moments where I am not capable of armoring up, it means the grief is too deep. So even though no one was trying to see me cry at a Whole Foods, they must have thought that them being out of the veggie dogs I like was being taken way too seriously.

Although I will say that it was legit a problem. If veggie dogs, vegan cream cheese, and hot sauce didn’t exist, I’d probably be dead by now. I eat them all the time. It’s my favorite lunch, because it takes about a minute to make. Yes, I am a very good cook, but I eat prepared foods most of the time. This is because I don’t want to devote the time and energy to prep. If you come over to eat, I will pull out my good knife. Left to my own devices, I run on sandwiches and Crystal Light.

I believe in Crystal Light, because Crystal Light has always believed in me. Also, not going to lie- finding out there are flavors with caffeine in them has made my whole life easier. I cannot talk about Crystal Light Energy without tears. 😛

“Spare” is a rough read, and I cannot do it without tears, either. Prince Harry and I have so much in common. My platform as preacher’s kid was so much smaller, but I can empathize with his pain. I’ve cried over the loss of Princess Diana, being different than everyone else because he wants to speak his truth, and the list goes on.

And then he went to Afghanistan, and I went from tears to the full-on sob.

I have said over and over that The War Daniel is my primary partner, and that if he changes his mind about marrying me, it’s over for anyone else. The reason that they don’t stand a chance is that we have a trauma bond, which is like a regular bond on steroids.

He’s the only person ever to make me feel better about the emotional abuse handed down to me over the years. I couldn’t listen to him without tears of relief. He said, “your trauma is so much worse than mine, because my enemies in Afghanistan were clearly defined. Yours were the ones closest to you, turncoats all.” If he is willing to walk in my inner landscape, I am willing to walk in his.

In fact, I am hoping to God I didn’t just reject a call from him.

The area code on my phone was his, but the name was “Telemarketer.” They didn’t leave a message, so I hope that means it really was an auto dial. Someone in rehab feeling rejected is not my MO, especially because I need him to know that I love him, honestly and completely.

The only reason I’m even saying that it’s up in the air is because I’m willing to date people casually until January. At that point, it’s a different ball game. I need to know if he still feels the same way after the fog has cleared from his brain. Again, I am trying to think logically through rehab and its aftermath, experience I’ve gotten from being a friend and a coworker.

But even though I’ve dealt with addicts my entire cooking life, that doesn’t mean I can do it without tears. What if he doesn’t come back? What if I’m waiting for nothing? I only think that in my smallest moments, though, because I’m not ready for a serious relationship, anyway. Even the relationship that Daniel and I created previously wasn’t serious. He didn’t tell me to break up with Zac, and thinks he’s adorable (because he is). I didn’t tell him I needed him to be faithful, either. He was going to be off doing his own thing. The best I hoped for this year was letters, calls, perhaps a short visit since he can fly here so easily and without money. The only constraint that the military would put on him is time…. Being flexible about his departure and arrival depending on how many standby seats were available.

The only part that was serious is dreaming of the life I wanted to create with him once he was capable of doing so. It fits my purposes nicely that he doesn’t drink, because I so rarely indulge. Zac likes cocktails, and so do I, especially if it’s something I’ve never tasted before. Therefore, I will always take a drink if Zac is bartending, but I don’t even keep alcohol at my house. I would rather drink Crystal Light. I think we have covered this. 😛

Right now, I am not communicating with Doc. It’s not because I don’t love him more than life itself. I need him to get well, and I don’t want to be a distraction in any way. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if he thought I needed help more than him and decided to come to my rescue at the expense of his own. The best thing I could possibly do is let rehab have him, and he’ll be done in May.

On the surface, it looks like I am batshit crazy and I realize this. Combat vet and alcoholic. Leslie, are you insane?

Yes, and that’s the point.

Daniel was HM2 in the Navy. That is the equivalent of a civilian nurse practitioner. Therefore, I feel safe with him because me being bipolar would never be an issue. I trust his judgment. If Doc says he can tell whether I’m up or down, I will take that check to the bank and cash it.

On the flip side, is it any wonder that I know how to support a Doc? My family is all medicine, all the time.

A really funny conversation between Doc and me ran thusly:

“I think I’m getting hypomania.” “And what are your qualifications to make this diagnosis?” “I went to medical school in the backseat of a Lexus.”

I am good at standing (sitting) behind people and listening closely.

I have been listening to Doc closely, and trying to understand his pain. Most of the time, I cannot do it without tears. If I start down the road of Doc doing this brave thing and how it was his worst day, I will collapse in a heap. It’s why I’m wiling to forgive him, and struggling through it. I have to forgive him whether he reappears or not. The forgiveness isn’t for him. It’s for me. I won’t be myself until all of this is resolved, even if it’s just getting my own closure.

The only reason I haven’t closed the door is that I can’t think of him going through rehab without tears, either. I know what that’s like, not from a first-person perspective, but from having a best friend back in the day who went through what Doc is going through now. I remember that I gave her a ring that looked like leaves encircling her finger, in honor of turning over her new leaf.

I wear my skeleton claddagh with pride on my right hand, or I did until the silver wore off and it turned my finger green. That’s not Doc’s fault. It wasn’t a gift. I bought it as a placeholder and told Doc where to find my favorite jewelry.

I should call around and see if I can find a maker who does plating. Even nickel would protect the metal. The only reason it’s worth plating a ring that cost $3.00 is that it’s so unique. Doc is a death metal fan. Skeleton claddagh is not my style, it’s his. Even after he broke up with me, I still wore it like a #livestrong bracelet. It didn’t mean we were still together, just that I hope to God that sending support would help, even if he never knew about it. I mean, he knows I have it and I have sent him a picture, but it might surprise him to know that the ring turned my finger green a few days ago. I didn’t give up on the ring, it gave up on me.

Perhaps it’s for the best that I’m not constantly looking down at my right hand, longing for a dream that might never come. I just don’t want to be certain about anything regarding him, because rehab is hard work and your emotions are all over the place. Again, Cora has said that she doesn’t think my faith in her father is misplaced, so I’m choosing to believe her. Keeping my own strength up is what’s important, because my faith in her father is important to me being who I am through all of this, too.

What kind of partner would I be if I gave up on him while he needed so much compassion? I know what it’s like to push someone away because you’re traumatized, and his trauma goes to eleven. Our pain isn’t even on the same playing field.

….and I can’t think about that without tears.

The Monster in My Head and the Ghost Out to Get Me

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

The blog post, read poorly by the author.

I just watched an exploratory criticism of “Vincent and the Doctor” that I really love. It talks about depression, because there’s who The Doctor thinks is an aggressive alien chasing after Vincent, because only he can see it. The Doctor has to use a gadget with a mirror so he can see the alien in reverse, and it’s not aggressive. It needs help.

Which the creator of the video calls the alien representative of depression itself. It’s a monster only you can see. Depression is also not feeling sad, necessarily, because there is no rhyme or reason to it. I could be panicky, I could be absolutely devastated regarding something, so that pain also mixes in…. But mostly, depression is the absence of emotions at all. People, places, and things don’t matter. You have to drag yourself everywhere, even into the shower or actually completing any task that would make you feel better…. Because of course, it’s what depression thinks you deserve. It knows the very best lies to use against you…. That you are worth nothing, that you are not deserving of being able to take care of yourself, because you don’t matter to anyone… and if you do matter, you think it’s just because other people are being nice to you.

Because who could ever love dumbasses like us?

If people do show that they care, genuinely, you still can’t accept that fact… because depression knows the very best lies to use against you. It is an alien who needs help, a foreign brain infection. Depression thinks that it’s saving you from pain, because you think you’re a burden on everyone, especially when they tell you that.

I’m Bipolar II, which is like regular manic depression but without caffeine or calories. Nothing to get you going at all. You’re just hanging in until you get just enough hypomania to function out in the world without being stuffed full of bravado and confidence that is unparalleled and leads to extremely poor impulse control. One of the worst thoughts I’ve had after an appointment with a psychiatrist. He said that he thought I was bipolar, not unipolar, and switched out my medication. I was over the moon that I’d found a really great doctor, and eventually learned once my protocol changed that a mood stabilizer was the right answer.

I called Dana in tears, the kind that threaten to swallow you up. I said, “I don’t want to be Sally Field in ER!” If you know, you know.

Bipolar I is so different from Bipolar II that there’s not really a direct comparison. You don’t go up in to true mania, where you’re buying ten cars in one day or putting yourself in more danger than is necessary because you like the thrill.

Bipolar II is a lot of depression without coming back up. My hypomania presents as insomnia. I don’t get it very much, but I wish I did. Depression is a complete shitshow, because it will rob you of thinking you deserve anything at all. You’ll pick the most toxic person in the room because you actually think that being treated poorly is almost necessary. You’re still getting some contact comfort, and still focused intensely on how bad you should feel for inconveniencing other people. If they’re crazy, too, you figure that taking on their pain so they can function is the one thing you can do to prevent them walking away. It generally doesn’t work for either party, because two people care about them to the point of losing ourselves. For unipolar and bipolar depression, this pattern occurs a lot… because again, you think your job is to take care of everyone else so that they see you actually have something valuable to contribute to the conversation, because if you’re dealing with your own pain, adding on someone else’s is a no-brainer. If they’re not a narcissist, you’ll get support and love because they may not be able to sympathize, but empathy goes a long way.

But that’s a healthy relationship, and we don’t find those, because it would show self worth and esteem, and we don’t do that either. Why would we? We don’t even like ourselves…. And from the Gospel of RuPaul Charles, “if you can’t love yourself, how in the HELL are you going to love someone else?”

I feel it’s time for a snarky reminder that RuPal is a drag queen. Get out of here with your bullshit. You’ve loved RuPaul since high school. “But I’m a Cheerleader,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and the list goes on.

I didn’t think of it before, but I’m thinking of it now. Minorities are more adept at thinking they’re trash than the cis, straight, fits in everywhere sort of person…. And white people are awful. Full stop. It’s embarrassing. Even though I’m white, I use the queer card everywhere because I want to take people’s slurs and stupid comments because it makes me feel less like a traditional white person and more like the minority I really am.

Being queer is great if you keep to yourself, because no one can tell if you’re queer just by looking at you…. Even though I joke about it all the time. For instance, “are you pregnant?” “You can see me, right?” But the hard truth is that I am not having the same experience of the US as people of color. I could absolutely hide from it. I want to marry a man. To me that says bi pride flags everywhere and Daniel becoming a part of my community because Cora will also be there. Kidhausen and Lesliehausen are a team for life.

The suffix -hausen is used to represent the best of the best of the best. So of course my favorite movie is now “Argohausen.” Seriously, I love the dialogue.

“I should have brought some books for prison.” “Oh, they’ll kill you long before prison.” “If you get caught, The Agency cannot claim you.” “They barely claim me as is.” “What’s your demographic?” “People with eyes.”

And the list goes on. My favorite that runs through my head when cooking in a professional kitchen is “I’ve seen suicide missions that had better odds than this.”

In case you were wondering, I did type all of it without looking up. I have seen it so much that I’ve memorized most of it. The only part I cannot do is speak Farsi…. But don’t think I haven’t tried to learn it by transliteration.

Tony Mendez is literally in the Top 50 spies to ever work for CIA.

There is an Argo line or conversation for every occasion. This is “He (meaning President Carter) says you’re a great American.” “A great American what?” “He didn’t say.”

But my favorite has to be when they go to present their very best bad idea… by far. “Careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”

Things that really make me laugh are important, because it lifts my mood overall. I have learned that I am not the sort of person that can go without listening to music for more than five minutes, because it silences “The Committee.” You didn’t show up knowing what that meant, but if you have depression or alcoholism, you know. It’s the tapes in your head that tell you you’re no value add.

It’s why most people die of depression, and I will say it exactly that way. It’s a disease in the sense that the brain is an organ, focused on survival. It will do anything to protect you, because to it, protecting you means isolating. It’s “obvious” no one likes you. They can’t get away from feeling that we don’t deserve to be alive at all.

Because it’s the monster in your head, and the ghost out to get you. For a lot of people, it does. The one that hurt the most was Tommy Raskin, son of Jamie, because Jamie is brilliant and I had to watch him on TV while bleeding out emotionally because I know what it’s like when someone close to you dies. Every neuron in your body is re-wired to accept the loss and move on. Losing a parent or a child fundamentally changes you in a way that people who haven’t lost parents or children will never understand.

They don’t realize you are literally a different person than you used to be, and you can’t go back… especially when they look at your method of grieving and decide it’s unacceptable, because they also don’t realize that grieving is as individual as a fingerprint. Everyone reacts differently. For Nora Ephron, it was keeping her husband’s shoes because she thought he might need them. She’s right. It’s at least a year of magical thinking. The brain fog is interminable, like putting whatever you’re holding in the freezer whether you meant to or not. I thought my notebook was missing for days. It was in the pantry.

For me, grief was being “show mode” in public and unable to function when I was alone. I’m not sure I got out of bed more than a few times in the first month my mother died suddenly. She broke her foot and developed an embolism. In one way and one way only, it helped a lot to know that there wasn’t a doctor on earth that could have done any better. They would have had to catch it early on. When it blows, it blows. Periodt.

The part that was terrible was that I had just come home from church, where I talked to Sam, my choir director. She asked me if I would do a solo, and I asked her if it was okay to invite my mom to play for me.

I was writing a blog entry about it when my sister called and told me that mom was in the hospital. I wasn’t even finished with it when Lindsay called to tell me that she died. She died and I was so far away, when I still had a car and was “threatening” to take a road trip home. She said she thought it was a bad idea, and I have been kicking myself ever since.

I went into complete shock mode, putting away my emotions because I knew that a crowd of people I didn’t know would be filing past me to give condolences, or coming up to me at the potluck afterwards, etc. The worst comment I got was that a woman said she knew how I felt, because her cat died. It’s not the same playing field, Karen.

No one saw me cry because I was incapable of doing so. Falling apart in front of strangers is not something I do, ever. I could cry in front of this audience because I was alone in my room, and it felt natural. I just left it that way, even though the moment I started telling the story of how I met Jonna Mendez, Tony’s widow, made my stomach clench and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop from showing grief.

Showing grief is uncomfortable, almost as uncomfortable as being depressed. People don’t know what to say about your loss, and you are mindful that people have no frame of reference for what you’re going through, because again, grief is as individual as a fingerprint. Sometimes people who are grieving are surprised that you’re not doing it the same way they did.

It felt like “you’re not doing it right, Leslie.”

I wouldn’t have survived if I hadn’t turned on my inner sociopath (in terms of cutting off your emotions, not nefarious activity). It was the only way I would survive the onslaught of being thrown into public, akin to being dropped in the middle of Tehran without language skills, a map, or anything else that would have been helpful.

I felt like Marcus Brody in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

“Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.”

Oh my God it’s just the truest thing ever. You only think you’re prepared, but you’re not, because you have no idea what your brain is going to do to protect you. It might be close to how you think you’d react, but it’s a sure bet it’s going to be absolutely nothing like what you thought you would feel. It’s also a different scenario when a parent dies suddenly at a young age rather than you getting to enjoy them until you’re both relatively ancient. I feel like I got robbed of at least a decade.

If someone is dying slowly, you have the opportunity to ask questions, get educated on what’s going to happen, make major life decisions for them, etc…. Most people think of it as a burden to become a carer. My response in my head is generally “fuck off,” and not because I’ve suddenly started to hate this person. It’s because they seem ungrateful that they get to watch their parents finish their lives instead of it being stolen.

My mother would have hated every minute of it, and would probably be grateful that she died suddenly. This is because she would literally rather die than let us take care of us. Depression is genetic, and she was never diagnosed or treated. You could just tell, because you think you’re good at hiding it until someone finally tells you they can see you and it’s astonishing how much you think you’re hiding it. If I had to take a guess, my mother was dysthymic, which is a low level of depression that presents all the time. You don’t feel bad enough to go to the doctor because you think it’s just a case of “the blues.” You’ll get over it soon. And then you don’t realize that ten years have gone by.

But it’s a bullshit diagnosis because I’m not an actual doctor. I just call ‘em like I see ‘em, and I’ve had enough experience with crazy people to see them. Acknowledge that they’re hurting and try to help. I have actually been to what poet Mary Karr calls “the mental Marriott.” It was great meeting my cohort because all of a sudden, I had seven people who understood me completely.

Because they too have a monster in their heads and a ghost out to get them.

Cooking and Cleaning -or- New Hat. Who Dis?

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

So, here’s the thing about the hat. I am not sure what happened to my original khaki hat that said “The GAP,” but I flipped houses in it so my guess is that it just fell apart. Then, my sister came to visit and left it here. I have conveniently forgotten it for what will be eight years at the end of April.

I normally wear my CIA baseball cap because of what it took to get it. Easy for my friend Zac, not so much for me. Because he works with classified information, he occasionally has to go to different intelligence agencies, and one of them is Langley. If he thinks I can be bought for a baseball cap… Yes. Yes, I can.

I just figured a new look was probably called for. Half my videos I can’t tell the difference when they were made. 🙂