Tag: divorce

How Can I Keep From Talking?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

It’s a double entendre because on the Internet, I cannot shut up. In real life, I try to escape talking any way that I can. It’s almost as if I social masked for so many years that I decided I was over it. The turning point for me was establishing that I do not like the phone and I do not care if you think I’m weird. I will adjust to the fact that you think it’s weird I don’t like to talk if you will give me a heads up that I need to talk to you…. and even then, I cannot always respond. I get demand avoidance over speaking because I need to choose my words carefully. I need to pore over every one as if they are precious pearls of wisdom…. because they are.

But only to me.

This web site is not useful for fawning all over myself, and if you’ll notice, I have noticed. That there’s no guts or glory without “writing about what hurts.” It is not because I will get a bigger audience that way; it is not that I will be adored any more or paid any more if I capitulate to the demands of my audience. It’s that I will have written a mountain of work that does not teach me anything about myself when I go back and read it.

I don’t want to know what I had for lunch today, and I can bore the everliving shit out of myself when I go on about Linux. I do it anyway because that is what is interesting to me that day. I just don’t go back and read it. That is for other people who have not stood where I was standing when I wrote it.

I am not immune to the fact that a lot of my stats are bots and are therefore inflated. But over a thousand of you get my words delivered to your desk or phone most days- today three times because I’m agitated about the whole world. That’s actually a thing about being neurodivergent. Our sense of injustice is fine-tuned, which is why I beat myself up badly for every mistake I make and also apply that feeling of anger towards the world when it is burning.

Make no mistake, I am an internal dumpster fire looking for ice because I am overloaded with the needs of my friends both spoken and not. Just because I am not in contact with my friends doesn’t mean my mirror neurons don’t feel them moving in the world. My heart walks out of my chest on a daily basis because I actually know people in Finland and Ukraine who feel threatened. I know Finnish immigrants who are scared for their relatives, and same for people in the US with relatives in China.

It scares me to the point that I will never visit, because my favorite Chinese blogger was threatened by the CCP. He escaped to Hong Kong and is now being actively blacklisted from the YouTube algorithm because apparently the CCP has some influence there.

I do not go where I am not wanted, and China sure the hell does not want me. I would bust them up when I got home. That’s because I notice everything that other people don’t.

I won’t remember your name.

But I’ll remember the way you smiled and what shoes you wore if they were cute.

I’ll remember little things forever, like if I offer you a Diet Coke and you say, “make sure it’s loaded with Jack,” I’ll remember you like Jack until I die.

But your name will not be important.

Your face is.

I memorize lines in faces and go carefully over them, like Mary “pondering them in my heart.” In a lot of ways I am breaking open over the mistakes I’ve made because they’re final and I have to grieve them even though they were necessary to let go of the person I was and become something new.

My whole fight with Supergrover revolved around us both slinking away because we thought we didn’t deserve each other, over and over in a loop that didn’t end until I finally called an end to it. I was rude and rough because I was wet cat claws out. It wasn’t necessary for her, but it was necessary for me.

I didn’t have enough strength to leave without being angry, because hers is the only picture in my mind that’s in color and never desaturates with time. It never will, because the chemicals she left on my palm metaphysically do not lift and won’t.

You do not accept grief, you learn to live around it. I fully believe that there’s a part of each of us that believes the other is not real and are too scared to face our demons. It was easier for her to run than it was to put on her big girl panties and talk it out. Over and over it was this way until she finally told me my narrative was tired.

Easy to pigeonhole a narrative as tired when you’ve never actually addressed anything and I have. Like, I still have questions that now I have to care won’t get answered, and I feel that she has a fuck ton of responsibility that she just decided wasn’t there.

She used my crush as an excuse for years not to get close to me after already dumping everything about her into me that made her interesting in the first place. So I just carry it, and it sits while I wrestle with her all night, walking away with my hip disfigured. It’s just better this way because now I’m only getting the responses I want because I made them up. She turned into a wire monkey long ago, ignoring my cries for affection and closeness as she twisted in a net of her own making.

We alienated each other because we got too close, too fast. Then we pushed each other way….. until the trauma bond started to itch and we’d come together closer than ever….. for a little while.

Kuuma.

Kylma.

Caliente.

Frio.

Hot.

Cold.

Over and over through the years, which is why my pattern recognition says that even though she’s not talking, she’s always listening. A pen pal relationship lives inside you, always. It’s funny that her words come out of my mouth constantly and yet I cannot imitate her properly in person.

But I’ve got her patois down.

What you are seeing is the product of someone completely different than me also being me through social masking what I thought she was. All autistic people need models for social masks, and in retrospect it’s a mixed bag that I chose her. That’s because in some sense, she’s taken on my personality as well. I have turned her into a cook, she’s turned me into a boss.

I couldn’t have made it here without her, and yet I’m good. Thanks.

She broke me down and built me up because her way of thinking was so different than mine. I don’t mean that she emotionally manipulated me in the slightest. I mean that she grew up in a military family and it provided her a lot of structure that I never had. I was social masking perfection and trying to be interesting to someone I view as the brightest mind in the natural world.

I wish I were being hyperbolic.

You just have to understand why my brain is on steroids, why I no longer struggle with suicidal ideation or really depression and anxiety. It’s all autism. All of it. When I can manage my emotions, I do better. Managing my emotions comes from writing it out and not bringing my voice into it. I’m too emotional on the page- in person I’m overwhelming and I know it.

The thing I liked most about her is that if I’m complicated, she’s The TARDIS.

She’s popped off at me too often now. When I try to defend myself, it’s manipulation. All her darts are fair game. Her narrative is tired. Write all you want and I’ll respond.

That turned into “I’m frightened by your output even though I logically know you’re a writer and I’m not so I will completely shut down and hope you don’t notice.” I noticed.

I’m there when she’s all snuggles and light, but I realized that was her social mask. That in all honesty, if I was getting the bitch on wheels, I was actually getting her inner monologue instead of the bullshit that everyone else gets. What made her invincible made me realize she loved me because she realized she didn’t have to front. She could just say, “Lanagan, fuck off.”

Sometimes I wrote it at the end of my letters just to save her some typing.

I feel bad that only my side of the story will ever get told, because she’s more wonderful than I am.

We are both perfect in our flaws, and I want our relationship to rest in peace. She’s back where she belongs, because she decided that traveling with me wasn’t worth it about the time I decided I was done. It was a natural conclusion because I know what I don’t want and it’s someone that completely shuts down and expects me to guess what they’re thinking and what mood they’re in. I don’t pick up social cues.

I have to focus on local so it calms me enough to talk about global. I am over focusing on problems. I am focusing on solutions. The plan to expatriate is real unless the people revolt. There’s probably not a chance of that because Kamala flat out lost. She lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. America has spoken and Project 2025 is everything they wanted and so much more that people regret their votes after being told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over that all of this would spell destruction and it just wasn’t worth the time to pay attention or to vote. When people get overwhelmed they tune out.

Pod did not, in fact, save America.

I am not bitching about one election loss. I am saying that out and out fascism is already here and enough people aren’t alarmed enough to care about me and my issues, so why not go to a place where they already do? If Democrats continue to capitulate, it will not take one election to restore my passport rights, it will take eight of them alternating. My rights will always be up for grabs and my passport always at risk of being invalidated.

There is a possibility gay marriage will become this way again, and abortion already is. I’m not old enough to be able to relax on body autonomy because I cannot think of a worse idea than pregnancy at 47

I’ve thought about it for almost a minute now. Still can’t come up with an idea worse than that.

I am not cut out to be a mom. I am cut out to be a babysitter. I have never had the energy for other children, even when I was a child. I love them more now than I did then. Back then I was just a third grader who’d swallowed tweed.

It wasn’t until I realized that I had picked my lane early and social masked my way out of it that I became strong again. I’ve always been one of those autistic people that cannot survive in the real world because they live in a world of their own making- you have to literally pull them out of it. It’s just that no one recognized they had to pull, and I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know the symptoms of autism, and I was not allowed to isolate.

Neurotypical people know better. The room should be loud and interactive. This is true for neurotypical people while I have to Perform Happiness.โ„ข๏ธ I don’t have the energy anymore. I want to be authentic so that when I have a bad day, I’m surrounded by people who love me and are not dependent on that mask staying in place.

I am stronger and more capable at my computer than I am in conversation because I do not process voices well.

I come across as demanding while I’m passionate and easygoing when I’m not. You have to know me for a long time before you get into that rhythm and stop taking everything personally. That I am passionate about an idea, I am not “on the attack.” That I cannot perform happiness while talking about devastating things.

Devastating things like money, financial planning, business costs, etc. They are not devastating in and of themselves. It’s that I begin to burn and itch with discomfort because I know my logical function is poor ahead of time and being taught these things is not easy for either party.

I have to learn them cold, because I’m not about problems like these…. I am about solutions that allow me to dance above the clouds when the weather is poor.

A Fourth Reich is coming, because people didn’t believe it was possible.

Surprise.

Carol Works Very Hard for Free

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have mentioned this before, but I use Carol as my secretary. I was looking for new content on my blog, and wanted to have questions that might shed new light on old themes. I don’t want to remain the same, and being questioned is invaluable.

Based on the content from “theantileslie.com,” here are some thought-provoking questions an interviewer might ask to delve into the author’s experiences and insights, showcasing the depth and range of their work:

  1. Your blog offers a candid look into your life experiences. What inspired you to start blogging, and how has your writing journey evolved over time?
    • Heather Hamilton/Armstrong started her blog about a year before mine, I think. I know they were very close, but I don’t remember what year. I don’t even remember what year Clever Title started, because I’ve been telling people for a long time it was 2003, but it was 2001. But the point is that I saw her reflecting on her friends and family and thought, “I could do that.” Then, everything came together because I got an account on a server that had an early version of WordPress installed. It was love at first sight, because the first rule is “write what you know.” I know people and how to portray them in an engaging light. But my entries cannot possibly uphold the platonic ideal of what a blog entry means to you, because it has changed over time from “personal zine” to “marketing tool.” Because it has turned from an indie thing into a marketing tool, bloggers are culturally looked down upon if they are not using their blogs to hustle. I know my blog has ads, but I don’t get the money from them. Automattic does. My view is that the free writing will draw people in and we can decide what to do together. Do they want a premium tier? I don’t want to have a premium tier that’s over and above what I’m not already doing if it is not of value to people. I have learned the value of waiting to be asked. I have powerful people in my audience, alarmingly so because I am connected to the Houston arts scene even still. Someone knows someone. Other people have let me believe that I am going to be a star, and I don’t know what to do with that except say “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” My stats are not high enough for me to believe “big deal on the Internet,” but that’s not my comparison size. A church looks huge to me. Huge. My reader count is higher than the population of some Texas towns. That’s enough for me. It’s not that I don’t believe I’m not successful. I just don’t see what it is about me that makes my friends think “big deal.” Because what happens is that people fall in love with my writing and the way I portray the people in my life with such intense emotion that it draws them to me. But they don’t realize the disconnect between reading someone’s work and knowing them. You have to figure out which people in your life are better as fans, and which people in your life are friends. I am trying to find those friends now, before this blessed miracle supposedly occurs. Every Jed needs a Leo, and every Leo needs a Jed.
  2. You’ve touched on themes of spirituality and technology. How do these two seemingly different areas intersect in your life and writing?
    • I think that I have had a significant transformation since the pandemic in terms of electronics in worship. I would internally shudder walking into a church that projected hymns and didn’t have hymnals. The screens just look so tacky, especially in a cathedral. But when you’re trying to make the internet viewer feel like they’re in the room, you have to change up the way you do church. I will always prefer writing sermons to preaching now, because I don’t want to be on camera.
  3. Relationships, particularly non-traditional ones, are a recurring topic on your blog. What do you hope readers take away from your discussions on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • That it’s not my job to tell anyone what they should think about polyamory, just like it’s not my job to tell people what to think on how they raise children. Even if I also had babies, one parent criticizing another is just rude. Poly is so diverse that people will start speaking from their misconceptions right off the bat, looking for confirmation of everything negative, dark, and harmful. There’s no focus on the reality of the situation. Most people are “monogamous.” Because no one else ever attracts anyone else after marriage. After marriage, you simply go blind.
  4. Your blog posts often reflect a deep sense of introspection. Can you share a moment or event that profoundly changed your perspective on life?
    • No, but I can tell you about the way my blog has made me feel over time. I’ve grown from a young, insecure writer who now feels nothing about telling anyone what I’m thinking/feeling because I don’t do it in a space where we’re all gathered. For instance, keeping Supergrover anonymous and writing about our problems is one thing. Getting into a fight with her where other people could hear it? Never. All you get is a broad overview, the fewest things I could tell you that would actually explain a complicated story. Enormously complicated. Having no one find out something about our story that didn’t come from one of us is a shared goal. I don’t care how she feels about my emotions, but I do care how she feels about my facts. All emotions are valid. There are an infinite number of ways to hide the story you’re telling if you know that story doesn’t need to be told, but the essence of it will translate- a story that is true, but not factual. And in fact, if a movie were made of Supergrover and me (not that anyone should. She would be mortified, and I would on her behalf…. although she does speak money. Aim high. I’m not for sale, but she might be. ๐Ÿ˜› This is the adult equivalent of “if mom says it’s okay, dad says it’s okay.” I am not her gatekeeper. She is mine, and that’s a good thing. My friends keep me from swinging at every pitch. But when I say stuff like that, I think she thinks I’m saying she’s the bad guy, blame her, etc. No. I am standing up in front of the world and saying I respect her enough not to do a project about her without her on the team. Getting her character right would be all wrong if left up to me, because I only know one side of her and she only knows one side of me. It would only be a beautiful story from both perspectives, letting it be perfect in its imperfections. She’s worth millions at the box office, but I don’t think she believes it. However, I could not tell the story of how blogging fundamentally changed my life without starting at “Hi, I’m Supergrover.” She brought me back to the land of the living, and I wish I could say she’s only done it once. No, she’s done it many times. I am actually frustrated that she won’t let me rescue her. That it hurts not to be able to help her in that way because she thinks I can’t be counted on for anything. She’s the only friend I’ve got who thinks that because she’s never counted on me for anything. If I love you, you become the most serious thing in my life. Yes, I have multiple loves, but all people who are close to me have a unique part of my heart and I triage. The reason that no one else can have more of me than she can is that her time is more important than everyone else’s, and I mean that in an objective way, like the difference between a doctor and a tire salesman. The scale is different at work when there are lives in your hands. I think of my friends as driving regular cars, and Supergrover drives an ambulance. Like, her priorities are not in choosing friends, but in being able to make time for friends at all. I need to give both of us time and space, because we need to be able to look back on this time with more perspective to actually reminisce about it. Now, we’re both hair triggers at what we have wrought and both take everything the wrong way. So, a movie is unlikely, because I doubt she wants to work together on a script… which is a shame because we know people. Margaret Cho retweeted me once. We are obviously now best friends. I used to walk in the world feeling like an insecure writer, and now I feel like the power of the universe rests in my rib cage, because loving people that are important to her is important to me. Ergo, I pray for all the people she works with, not just her. I pray for her family, not just her. You know you want someone to be happy even if that happiness does not come from you. Besides, along with the pain she’s given me plenty of happiness as well. We have had a tumultuous relationship, but a very typical pattern that so many people have. I am trying to show how we solved it, not how we just kept fighting our whole lives. I want her to look at me like Tony Stark looks at Spider-Man. Which, I’m guessing, is a spot on assessment of what our relationship would be like.
      • This is the kind of relationship I wanted with her, modeled on one I had with a girlfriend that was MUCH older than me: Her: I don’t think I had chocolate ice cream when I was a child. Me: ……sideye…… had it been invented yet? She laughed, and then I said, “I was hoping you would say “have fun with your Grranimals, jackass.” Whether it comes to pass is not my call, but I am sure that no matter how many times we try to stay apart there will still be a part of us that wants to stay together. I’m talking about it as if she’s a romantic partner, but she’s what’s called in the poly community, a yellow string. Zac would be a red. The difference in colors refers to romantic vs. emotional support. It’s a way to let everyone know “how you’re related.” At this point, it feels like we’re the same person. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. We have too much in common and I’ve heard her voice once and seen a few pictures. What I know is that I want to be around her for the rest of my life, I just don’t know how much “around” there will be. Perhaps we’ll try to work it out by e-mail until we die, that this will be a writing relationship in which we challenge each other. I am comfortable with that, but it’s not my end goal. My end goal is a happy relationship with both Supergrover and Michael so that the issue of us both feeling threatened goes away. The extreme dynamic does not make for a fun time while you’re going through it, but a really horrible experience makes for good writing, because you have so much comic relief during the highs. Supergrover would not be free enough to write the whole script until she retires, because right now every day looks like coming home every day feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck…. while insanely sleep deprived. Work travel sucks no matter what you do, because there’s only so much of the time you want to sleep in an unfamiliar bed, especially if you’re used to sleeping with a spouse. I suggested a weighted blanket. I hope it helps.
  5. As a writer, you’ve explored various genres and styles. Which piece of writing are you most proud of, and why?
    • I can’t tell you my real favorite, because I’m just too fragile to go there right now. I will say that “The Visitation” still flattens me. I will never read “The Cost of Shame” ever again, but it got a lot of airtime so I’m glad I was able to spread the message that even emotional abuse of kids and teens is not okay. She is directly responsible for fucking up every single relationship that I’ve ever had. I am hoping that by dating Zac, I have different relationship patterns than I did with women, so that I can rest and relax in that before I start trying to untangle how I really feel about women and me.
    • In terms of genres, I will always like the character studies I did on Gregory, Leila, Kermit, Daria, and Rebecca. Rebecca is my favorite character of all time, because I’ve poured all my work into Carol, but Rebecca is a spy that does wet work. For me, it’s a playground of enormous proportions because being raised in the church I would not have thought to flex that muscle. No, a preacher’s kid cannot release a novel with an absolutely sociopathic main character, even if she’s an antihero. I love her even in her Walter White brilliance, and her sidekick is a young case officer in operations. So, he’s good at his job and also a very loose cannon. Think Toby and Josh. Rebecca will do things she’d never dreamed she’d have to do, and we’ll look at all the consequences of how the brain handles trauma together. Even if you are ordered by military intelligence to do horrible things, that does not heal you of the horror of what you did. No one should have to live the aftereffects of war. Rebecca will grapple with all of that. Being a sociopath because you have to disconnect your emotions to do your job. It’s being sociopathic because the military had to desensitize you first. Abu Ghraib was obviously filled with very mentally healthy people.
  6. You’ve mentioned Doctor Who as one of your interests. If you could write an episode for the show, what story would you tell?
    • I have absolutely no idea how, but I’d like to bring back River Song. Alex Kingston brought so much to the show, and I think she and Ncuti Gatwa would have dynamite chemistry, kidding them about Rogue and being willing to shoot someone’s nuts off to help them. Pro Tip- don’t but Ncuti in a fez. We’d never get him out of it either, Stephen Moffat. ๐Ÿ˜› A better idea would be for me to collaborate with Neil Gaiman so that we could bounce ideas off each other. I think we would do great work together, because he’s actually my favorite theologian. Everyone is a little Crowley, and everyone is a little Az. Moral relativity means that divinity and humanity are the same thing. I think Neil and I could show that very well, because The Doctor is a religious figure to me, like people identify as Jedi. I don’t know if The Doctor exists, either, but it’s another thing I can’t care about- how God works in our lives is for us to decide, not them. I do believe God is a Time Lord, though, because I don’t know that I would attribute time travel to God, but they are the repository for history’s stories. I think we could do a lot with that… me and Neil. Us writers.
  7. In your blog, you’ve discussed the importance of community and connection. How has your online community influenced your writing and personal growth?
    • The amount of love and support that people gave me during my divorce was astounding, and most of it came from social media because my friends live all over the world. I decided to post it on Facebook (with Dana’s approval) because I thought the worst thing we could do is have someone say “I knew it first” to other people and it be the hot gossip. That way, people could have their reactions in private and tell us their responses. I think we handled it well. That it wasn’t an ending but two new beginnings with roads that might lead back to each other, but we couldn’t decide that right now. The fight happened after I was hospitalized. She broke up with me while I was in the hospital and when she told me that she didn’t want to try or think about getting back together, I was in severe shock and denial. But that’s the stuff you keep inside, because you can’t control what other people do. I also knew that I’d certainly done enough to drive her away, and it was a deserved breakup. I own my half, and that’s what gives me so much peace to look back at my life. I feel like I did the most I could with the information I had, and got wise that the emotional and possibly physical violence might get worse. Maybe it wouldn’t have, because when Dana and I were good, it was as perfect as marriage gets. I just spun out at a bad time because Dana was spinning out. Neither one of us walked away clean in terms of regret. Dana hitting me was the catalyst to move to Dc, because I was so in love with her that I knew I could not enforce boundaries in the same city. Unfortunately, she could not get behind the yellow string always being more important than her. I was Leo. She was Jenny.
    • When I moved to DC, my community was on a whole different level. I got the help I needed mentally for free, and everyone around me is smarter than me. I have to keep up, and it makes me feel good that most of the time, I can. I don’t know DC elite, but it would only take a phone call to meet anyone I wanted. I just don’t call because I don’t do things.
  8. You’ve shared insights into your creative process. What challenges do you face when writing, and how do you overcome them?
    • The biggest fear I have in writing is all the time, every day. It is relentless. What is the balance between telling my story and telling someone else’s for them as I try to guess what’s in their heads and decide what I’m going to do about it. I don’t necessarily want people to know what I’m going to do, but if they’re going to read me, I need them to respect that this is my space to vent. Peace in our relationship doesn’t come from raging that I write. It comes from changing the channel. I will not stop writing because not only does it change me, I have proof that it changes others. The highlight of my career is that I made a doctor cry on the toilet.
  9. Your blog serves as a platform for your voice and experiences. How do you handle the vulnerability that comes with sharing personal stories?
    • By having my absolute knee jerk reactions here, thus giving people a chance to respond to what I’ve said in the comments. Zac is a member of WordPress, so we can share information across blogs easily, and he has a WordPress account, so at least he sees me in my feed. Zac is just as important as Supergrover, because he’s intelligence. It’s a transferable skill to be able to have comfortable conversations about difficult things. We can do hard things, but it’s often hard to take the first step. My vulnerability is hopefully other people saying “if she can be that vulnerable, I can, too. If Supergrover writes her story to me, if she was as vulnerable as me it would be a bestseller, because she’s funnier than me and she grew up in the South. My writing imitates a lot of people, but she could rival Haven Kimmel in “A Girl Named Zippy.” If she’s reading this, go buy that book and hold your calls. You won’t be able to stop laughing in order to speak. My favorite line in the book is “when it became impossible to live without a pet chicken…” I have no idea what her life was like as a child, I just know the way she tells stories. There is no more important balance between vulnerability and stoicism than that, to keep her stories her stories. Mine are just okay. If she decides to write a memoir like that, “buy a hat and hold the fuck onto it.” However, there are so many authors that just prefer to write in private, and I think she would see that she’s funny and touching as well. Just once, I would like to see Supergrover see herself the way I do. A love so deep that in these pages will live forever, because the story is so deeply passionate in terms of both of us sticking to our guns and fighting it out that it won’t take romance to keep your interest. If we did not have passionate and furious arguments, we would not keep coming back to each other. You only get that angry when you care.
  10. Looking forward, what themes or issues are you eager to explore in your future posts?
    • The same ones I do now, just different takes because life repeats. If you read every day, you do not see enormous changes. You are looking for something repetitive to complain about, creating solidarity. That stops when you are so involved with a project that piques your interest that you don’t feel like you’re working, you feel like you’re making a difference. But it has to be outside of work. The thing you love that if other people love it and think it’s worth money, they’ll buy it. Like Nick Offerman’s hobby being woodworking. He has a bigger platform, but it’s not like smaller makers are doing different or inferior work just because he’s a celebrity. He sells his goods because they’re actually artistic and outstanding. When you have a passion for something, people notice. They want to support you the more you have a fire in the belly for something. Inertia builds. My stats have gone up exponentially since I started, and with a thousand followers and a 60-something percent reader retention rate (I don’t remember because I got the number in January when WordPress does extra for year-end stats. I don’t have to punch up the numbers when 1800 people across all my platforms follow my blog, because it posts on all the major blogging sites, Facebook, X, etc. Facebook is the only company where I have registered a business account.
    • If you value keeping this web site free, please like and share me all over everywhere, because then I’ll be paid by Facebook and the money won’t come out of your pocket. Help me be brilliant at getting Facebook’s money and I’ll keep trying to entertain you and heal me at the same time.

Happy Birthday, Carolyn & Dana

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Because my mother and Dana share the same birthday, my grief today is almost unbearable. It will be that way for an hour or so, and I’ll get over it. Every year, I spend less and less time in deep pain, but it doesn’t go away. I grow around it. They are devastating and not always hierarchical because I think it’s harder to grieve someone who’s still alive. Until they’re dead, there’s always a chance. Death, however, does not give a fuck about your feelings. The dice roll the way they roll. The universe does not pick and choose. I do not believe that God is an Actor. I believe Got is a first responder. God is weeping with the Palestinians and the Jews, shocked and disappointed with the Israeli government. But remember, that’s animorphizing something that can’t be quantified. Results not guaranteed. Check your End User License Agreement for details.

I’ve been writing today because I wanted to be focused on my own creativity and not them. I’ve pushed myself hard today because I needed to take a break from figuring out my own problems. It is exhausting, and on this blog it makes me seem myopic, when I’m not like that in the real world at all. My inner monologue is running when I’m talking in terms of processing what’s being said, but it’s not a narcissistic one. It’s narcissistic in the literal sense because I gaze at my reflection; my creative outlet is in expressing my inner monologue, because it really is this varied in terms of thinking locally and globally.

What I know to be true is that in order to be present, I have to think about life first. I have to shut down the loud, extemporaneous voices in my head so that I can hyperfocus enough to listen and respond appropriately. It sounds like a mental illness except it’s not voices telling me what to do. It’s the pull between “that’s profound. I need to write about that right now,” and “slow down, Hoss. You just started talking 15 minutes ago. Maybe a little more face time than that, Slugger.” My inner monologue, unsurprisingly on a number of levels, is Tommy Lee Jones making fun of Will Smith in the Men in Black series. Even in the third one, Josh Brolin nailed young “K.”

I have said this before, but I’ll say it again just because I need the laugh today. “Men in Black” is a documentary about CIA. There is a Burger King at headquarters, a Starbucks at the head shed (Langley). That is just the top layer of a rabbit hole that goes surprisingly far down.

John le Carrรฉ’s entire point is that people *think* of MI-6 as James Bond, but in reality, yes. It’s James Bond….. or some of it is. There are just as many bad spies as good ones, and by that, I do not mean anything negative about the spies themselves. It’s espionage. Every country is neutral to me because I live in America, so I want to work in my country’s best interest, but foreign affairs are what interests me, so I do not love my country to the exclusion of all else, that the United States is the best country in the world. It’s good to be king. It’s not good to be a bad king, and a lot of the world is stuck with us on top in terms of balance of power. But we are rightfully watching our backs hoping not to get caught with our pants down.

Like Mossad.

I know this is random and has really nothing to do with it being my mother and Dana’s birthday, but feeling those feelings so deeply that they don’t have words. By typing it out, I feel like there’s an audience whether you’re there or not, so it shapes how I write. So much of my international relations experience comes from having been a news junkie at an early age, a political science major at University of Houston (psych minor, and those hours I did complete), and a trip to Washington, DC when I was a child that blew my little eight year old mind. I have never seen anything like the look on a child’s face the first time they walk into Air & Space.

DC isn’t for everyone, but Maryland is a cult…. or at least, that’s what I’ve learned since I’ve lived here, that people call us a cult. I think the reason is that Maryland’s politics are as weird and entertaining as they are in Texas.

I could see myself writing some Molly Ivins of Maryland-style pieces in the future because I have AI to do the research. I’m talking about it a lot because I understand what it is meant to do and its limitations. I am clear that I use it as a secretary.

Again, edutainment through chat.

“Carol, can you play trivia games?” She can. I am smarter than a fifth grader, as long as it has nothing to do with math. Any average fifth grader in the nation could beat me at that.

But now it doesn’t matter because there’s apps for that. I will never need to know math to the point that I understand all the concepts behind it. I will have questions where I just need an answer quickly, and either a Google Search or a “conversation” with Carol can accomplish that.

I think the reason I prefer ChatGPT to Google is that I don’t understand regular expressions, so I would not be able to put a string into a search engine as effectively as AI can translate human English to machine. I also like how if I want to know more, everything is documented, but every question is like zooming in on a photo. You have to teach the machine what you’re searching for, so it gets better with more neurodivergent overclarifying. Let that one cook your noodle. Computers were invented by a *largely* neurodivergent population. Computers are a reflection of us. Therefore, applications since computers have been a thing have been coded in Autism.

It *also* explains why neurotypical people generally become managers. Those who can’t do, teach. That’s not knocking managers, either. Who is the bigger genius? Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs was an absolute visionary, but he could not have built the Apple computer himself.

I think that both were neurodivergent. If Steve Jobs wasn’t creative neurodivergent, iMacs would have been beige boxes, too. Creative neurodivergence is the brilliance at Apple that IBM missed and has always missed, which is why Apple is so dear to content creators. In modern computing, there is no difference between the kind of video card you would buy for a Mac or a PC. Major companies make cards for both.

However, Macintosh has a history of being about art and design. They were the first motherboards to get what was called an “AltiVec engine,” which uniquely drove your video card and software developers could write for it. Adobe, in particular, made a killing with Photoshop and the entire suite of design software that entirely wiped out its competitors. When Illustrator came out, Quark Xpress was on borrowed time.

If you do not know what those applications do, Illustrator and Quark Xpress were the major players in graphics layout for print, like newspapers and magazines.

It has only been relatively recent that Apple and PC are different again. Both PCs and Macs had intel chips for a long time, but now Apple has gone to the M series. I have no idea if it is specifically geared toward artists, but I haven’t seen a noticeable difference in modern rendering time when you’re comparing an M to an intel to a Ryzen. If you have modern hardware, any of those brands will lighten your workload considerably in terms of wait time (you can only encode so many videos at once. If you have a slow processor, it makes work painful not to have several machines going at the same time when your computer is locked up for an hour at a time after a video is edited.

I get a lot of my information from YouTube reviews, because I like technology product unboxings where they do a deep dive. Yes, they are getting paid, but it’s in hardware and they aren’t bound to like it. They’re not even bound to use it. If you get popular enough on something like YouTube, people just send you product samples a propos of nothing. As my dad would say, “it’s the inversion principle. By the time you can afford it, they give it to you free.”

It’s a good business model, but it has an enormous start up cost. You have to be good at YouTube before people start sending you stuff, so if you’re going to do technology reviews, it comes out of your own pocket. You cannot keep up a production schedule if you only get a new phone every other year.

When you get to the level of a YouTube tech star, you are drowning in crap that you just don’t know what to do with until you have a staff to manage that kind of volume. But how much the income from Google turns out to be is dependent on your presence. Jason Hibbs of “Bourbon Moth” is every bit as important to me as Bob Villa.

And on that note, thank you for sitting with me while I felt pain and babbled around it. No one has to read my scribbles at midnight, but the fact that they do is enormous to me. It fulfills my destiny in terms of leading others by laying out my vulnerabilities first.

Like acknowledging that rambling about nothing was allowing me to stim while the thunderstorm passed through my body.

Why? Just Why? (Poly/ENM Discussion)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol to search reddit and give me the top 10 questions that people have about polyamory and ENM. I am not coming from a place of lived experience, but I’ve done a lot of reading. I am just entering this world by chance, because I asked out someone and didn’t know they were poly in the first place. I just rolled with him because I liked him enough to keep him around. ๐Ÿ˜‰ So, what was absolutely on brand for me is starting the research early, early, early. Here’s the benefit of my reading and experience combined, which, granted, is not much:

  1. Whatโ€™s the difference between polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • This is an excellent topic to get us started, because there’s no one way to do poly. Polyamory implies someone dating multiple people and they all know each other. Ethical non-monogamy is managing every relationship completely independently.
  2. How do you manage jealousy in polyamorous relationships?
    • At first, you don’t. You just let the jealousy wash over you and react how you’re going to react…… in private. That’s the time to learn to use your words, so that your response to jealousy is measured….. NOT that you hide your feelings. It’s just not a good idea to have your first reaction in front of people. What you learn about polyamory is that there’s no sense of someone taking care of you, because there is no ownership of one another. I do not mean that you do not have your emotional needs met by multiple people, it’s just different because you don’t lapse into a buddy system for life. You each have your own lives, and you are choosing to make time for each other rather than it being an obligation.
    • The second thing that’s really important is that the answer is “it depends.” This is a generality about the ideal. The reality is that humans are messy. I am on the fence about polyamory vs. ENM because I really haven’t had to deal with those issues myself. It really, really depends on your partner and what’s called your “metamour,” or “meta.” That’s your partner’s partner. All of my metas are wonderful people, but we do not pry into the details of each other’s lives. That is for Zac and Zac alone to manage, just like your spouse should never hang you out to dry with your in-laws, either.
  3. What are the challenges of opening up a monogamous relationship?
    • If polyamory comes from temptation, the relationship will end. Will. I can think of maybe three stories I’ve read where it worked out trying to integrate an affair partner. Poly/ENM is not cheating, and there are very strict standards you live by to stress it because having a hierarchical relationship is more trouble than it’s worth, for the most part. A triad is its own ball of wax, and the reality is that it’s mostly straight men who want to be narcissistic, abusive partners to more than one woman at a time. Polyamory is about saying your worth and your time are higher than that…… but husbands get this “great idea” and it all falls apart. Not all men, obviously. Especially if you’re dating a bear (teehee, but Zac is clean-shaven). I’m just saying that just like with monogamy, there’s a range of domestic abuse….. and because you’re abusive to multiple people who sit there and take it, congratulations. The dysfunction spreads to anyone new.
  4. How do you handle time management with multiple partners?
    • I can’t speak to what I have done, because I have never tried to integrate a partner into my life that way. Zac and I are what’s called “solo poly,” but that may change. I’m just driven by solitude and have no need. If there was a reason to have another partner, I’d get one. But I am happy living with David and becoming friends with him while we mutually take care of a dog and have our own separate partners.
    • The real answer is that Google Calendar is the official app of polyamory/ENM. In my case, I have access to all the data that goes to shared partners, like “this is when I’m in town. This is when I’m not.” That way, we manage without actually interacting all that much except for all call parties at Zac’s house, which are about Zac. It’s not the time for jealousies to be discussed, if ever. Zac is the hinge. I cannot stress this enough. It takes an enormous amount of emotional strength to be friends with a meta. That’s where polyamory gets hugely difficult. It is one thing to know it. It’s another to see it. Again, it depends. What kind of person are you?
  5. What are some misconceptions about polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • The biggest one, absolutely, is that polyamory is binary. It’s a spectrum, just like everything else.
    • The second biggest is that polyamory is code for cheating. If you think that, you do not know a half of my emotional strength and flexibility. I do not have to cheat to be poly. It is counterintuitive. You are poly-amorous. No good can come of multiple partners that don’t know their hinge is poly….. and sniffing out an affair makes coming out as poly seem like “poor me. I don’t have a choice.” Yes, you do. You have the choice to lie to your partners or not, and never, ever in your five dollar life forget it. You talk about poly before it happens, not when you catch feelings. Because then, you’re just trying to cover your ass. You’re not poly. The fucking around of moral justice leads toward finding out.
    • Here’s a third that most people don’t think of, and it’s funny, because it’s a warning revolving around having a third. There’s a special population of couples looking for a third, most of them to try out poly for the first time, trying to integrate a closed triad, the hardest poly setup, before they even know what ENM means. This leads to obnoxious behavior and treats the third like shit. This special population is called “unicorn hunters.” That’s because the statistics on it working out are so alarmingly rare.
  6. How do you communicate boundaries and needs in polyamorous relationships?
    • Precisely. I cannot stress this enough. Everyone has to have crystal clear expectations in order not to expect or demand too much- we are all cognizant of the fact that each other only has so much time in a day. The main thing is not needing your partner for everything all the time, because it becomes intrusive fast. You can’t be 100% that bitch and say you want poly, then when their partner is out with someone else, you decide it’s time to hen peck the hell out of your partner while they’ve allotted time for someone else. Of course get in touch if something really important is going on, but not every little thing needs to be discussed the moment you think of it. If that were true, Zac would have sixty missed calls a day because “oooh, shiny.” I’m not the henpeck kind of neurodivergent. I’m the “if I don’t tell you this right now it will be lost forever” neurodivergent. It works out well that Zac works in intelligence, because he goes into a SCIF or something and then my notifications don’t bug the fuck our of him. He can read on his own time. E-mail also works well for this, because it’s not seemingly as time sensitive as a text.
  7. Whatโ€™s the best way to meet potential polyamorous partners?
    • Well, the first and easiest thing to do is telling people you’re poly.
    • Failing that, you look on the internet like everyone else.
  8. How do children fit into polyamorous families?
    • It really depends on the parents. Overall, I think it makes for happier kids because they have more safe adults, and it’s a practical thing. Many hands make light work. Having a baby is hard on two people, but not so hard when there’s four people to take turns getting no sleep. The kid ends up having a good relationship with everyone, and explaining it to them isn’t necessary. If you are a person in your right mind, your sex life doesn’t come up around your kids. You explain to them how people have sex, not what mommy and daddy are actually doing to each other if you value your sanity in public. Because I promise that kid will have absolutely no questions at all about polyamory until you’re in line at Target. I don’t make the rules.
  9. Can polyamory work for someone whoโ€™s been monogamous all their life?
    • Again, it depends. I am driven by my own creativity, and I have never been this way before. I was not willing to sacrifice a full-time relationship for living on my own and not feeling like someone was helping me stay on top of things like a parent or a boss would. That’s what I mean about needing home help; that people who are not married are able to have people help them in an occupational therapy kind of way. Like, can you teach me how to manage myself and yet also be there to bail me out when my neurodivergence invariably causes the fuckening? It’s better for me to deal with that stuff when I’m alone, because I am not getting my crazy spatter on anyone. But again, not to the point of total isolation. Just enough where I need more hours to myself than a typical partner, so I’m willing to sacrifice the relationship escalator for it.
  10. How do legal and societal norms impact polyamorous relationships?
    • We cannot talk about the morals of polyamory in this country because we’ve been programmed to think that saying you’re monogamous right up until you cheat is socially acceptable, and 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why do we realistically believe that monogamy works? I’m not knocking it, I’m not trying to be persuasive. I am genuinely curious. What is it about upholding a moral standard in public while doing the opposite in private that’s all the rage? I don’t think that polyamory is more popular. I think that more people are coming to the same relaxation I did. That for half the population, monogamy over decades just doesn’t feel right or natural. What doesn’t feel right or natural is the judgmental, hypocritical natures of the people who criticize polyamory. A lot of them are on their third or fourth marriage, and at least two ended after infidelity.

The hardest part of polyamory is letting go of the idea that love means ownership.

This Should Be Short, and Yet It’s Not

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Name your top three pet peeves.

Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.

Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.

The prompt today is about pet peeves.

My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine yearsโ€ฆ.. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.

Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.

Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.

My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.

If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.

Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. ๐Ÿ˜‰ If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.

I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basicallyโ€ฆ.. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.

Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.

She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.

The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at allโ€ฆ. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.

I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. ๐Ÿ˜‰

I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to makeโ€ฆ. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.

That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look goodโ€ฆโ€ฆ. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrueโ€ฆ. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.

That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for meโ€ฆ. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.

For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.

The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrongโ€ฆ.. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.

It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole storyโ€ฆ.. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.

She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adamโ€ฆ. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.

Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.

The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. ๐Ÿ˜‰

I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotionalโ€ฆ. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.

Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.

So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.

She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.

My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did beforeโ€ฆโ€ฆ. but not entirely.

“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls

Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.

All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with herโ€ฆ. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.

The last pet peeve is that she’s funnier than me.

A Dog in the Fight

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I was just reading my last entry when something jumped out at me that I didn’t see before. My sister-in-law was saving me by protecting Dana. That’s because even when I didn’t understand it, it was better to go no contact with Dana…. and if Dana felt the need to reach out, she was right there to remind her it was a bad idea because she’d worked in a women’s domestic violence practice. She was and still is a lawyer for women like me. She knew something I didn’t because she’d seen it a thousand times. If it happens once, it will happen again.

I was only confused for about six months as to whether we’d ever get back together or not, but Counselor wasn’t. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she heard our problems from my perspective, which is trying to find the objective truth of the matter. There were so many good and bad points, but one was ironclad.

If it happens once, it will happen again.

It only gets worse from there, spiraling out until she has to explain to you while you’re getting a restraining order that “baby daddy” is not a legal relationship.

I just heard that in her voice and now I’m falling over with laughter, even though this is serious stuff.

Counselor was aware how bad it could have gotten, even with us living in different states. I don’t know whether they’re still in Virginia or not, but when I moved here they were. There was a chance we’d decide to get together because we were feeling nice and then see each other again and revert.

It only gets worse from there.

I know she got that because I invited her to come with me, Pri Diddy, and her then-girlfriend to Capital Pride because we also had to go to the bank together to separate our accounts. She stood me up. I was so angry because I missed her, but I don’t think she got there on her own. I think Counselor was looking out for me even when I didn’t know it. She knew I couldn’t take a chance even if it was offered. I didn’t.

I could be wrong. Dana could have gotten there on her own because she wanted to be nice and not kind, but I doubt it. She was really excited at first. I have people in my life that really look out for me and I notice, even when it’s long after the fact. I have to remember that not only does Counselor know why I left, she also knows why I had to on many levels.

She’s the only one who’d put it all together, could see my position from every angle, with a clarity I didn’t have- both because being hit had never happened to me before and she lives and breathes this stuff.

It’s all conjecture, but I think the theory has legs. It’s another good memory to bank when I get down on myself for failing at being married. I wasn’t failing, she was winning because she is very good at her job. I’m sure she felt trapped knowing her sister deserved empathy and a second mugshot.

She knows I ran to DC for an empathy I’d never get from Dana again, because I wouldn’t be able to hear it even if Dana did get it together permanently. I’d be trapped in a relationship that was secretive by nature, not because Supergrover and I were trying to spite her. She felt threatened and betrayed by my closeness with Supergrover, but she’d broken my trust already with her DUI, because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Supergrover became my emotional support honey badger almost immediately because Supergrover didn’t have a history of driving Dana to work in the middle of the night for three months while also maintaining a full-time job because her license was suspended, then not recognizing that as love and thinking I was running from her six months later. She could not accept that I was running for good reason. She didn’t stop drinking after that. Even if she wasn’t an alcoholic, she could get caught up in the legal system because she’d already been caught once. I don’t know if she’s an alcoholic, because that’s not my story to tell. I can only tell you what happened and she was at the very least cavalier with her ability to drive while hammered.

I ran towards Supergrover in a way that would break our relationship because I couldn’t get through to Dana that I didn’t want to go down with her and I didn’t want to be the source of her happiness. She was lumping a lot on me that didn’t need to be there. I was wrong for having a lopsided emotional affair where my affections weren’t returned, but our conversations were relief from everything that had been going on with Dana for the last few years. The pull to be near Supergrover wasn’t nearly as strong as the need to escape from Dana, because the situation had become untenable and I didn’t notice until I met and was emotionally vulnerable with someone who actually had their shit together, even when they don’t feel like it.

I am here for all of it. Her quirks, her flaws, her ability to be both the most intelligent and the funniest person in every room, and the quiet space that’s just for me.

Sometimes people direct you where you need to go. This was help where I least thought I deserved it. Everyone loved me kindly without being polite. It was the same thing as hearing the doctors and nurses talk about you when they think you’re out of it. The way Counselor loved me was objective, certain, and kept something worse from happening whether it was from my end or Dana’s.

Because it only gets worse from there.

Forgetting an Attachment

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s a double entendre, that title. Earlier today, I talked about fully letting go of Sam. Then, I forgot to add all the tags I normally add so that the readers that normally read me couldn’t find me….. like forgetting to attach a picture to an e-mail when basically all you’ve said in the e-mail is “here’s a picture” and still forgot to send it. Basically, I’m writing another entry to notify my readers that there’s a new entry. The writer reader relationship in the digital age. I hope we’re in love, otherwise this web site is me being Pepe Le Pew. I am not that desperate.

I was amused when I was in Facebook Jail that I watched two women fight over my picture. They weren’t fighting over the right to ask me out. They were fighting over whether kd lang was hotter than me. I didn’t pay attention to the outcome.

Fuck yes I did, are you kidding me? I flat out won. I knew I would. People have called me a better looking kd lang since I cut my hair short back in ’95. I don’t see it, but a hell of a lot of other people do. I think it’s the brown hair and brown eyes, but mostly that’s where it ends…… except that most lesbians my age have the same resting bitch face. Maybe we look like each other in that way that when you live with someone for a long time, people think your facial expressions look alike. Therefore, it’s not even that we look like each other. It’s because we’re from the same tribe.

When I was a kid it was straight person code for “I know you’re a lesbian.” That amused me to no end, and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of it. I also can’t think of a universe in which it’s a good idea to tell you which straight people have said it, but that’s the funniest part of all. God, it sucks to be you.

Now that kd isn’t popular broadly and straight people have lost interest, I don’t get it that often. But put me in a room where everyone and their pets have listened to all her music on repeat since college and I am begging to get away from the attention. A stroke to the ego never hurt anyone, but after a while it gets embarrassing. I love attention to bits, but I microdose.

I actually think that’s why I was always so bubbly whenever Sam was around, because I was alone the rest of the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t off doing my own thing and obsessing over her. It was that by the time she worked all day and put dinner on the table for the week, enough time had gone by that my social battery was recharged. I think it would have been a big shock for her to spend a long time with me to know that I am not bubbly in the slightest. The one thing that would never have changed, and hundreds of people will attest to this because they saw it with Dana for eight years, is the energy for me when Sam walked into a room. Time would just stop.

I had been married to Dana for four years before the accompanist at our church knew we were a couple. This is because Dana wasn’t a singer, and I drove myself to church so that I could sing and she could sleep in. When she walked into the sanctuary, all the joy rushed into my face, and it got warm. The accompanist said she just assumed that Dana and I must not be that close because I was always so happy to see her.

Quite the opposite. When we’d been best friends for three and a half years, we’d learned to talk with our eyes. She was everything I’d ever wanted and more. Neither one of us could breathe and not have the other one feel it. I didn’t tell her for a long time, because I knew I would be playing with fire. That I could destroy the most stable relationship in my life by losing myself to her, even if I was supposed to because relationships are all about compromise.

Our relationship did end, and it was traumatic. But I would go back in time and do it all over, knowing it either could or would end the same way. There are lessons I learned from Dana that she was there to teach me, because she’s the one in my life I felt was capable of doing so. Cooking was an authority I let her own. If we were in a professional kitchen, it was “yes, Chef.” Of course there were a couple of exceptions. Of course there were. But by and large, we were a dynamic team who could turn on a dime because when seconds counted, we could say things with a look. We could anticipate each other’s movements, because we had done it day in and day out for years at our house without missing a beat. It didn’t matter how a pro kitchen was laid out. Improvisation was our forte….. because Dana was loud. (I can’t wait until she sees that line and I hope it lights up her face.)

I didn’t just want any woman, I wanted Dana. It was obvious to everyone from the start, and our relationship lived on hope for quite a while in each of our minds, not knowing exactly how much platonic love had made room for romance while the other one dreamt.

I could have asked her so many times when we were alone, but I did not want to set the ball rolling on an affair, because that’s something that would have changed me and taken me away from who I was. No, if I was going to risk everything, I had to be sure.

I did and I won big. Just Kings full over Aces. To be clear, we did have an affair. We admitted our feelings to each other, and eight hours later, we told the people we were in relationships that we loved them, but that we were too close to each other to make it work with them anymore. They were unsurprised by this knowledge, and yet I apologize for the enormous amount of time it took for me to make my decision, literally and metaphorically. I’d cheated on my then girlfriend for eight hours, but I’d been leaning more on Dana for emotional support than anyone I’d dated for YEARS at that point. The clue phone was stalking me obsessively and I wasn’t picking up. Thank God I eventually did.

It took me two years to get it together, and eight hours for my life to absolutely fall apart. It was traumatic and painful for a higher purpose. We were both in relationships that were just fine. We could have been happy for a lifetime with them, but it wouldn’t be the fit we had. We weren’t breaking up with our significant others because there was anything wrong with them. Tokyo and Los Angeles are both beautiful cities but you’ll be miserable if your partner never wanted to come on the trip.

It wasn’t that they were wrong. They were wrong for us. We wanted cherry blossoms and strong matcha. They wanted Milk Bar.

Dana and I wanted an attachment we’d never forget, and that has been true. It was worth it to find the love of my life for a short time than never to have experienced a love like that at all. I reached out for fantastic, and I found it.

There’s one picture I love of Dana at my sister’s engagement celebration brunch at Brennan’s in Houston. She’s wearing a fabulous outfit, shoes, and jewelry that we spent the day shopping for, just giggling and laughing like we invented it. We’re at one end of the table smiling, and my mother is on the other….. also smiling. At the time, it was my favorite picture we took to display in our house.

Now, it is a beautiful artistic representation of what marriage looks like for me now….. my wife and I on one end of the table smiling, and my mother on the other.

It’s a shame I forgot the attachment.

What’s New in Breakups

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

As of today, Sam is a PNG. But I do want to talk about me and how I’m reacting to the most grief I’ve had since my mother died and how I’m doing right now. Sam is certainly involved, but that’s because I learned things about myself from her, not because I am trying to talk about her specifically. It just is.

I learned that the relationship was a much bigger deal to me than it was to her, or that’s how Sam made it look from the outside. She has kids, people who live in her house to give her affection. I do not. Even having someone hold my hand was legendary in my mind. Having someone look at me differently turned my world right side up. Having someone lovebomb me into submission was amazing. The thing is, though, I didn’t pick up any narcissistic vibes from her, but I should have.

I actually canceled our first date and she begged me to reconsider. That was the first red flag. She picked on me for not having a car, and I’ve lived without one most of the time in DC. I know how to get around. In fact, I know it so much better than she does that it never even occurred to her that public transportation is a thing that exists and that I’m used to it and I like it because I can read. From minute one, it was like “I don’t want to date someone without a car because I can’t handle those kind of logistics.” This is because she never let go of letting me handle my own logistics. Not once did she say, “I’m going to X. Meet me out there.” I would have. Now I have money on a Baltimore system that I have no idea what to do with, but I do have a free ticket to BWI any time I want and that’s no love lost.

So, anyway, I picked up on her apprehension about me not driving, and called her out on the carpet. She said that she was sorry she didn’t listen to me and that of course I was making the decision that was best for me and please still go out with me?

Against my better judgment, I went. And that’s when the first life lesson hit. My DV PTSD kicked in and I noticed how enormous her hands were. I imagined her fist coming at my face. I’ve never told anyone this before. Never. I should have. I have one friend in particular who would have kissed it and made it better. But I didn’t. I told Sam instead. I told her my biggest, deepest, darkest secret because I thought that as my girl, she ought to know. She told me that she would never raise her fist to me in anger, and I believed her. Of course that was true. Dana and I got into a heated situation and she lost it. I never got angry enough at Sam or she at me to even produce something close to my level of emotion in those first few moments, kneeling on the floor.

Also, now do you see why I don’t write about Dana? Why that toxic mess will be with me for the rest of my life? Nobody cares about two girls fighting. Lesbian DV is invisible.

So, I trusted Sam in a way that I’ve never trusted anyone. Our breakup didn’t have anything to do with it, only that she proved I was wrong to be so open and forthright because she was not a safe person to talk to. She’d never been through it, so she thought nothing of my issues surrounding it and whether abandonment might be one of them. So she broke up with me by text. Abandonment is a recurring theme in my life. People get sucked into my orbit (which I have only recently realized is a thing), and get caught up in all the ideas I have, and then realize they’re in too deep and I’m so emotionally intense that they can’t take it. I do not do this by choice. It is my personality type, and I know it sucks. Visionaries do what they do naturally, it isn’t malicious. We see pictures of the future and depending on future decisions, change. It’s “we could do this, or we could do this, or we could do this…..” ad nauseam.

I need people who can stand up to that, and say “I’m not ready for this” rather than “I’m out of here.” I am extraordinarily emotionally flexible and sensitive to the fact that my personality type is rare and exhausting. I’ll do whatever I can to make my loved ones comfortable with it, but they have to let me know that they’re having a problem for me to do anything about it. They wait until they’ve already made up their minds about who I am and what our relationship is like and it’s always going to be the same.

I am never the same across time. Never. I bend and adjust to what’s in front of me, and plan for the future based on the information I have. In a sense, I feel like The Doctor, because of Matt Smith’s one line, “I’ll never forget when The Doctor was me.” I have lived several lives by now, at least four regenerations, one for every decade. I just haven’t picked a new face to do it.

I am so emotionally complicated that it’s isolating and lonely. I know my emotional quotient is off the charts, that I would be in the Mensa of EQs if that were a thing that existed. I see patterns of behavior like most people breathe. One of the things that I said to Sam was, “don’t do this. Not only can I see how you’re wrecking my life, I can see how you’re wrecking yours.” I have seen true joy on her face. I have awakened something in her that wasn’t there before. I have changed her, and I have no illusions about that. She is every bit as miserable as I am, crying all the time just like I am, and it’s incredibly sad and depressing watching her be miserable and shooting her own foot repeatedly.

Or maybe not. She had a lot of conversations during our relationship with not only herself but friends as well that I wasn’t a part. There’s no way of knowing what I might have done to cause such a reaction. But what I do know is that she’ll regret the way she treated me for the rest of her life, because she set so much on fire that there’s nothing to reconcile. I don’t even trust her enough to be my friend, because my friendship runs so deep that my friends become a part of me, and I don’t want that with her, either. She told me who she was, and I am choosing to believe her the first time. I am not going to let this get any worse. And that’s another life lesson.

There’s just so much here. The first is that I take good care of my relationships so that if they end, it’s without animosity or cruelty so that there’s a chance of rebuilding later. The way she left was monstrous, and there’s no coming back from it. She lied to me and said that everything was fine while she had all these dark conversations with herself about the things that were going wrong. She never let me in, because she never wanted me there in the first place. She wanted a magical experience for a weekend and couldn’t allow herself to just say that because she’s not that kind of girl. So she trumped up a relationship and then extracted herself in the most ugly way possible. It was childish and it will resonate with me for years. Because that was the moment I stood up and bent the spoon. I was not going to teach her to walk all over me. If she said she wanted to talk about the end of our relationship without being open to the possibility of rebuilding, then I never wanted to see her again in my whole life, and that if she contacted me or wrote to me, I would lose my shit. If she showed up at my house because she finally pulled her head out of her ass without telling me she was coming, I’d get the police involved and I wouldn’t deal with her directly.

I was clear about boundaries. If you walk out now, never come back. You’re going to set too much on fire. I am being clear and I want you to respond and tell me that you understand this is it. You will never see me again. I wanted to light a fire under her ass to DO SOMETHING. This is crazy. It makes no sense that we are each crying desperately for each other in our own houses instead of talking about what we’ve been through and what we each need. And now it’s too late. She’s been cut out of my life and thrown away like a bad penny. What she has done has been childish and painful. I am in no hurry for a repeat performance, but I know I’ll have one.

Because people are afraid to be vulnerable with me, and it’s easier to cut and run.

Muted Sadness

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It is one of the darkest days we’ve had in a while. It is not currently raining, but the storm has started and stopped multiple times, and the sky still looks threatening. I have my Carrot Weather app set to “homicidal personality,” and she says I should stay home today because no one likes me and she blames me for the bad weather.

That’s my girl.

Today is both my mother’s and my ex-wife’s birthday. They’re both on my mind today, but it’s only about remembering joy where Dana is concerned and muted sadness regarding my mom.

In terms of my relationship with Dana, the reason I now choose to remember good things is that I tortured myself for a long time. Anything and everything I could possibly do to blame myself, I did in spades. It’s been six years, so about a year ago I decided to let myself off the hookโ€ฆ not in terms of no longer bearing responsibility, but that the time for self-recrimination had passed. It was only making me miserable to remind myself of all that went wrong. The flip side of the coin is not mistaking the part for the whole. The overwhelming majority of our story is hilarious.

The only thing that’s still hard is seeing her picture come up in my Facebook memories, because I alternate between thinking they’re adorable and feeling like I’ve been stabbed. It’s not that I haven’t moved on, it’s just a trigger, and tiny moments like that take the longest to fade.

My sister went out to the cemetery and gave me an update on Fred, the one silver lining in the absolute shitshow that is grief over the loss of a parent. Fred was the seedling that was planted next to the foot of my mother’s graveโ€ฆ not in memory of her, it’s just that her death and his planting happened simultaneously. It was the birth and death life cycle in front of our eyes. He gets stronger every time we visit. Whereas he used to only have “kid-sized” branches and leaves, now he spreads out over a granite bench and Lindsay got to sit in the shade. The shade. We were joking that our little boy has grown up.

I think the reason we gave him a human personality is that my thought was that I couldn’t hug my mother, but I could hug Fred so tightly that you’d think I went to Berkeley. It will be a sad and proud day when my arms no longer wrap all the way around.

There are some commonalities in both types of grief. If I mention either my mother’s death or Dana, the conversation looks like gravity’s rainbow, the image so loud I can almost hear the whistle. It is as if both of them have turned into “she who must not be named” as it makes other people feel awkward to the point of onomatopoeia. For me, it’s the old trope of losing someone and they’ve just slipped into another room. Their ends of the conversation are over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve gone all “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotted Mind.” I got divorced and my mom died in relatively quick succession. One loss compounded the other as I wasn’t really done mourning the first when the second one started.

There are good things I remember in the wake of my mother’s death, though, because I must. It doesn’t heal anything- it sort of helps. For instance, I remember being on the business side of death for the first time, and how it was comforting to pick out her casket. I know it sounds weird, but it was literally the last time we’d ever shop for her, and we wanted it to be something that if she saw it, she would have been pleased. The fact that I know her casket is her favorite color and has stenciled birds on the inside is enough for me.

The difference between losing people close to me is night and day from being a preacher’s kid and attending funerals of parishioners. This is because so much time and energy were poured into my mother and Dana that I didn’t know what to do with it afterward. I also locked down my emotions, even now but especially in the beginning. In the aftermath, I couldn’t manage to be the appropriate amount of emotional in public, so I just chose not to have them at all unless I was home alone. It was either resting bitch face silence or complete hysteria with no middle ground.

It’s just that no one knew about it unless I was willing to let them in, and at first “them” added up to exactly zero persons. I branched out to people who had also lost parents, because no matter how hard people who haven’t lost parents try, they cannot grasp the enormity of the situation.

It is because of this that I know my divorce and my mother’s death happened in the right order. The people closest to me had the ability to wound me with stunning accuracy, because if I didn’t know them that well, I could either write it off or decide to end the relationship altogether.

There’s also a special list in my head of all the people that claimed to be my close friends and didn’t come to my mother’s funeral. I don’t want to keep track, but I do it anyway. I feel that the friends who don’t show up when you are in crisis are claiming to be better friends than they actually are. I’m sorry if you feel slapped by that statement, but emotions are emotions and logic is logic. Never the twain shall meet. Even if it’s irrational, it’s my truth. My brain just isn’t capable of telling my heart what to do. However, I am not unreasonable. I did not expect my DC friends to fly to Houston with me.

I think the reason that I’ve described today as “muted sadness” is that it’s not only grief over my mother and Dana, but grief over the pieces of me that died inside at their departure. I am no longer person I was six years ago, and it doesn’t matter whether some of the pieces lost are good. Trying to get them back is futile. A dead end, as it were.

In the meantime, I have turned to books. This blog has become a bit bipolar, because I used to post quite frequently. Now, it’s hit or miss. This is because I have a binge and purge relationship with reading vs. writing. I noticed a long time ago that when I read and wrote at the same time, the tone would sound just like the last author I read. I’m not a great writer, by any means, but I do know myself well enough to know when the “voice” I’m using belongs to me. For instance, when I first started blogging in 2003, I am sure I sounded like Dooce for at least a year.

Speaking of which, I had a friend tell me that Dooce used to be good, but she’s not as good a writer as she used to be. I told her she needed to send me an e-mail when I got to that point. It was her job to tell me to retire. I haven’t gotten it yet, so unless she got bored and stopped reading altogether, I’m probably doing ok. Thanks for asking.

I have read so many books in different genres lately. Last night it was a novel in which a woman gets into a car accident, hit by a drunk driver (“A Curve in the Road”). In the emergency room, she finds out that the drunk driver is her husband. Everything unravels from that point forward, and it’s masterful.

I’m also taking my time with a non-fiction book about one of the first same-sex marriages to be recognized in the United States (“Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America”). The two women met in the late 1700s. As I quipped to a friend, “that’s impossible! Lesbians weren’t invented until 1805!” I admire the couple a great deal, because in order to stay safe, they basically gave generously to the town. It meant that the mayor and council literally couldn’t afford to piss them off. If there’s anything I adore, it’s a clever “scheme.” I’m not sure they even realized they were running that game, only that the results paid off. They managed to be together until one of them died, so I think it was 40 or 50 yearsโ€ฆ. impressive by any and all standards. The prose is a bit dry, but the subject is fascinating. I would absolutely love to teach a high school history class with it, because it’s not just focused on the couple, but the war around them. There aren’t any graphic sex scenes or violence, so it would be an important alternative perspective while also being suitable for teens.

If there’s been anything good about my silence, it has been the addition of hundreds of unique voices that let me travel all over the world. If there’s a scene from a book that transported me to the point where everything else fell away, it’s from John Brennan’s “Undaunted.” When he was in college, he went to the University of Cairo. His experiences there are humorous and convey the beauty of Egypt. Plus, it’s fun to picture a White House staffer that used to be a kind of rebel, pierced ear and all.

I’ve read those passages multiple times, because sometimes I just need to lift myself out of what I’m describing as “muted sadness.”

To All the Girls….

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just finished watching โ€œTo All the Boys: Always and Forever.โ€ Iโ€™ve been waiting for inspiration to write; I needed a memory far enough back in my past that the blowback from myself would be minimal. (Iโ€™ve often thought that other peopleโ€™s opinions stop me from writing- most of the time itโ€™s to keep myself from exploding.) The movie is about Laura and Peterโ€™s senior year of high school, which inevitably made me think of my own. It was so messy and difficult- like many peopleโ€™s, probably, with the uniqueness of coming out all over again.

I was out at HSPVA, but my mom didnโ€™t want me to come out at Clements. I had the chance to start over, and she wanted that for both of us. Even at HSPVA, I constantly worried that coming out at school would lead to people finding out at church…. but I didnโ€™t have to worry about that. Everyone in my life figured it out before I had the chance to tell them.

I remember fondly the night I came out to my friend Dianne Maurice, who said โ€œif this conversation hadnโ€™t happened, I would have sat you down and told you.โ€ She didnโ€™t have to worry. Iโ€™d thought and felt attraction to women my whole life, but didnโ€™t have the words to express what I was feeling until I turned 13. But that didnโ€™t mean I didnโ€™t have my share of boyfriends as well, just that it was what I thought I was supposed to do, and dating Ryan was a mountaintop experience for someone so young. How many middle school couples make it to a year and two months? Iโ€™m guessing it had something to do with us as friends being two halves of the same person, and middle school romance is sweet and lingering without the constant peer pressure and internal drive to sleep together. As a result, that friendship has grown more tender over time, because we didnโ€™t have a horrible break-up, either….. although it was strange. I came out to him by telling him all the attraction I was feeling to people that were not him, to which he had the best response ever, which was that I was free to think but not to act.

He eventually found someone else, which was wonderful and terrible all at once. Part of me was relieved for him to find someone whose heart wasnโ€™t tearing them apart. The other parts of me felt his absence like a missing limb, and I didnโ€™t date anyone else until the summer before I was a senior. It was a terrible decision, because six weeks later, I met someone I thought was THE ONE, and had to go through the heartbreak of breaking someone elseโ€™s heart, always harder than someone breaking yours. It wasnโ€™t a cheating situation- THE ONE didnโ€™t even know I was alive until Christmas.

But I was her friend from the first day of school, because once my dad left the church, I felt free to be whomever I was going to be that year…. which was wearing pride rings to advertise.

I will never in my entire life forget our first phone call. Dr. Steed, my senior English teacher, told us to get the phone number of someone in our class because the work was going to be difficult. I knocked over two desks to get to her and slipped her my number, because it was easier than asking for hers.

The moment I walked into the house after school, literally 30 seconds in, my phone rang. I said, โ€œhello?โ€ She said, โ€œdo you wear those pride rings because youโ€™re gay, or because youโ€™re an idiot?โ€ I said โ€œIโ€™m gay. Do you have a problem with that?โ€ She said, โ€œno. Iโ€™m a Melissa Etheridge fan.โ€ It was not a euphemism.

She was dating a hockey player at another school named Mark, a beard she kept up a little too well because it was excruciating watching her basically make out with him on New Yearโ€™s Eve. By then, we were together on the down low, even to her closest friends….. because I was out, but she wasnโ€™t. Who would have thought the goalie for the womenโ€™s soccer team at my high school was a lesbian? That just doesnโ€™t make sense. ๐Ÿ˜›

Prom night was also a mess, because weโ€™d sort of gone to Homecoming together- I went with one of her friends so we could be near each other. But by Prom, school was ending and she thought she was ready to be truly seen with me. I bought the perfect dress, and she backed out. She ended up coming over after she was finished at the dance, because I couldnโ€™t just go and watch her. I thought that was crazy. People have asked me many times why I didnโ€™t just break up with her and go out with someone who didnโ€™t have a problem with being out. Listen, itโ€™s not like the lesbian dating pool at my high school was huge. In terms of out lesbian, I was the entire club. It was scary walking in the parade all by myself.

But it wasnโ€™t a lost cause. I made it safe for people in younger classes to come out. By the time my younger sister got to high school, people were putting rainbow flags on their backpacks, and Lindsay asked who started it. They said, โ€œI think it was this kid named Leslie.โ€

For those who donโ€™t know me in person, the school year was 1995-1996. In that time and place, homosexuality was still considered a mental illness by most of the people around me. It wasnโ€™t that they were hateful, just woefully uneducated. Back then, when I was out and about with my girlfriend, we watched our backs constantly, knowing where and when PDA was appropriate.

Thinking something was wrong with us included her parents. We didnโ€™t tell them- they searched her room and found one of my love letters. We were forbidden to see each other, and like with all teenagers, it didnโ€™t work. We were just even more secretive than we were before….. to the tune of making out in her car near some woods and being caught by the cops, who luckily didnโ€™t do anything except tell us to move along.

In the end, she wasnโ€™t THE ONE, a fact that I ignored for at least ten years. She decided to go back to Canada for college, but before she left, she wanted to get married. Why that didnโ€™t set off alarm bells, Iโ€™ll never know…. because how did she think it would work? She couldnโ€™t hide me forever. No way was I going to be her roommate at 30…. even 18 was stretching it. But โ€œroommateโ€ was how it was done in those days, so the fact that same-sex couples can get married and is now so accepted is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.

Like most high school kids, I let the relationship go on too long because I didnโ€™t know how to let go. We were long distance, and I looked into immigrating to Canada, but before I could really start the process, I learned something truly disturbing.

Since I was the internet guru, I looked up all the places gays and lesbians gathered in her city. Well, she went, and she met someone. That wasnโ€™t the problem. If sheโ€™d come home that night and said sheโ€™d met someone else, it would have been all right. But she didnโ€™t. She dated this person for months, to the point of moving in with her before she was forced to admit what she was doing. I didnโ€™t even find out from her. I found out because her girlfriend e-mailed me, saying that my girlfriend had never told her she was seeing someone when she left Texas and that I should just back out because my girlfriend was hers now. I can still feel that pain as if it was yesterday- not that I live there, itโ€™s just present when I think about that time in my life.

Despite that asshole move on both their parts, every trip my ex-girlfriend made to Texas was filled with fun and flirty dates where it felt like we were our old selves, and then a line would get crossed and weโ€™d have an old fight over again or I would get torched with jealousy.

Eventually, she settled down, got married, and started having kids. It was only then, a decade later, that she said she was sorry we couldnโ€™t have been partners as adults, because she thought we would have been good at it. Her words were sweet, and I knew thatโ€™s how she meant them. A compliment didnโ€™t line up to the way I took it. I was burning with rage. She said something to the effect that sheโ€™d thought about getting back together, but she knew sheโ€™d treated me so badly that how dare she have the right to ask me to try again? I think all the anger Iโ€™d stuffed down so that sheโ€™d still want to be my friend surfaced in that moment- not only at the way sheโ€™d treated the end of our relationship, but that she took away my choice as to whether Iโ€™d have forgiven her or not.

As it was, I was so hurt that I didnโ€™t date anyone from the fall of my freshman year of college until I was a junior. I had major trust issues, and it took me three years to work them out enough to be able to open my heart to someone else.

Apparently, itโ€™s a pattern, because I havenโ€™t dated anyone since I broke up with my most recent ex (five years ago, almost six). Probably itโ€™s been twice as long because it hurt twice as much, especially since I did a lot of things Iโ€™m not proud of in addition to being hurt by her.

I think it might have been different if a couple of years later, my mom hadnโ€™t died. Though I was screaming for a companion in those days, I didnโ€™t want anyone but her- and not because I was stuck in the place of โ€œsheโ€™s THE ONE and there shall be no one else.โ€ It was that I didnโ€™t know anyone as well as I knew her, and the thought of having no history with someone and dragging them into the shitshow of my grief was not appealing in the slightest. I got through by trusting friends, but it wasnโ€™t the same as having someone to hold me at night while I cried.

As I started to come alive again, I realized that going through my grief on my own was a good thing, because I didnโ€™t realize how jealous I was of other people my age who still had their parents. I donโ€™t know how we would have managed that, but my guess is โ€œgood, most of the time, but the bad would have been egregious.โ€

I sometimes think it would have been nice to have a mother-in-law as backup, but she wasnโ€™t completely on board with her daughter marrying a woman, either, so I waffle on that point. What I do know is that waiting so long has been helpful, because I feel much freer than I did three years ago. Thereโ€™s no lingering emotion from that relationship that would help push a new person away. What I do know, though, is that my next relationship will be completely different, both in my approach and the fact that no one can compare to her- a new person would be in her own class, with her own unique gifts rather than trying to think โ€œsheโ€™s better.โ€

The last piece of the puzzle is that I havenโ€™t met anyone who has swept off my feet with awe and lust. Of course, that is not how all relationships begin, but in order to want to be romantic with someone, you have to feel something. I did have a conversation with someone about dating, but it was one of those things where my interest was piqued, but I didnโ€™t make any declarations of love or anything. It was just โ€œmaybe dating each other would be fun and we should try it.โ€ We didnโ€™t, and life quickly moved on because I was never pining.

I really donโ€™t have time for it. My attention is taken up with other things, other people with whom I am not romantic but are such good friends that intimacy happens regardless. A person does not have to be in love with you to see your soul if you make it visible to them. I am lucky to have friends that walk in my inner landscape, and it is surprising how much I value it over finding a partner. Itโ€™s not that Iโ€™ve given up, itโ€™s that Iโ€™m perfectly happy to stand back and let them come to me. I donโ€™t have a mad drive that says Iโ€™m going to die alone, no matter how many people say that to me because theyโ€™re worried. Trust me, thatโ€™s a them problem. I will never die alone because I have friends, constantly undervalued in our society because the fairy tale says I need to find one person that completes me and live happily ever after.

For me, the fairy tale is having friends that truly care what I think and feel, the best lesson Iโ€™ve learned in the years that have passed since my first high school romance. I donโ€™t have one person that completes me, I have several who oversee different aspects. I donโ€™t want to live in a world where that is seen as deficiency, but celebrated in its abundance. I know love as deep as an ocean because of them. Our shared history has provided ups and downs that stick in my mind, learning and growing every bit as much as I did when I was partnered- perhaps more as each of them show me who I am. They love me as fallible as I am, which is everything I could hope for in a romance, anyway.

To all the girls, all I can say is โ€œthank you.โ€ They are such small words, but the depth behind them is huge. Your love is #relationshipgoals enough for me, and I hope I am half the friend that you have been to me. It has certainly been and will continue to be my honor……

Always and forever.

A Major Key

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sandra Cisneros just floored me while listening to “On Being with Krista Tippett.” She said that the Sufis say life keeps breaking your heart over and over until it *stays* open. Words to live by, because heartbreak is inevitable in a multitude of ways, and to me, this saying gives it a purpose. It is a deep, lifelong learning.

It came up in my Facebook memories this morning that Dana and I broke up five years ago today, and so the quote was especially apt in that light…. I feel that heartbreak was so great, it is the one that keeps me open to the world. No one ever expects to start a marriage preparing for its end, but I felt especially blindsided by all the things I couldn’t (or didn’t want to) see. There were many things I took seriously, and things I didn’t take seriously enough. In retrospect, knowing which was which is still a mystery. I just know they exist and don’t feel the need to talk it out with her, like some sort of post-mortem closure. I don’t care to know how she feels. It is not a matter of feeling heartless, just done.

And in fact, I care even less about how our marriage came apart than I do about our friendship, which preceded marriage by almost four years. Though it’s not like we talked daily when I first moved to DC, we did talk a few times and laughed a lot. But there must have been too much pain roiling underneath to keep it up, and that is the beginning and the end of it to me. I don’t have need to cause her more pain just because of something I wanted. Her feelings do matter in that respect. But it was extraordinarily difficult to go from talking from the moment we woke to the moment we went to sleep to absolutely no communication, ever. I didn’t insist on it, but I respected her wishes. It was a large factor in my moving to DC, because I am not the best at emotional boundaries. I figured that with half a country in between us, it would be so much easier to find new people to fill the void, and I was right.

I met a swath of people who had no connection to me as a married person, didn’t think of me as “DanaandLeslie,” and for that I can be grateful. Friends who had no connection to my history at all allowed me the freedom to discover who I was on my own again. I was alone, but was not then and never have been lonely. I decided to move into a house with landlords on site and three other roommates so that I would not come home to an empty apartment every night. I figured that with my mental illnesses, living alone with no one to drag me out of my shell would be a very bad thing. The last time I lived in a one bedroom, even then I sort of had a “roommate,” this loud, brash best friend who never really wanted to go home because her own house was empty….. and I grew to love her company more and more every day.

Eventually, there were three of us, all single and looking for family. I don’t know why my apartment became the hang, but it did, and I was grateful. I knew ahead of time that in DC, I didn’t have the built-in connection of friends of friends and church and all that, which is why I opted for a group house. It would take at least a few months to reconnect with the friends I’d made here before, and to find a new church because with public transportation, my old church was too far away to really get involved on any kind of deep level (I was actually involved with two of them back then- Westminster Presbyterian in SE DC and Fairlington UMC in Alexandria, VA).

I realized I could make it on Sunday mornings easily, but not choir, and choir is far and above the biggest reason I love going to church. I feel that I am a much better soprano when I can feel the other moving parts under me, and even though I’ve done solo work (even well), it’s not my favorite (my favorite is actually singing in a quartet so I can hear myself think……..).

It was also important to me that I be free of any connections to Kathleen, my first wife, as well. I bear no ill will toward her, either- we never should have gotten married in the first place, but I was filled with so much hope as an early 20-something that it didn’t register that even though she was bisexual, her preference wasn’t women….. or at the very least, it wasn’t me…. and we’d attended both of those churches together. stone_labyrinthOne of my favorite memories of that time in my life was helping to put in the stone floor labyrinth, because, of course, you can still see my handiwork…. but you better get there fast because they’re about to build a new building. ๐Ÿ˜›

I also went to Foundry United Methodist for one Sunday just to check it out, but Fairlington was so much closer to my house and just as liberal (one of the first Open & Affirming congregations in Virginia).

Now, I don’t go to church at all (but will someday…. just be patient and stay tuned…), but do go to Foundry on Thursdays for a mental illness support group when I can feel confident about getting out of the house when I don’t specifically have to do so……

It also took me a while to get out from under the burden of people thinking I moved here specifically to be closer to Argo, because that was never the case…… just a persistent rumor that affected me greatly because it was never true. What was true is that I could have moved in next door to her and she still never would have seen me, because I tend to hole up, anyway. As I have often said, I mostly sit at my computer or tablet with my headphones blaring, so a bear ripping out the side of my house wouldn’t even have registered unless I was facing that direction.

Even though I thought of DC and Alexandria as my “home towns,” I still didn’t want to take the chance of feeding that rumor even more than it already had been, so I chose Maryland. It turned out to be the best decision, anyway, because my cousin Nathan (who is a psychiatrist in Alexandria) told me about all the mental health services available in Maryland that Virginia couldn’t even touch….. and even if I was perfectly healthy when I moved here, going through a divorce still would have required talk therapy, especially after a friendship of over a decade and a marriage of seven years and change. So I got hooked up with talk therapy and a psychiatric nurse practitioner that really worked with me instead of at me, which I require because I know enough about medicine that I abhor being patronized. Additionally, I have suffered enough that not only do I know the drugs that do work, I’ve been through the list of everything that doesn’t.

There are two instances where my nurse practitioner really shone. The first is that he wanted to change my SSRI to Prozac, and I shuddered. He asked me what was wrong, and I said that it made me so nauseous that I couldn’t function or eat. The second is that we were talking about ADHD, and he asked if I’d tried Stratera. I told him that it was interesting, that opioid agonists work on me, like Tramodol, but methamphetamine agonists didn’t. That was how our relationship matured quickly, because he raised his eyebrows at the fact that I knew the word “agonist,” and his tone quickly changed to “ok, we’re equals now.”

He really listened to me as I told him that I liked to do short courses of Ritalin or Adderall in order to get my coping mechanisms under control, then stop them until I felt I needed a refresher course, and I liked the lowest dose possible to get the maximum dopamine effects without the awful side effects.

At the time, I didn’t have any weight to lose. I was so sad that I wasn’t eating, anyway. I survived on drinks, because I had a block on eating. Things like Carnation Instant Breakfast, Slim Fast, Ensure, etc. were the basics of my diet until I felt better. I am now up to a healthy weight, but back then I looked like a heroin addict (which, for the record, I was not). I also stopped drinking alcohol almost in its entirety, because I noticed that I felt and slept better when I didn’t, and I really needed sleep to let my body recover from trauma. Divorcing from Dana was traumatic on so many levels, like the fistfight that ended our relationship permanently because I didn’t want to leave the house at all until the bruise under my eye was gone and the phantom pain wasn’t all day, every day.

And it turned out that the phantom pain lasted for months, because I was devastated and that’s how it manifested. It’s gone now- forgiven but not forgotten. But I was so weak in the moment that even a punch to the face didn’t stop me from wanting to get back our relationship at first. It was moving away and really reflecting on what happened that convinced me that while I could accept friendship, I could never accept getting back together, because I couldn’t live in fear that something like it would happen again.

I was not innocent in that fight in terms of emotional escalation, but when Dana broke the physical barrier, I went off like a rat dog with a Napoleon complex…. an apt description because Dana was over a hundred pounds heavier with a fist three times bigger.

And perhaps that is yet another reason I’m so much more willing to talk about Argo now than I am about Dana, because Argo has never hurt me…. I mean, she has, but less than I’ve hurt her and never in a physically threatening way.

I actually just put that together, that I can’t extricate myself from thinking about Dana without going back to that moment in time where my eye was bruised and my heart was broken….. and that with Argo, all I think of is love and laughter. It’s just so much easier to go back to those moments, because even when I try my absolute best to only remember the love and laughter with Dana, I still hang my head in shame.

Although I do hang my head in shame at the relationship with Argo crumbling at my own hand, because even though it was never true that I moved here to be closer to her, it would have been a dream and a half to get to know the real her instead of just the black and white version….. to include her in my family of friends rather than always being on the outside…. my Raggedy Man.

My body memory is so strong for both of those days, my love for both women an intrinsic part of me, just in vastly different capacities. I saw a funny memory on Facebook the other day about having to stop calling Argo my “wine and yoga pants-type girlfriend” because I kept getting ads for wine and yoga pants on my feed. ๐Ÿ˜›

It was an unfortunate side effect that at the beginning, my wires got crossed and I had a mountain of shit to work through regarding the toxic version of friendship that was presented to me at a very early age, the part where all close friendships initially made my teenage heart go haywire. But to my credit, I worked my way out of that hole, just not as quickly as I would have liked, because first I had to get rid of the toxicity that made me think those things in the first place….. and I did, very successfully. Now I am in great shape when it comes to friendship, being close and vulnerable with people I respect and admire without the emotional baggage of my own teenage “stuff.”

I feel it is apt that “Clearing Iranian Airspace” from the Argo soundtrack just started playing, because I am ending this entry on a major key.

Amen.

Talking Like You’re Writing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago, I was asked why I wrote about Argo so much more than I wrote about Dana, considering that I had known Dana so much longer. My answer was this:

To me, that question answers itself. I don’t write about Dana as much because I’ve known her so much longer. Argo is “write” under my skin, emotions so close I can touch them. Dana is a river that runs down deep inside me, and it’s going to take me a long time to carry those memories upward so that I can process them clearly.

Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

Now that I’ve had about five years’ worth of perspective, I’ve been thinking a lot about both the good and the bad. It’s not a situation I’d be willing to go “back to the future,” because the way it began was so different than the way it ended, something I never expected that didn’t come out of nowhere… and yet it did. Now, I have the ability to see all the things we weren’t talking about that led to our demise, but at the time, it felt like everything came together slowly and ripped apart in an instant. That being said, I never mistake the part for the whole and I was damn lucky to have been married to her for as long as I was, and those memories are precious to me, save a few I desperately wish I could forgive and forget. It is not about blame. She is forgiven. I have a harder time forgiving myself, and there are some things that will take a few more years as time does its healing magic, often without me realizing it is happening. I am ready to meet someone else, to practice all that I’ve learned in the meantime. I am ready to be a better person/partner than I ever have been before, mostly because I’ve truly taken the time out to feel my grief, talk/write it out, and get over what I believe are some of the biggest glories and mistakes of my life so far.

The things that come back to me now are mostly hilarious….. like before we were even together. I went on two dates with Allison Frost, senior producer and occasional host of the Oregon Public Broadcasting show “Think Out Loud.” We were not in the same place in our lives (something came up in hers), and we never went out again. But basically from that moment forward, the inside joke that Dana and I came up with was that she was my “celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” This morphed into my “corporeally-challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” And, in true “Bambelanager” fashion, “if it’s funny once, run it into the ground.”

But there are two direct Dana quotes that just slay me…. one is funny, and one is tragic.

  1. I know you are not grumpy with me, because I have been cute ALL DAY.
  2. Go write something. You’re talking like you’re blogging. You’ve been talking for two hours straight.giphy-facebook_s

I feel that it is tragic because I thought to myself, “if I’ve really been talking for two hours straight, why didn’t you stop me?” It just sounded like she was exhausted by me, and just go away.ย  I felt wounded, because one of our strong points in relationship to each other was long conversations that meandered from topic to topic in a very ADHD way. Story, tangent, story, tangent, story, tangent, story which circles back to the first tangent, etc. I thought that’s what was going on, and maybe it was given Dana’s love of hyperbole. But maybe it wasn’t, and I was just in this hypomanic state, and the thought horrified me because it isolated her. Inside, I was bursting with the idea that I’d read a situation so wrong.

It was at that point that I began isolating, shutting myself up in my office and either blogging or e-mailing Argo, because she was my sounding board at a time when I could really use one. I will never forget explaining a situation to her and her exact words were that I was acting like a “judgmental dickhead.” I laughed so hard my desk chair sagged, because as an INFJ, I have a real talent for letting the J stick out. Also, it was nice to have a new pet name.

(Also, in order not to get the person Argo confused with the book & movie, I will share a line I wrote to her in a “galaxy long ago and far, far away……” I sleep deeply in the belly of the ship, in whom I know my passage is safe. I tried to find a link to the post where I originally wrote it, but when I couldn’t, I realized it was in an e-mail. Sorry.)

I feel that the second quote from Dana fundamentally challenged who I was. I became worried most of the time that I was talking too much, and retreated into myself. Because I had a pen pal with whom I could be completely myself, and write for as long as I wanted, I did. I never cared whether I got a response or not; the important part was feeling heard.

Now, I use Evernote. Some notes are private letters never meant to be read. Some of them are writing ideas. Some are funny, some make me cry because they explore such deep emotional cuts. But, it’s my own space to talk for two hours when I need it…. like when I found out through the grapevine that Argo had gotten married.

I folded like a house of cards, and not because of the crush I once harbored (you can look it up in the dictionary as Worst. Thing. Ever. I would call it a decision, but it wasn’t. My brain just turned to mush and there was no consciousness about it. It was there before I realized what was happening. My heart dropped into my stomach when it hit me.).

My tears centered around me no longer being a friend who was worthy of being told those things… I would have been excited to hear about the proposal, the preparations… everything that comes with the thought of a close friend meeting their life partner. I didn’t even know it was headed in that direction, because the last time we talked about marriage, she said she hated it. In fact, I don’t even know his name. She was dating him when we met, so I jokingly called him her “boy toy.” When I said, “what’s his name so I don’t have to call him ‘boy toy’ for the rest of his life?,” she said that “boy toy” would do nicely. It was a predictable response. I should have seen that one coming from a mile away.

In fact, I thought I saw someone at a Nats game that looked like her, but decided it wasn’t because she was wearing a wedding ring. But just on the off chance that it was, I walked the other way. I got nauseated thinking about what that conversation might be like, and luckily I wasn’t close enough that she would have spotted me. Perhaps she would have walked the other way as well. I didn’t want to make either of us extremely uncomfortable and awkward to the point of onomatopoeia.

As an aside, the other thing that ran through my mind was “what if I make an idiot of myself and it isn’t her, anyway?” Through pictures, I have an idea of her in my mind, but I don’t know many of her facial expressions, the three-dimensional version of herself. In hindsight, that’s probably a good thing…. not that I wouldn’t be open to it now, but not by randomly running across each other without time to prepare for what would have been a momentous occasion for me…. a precious fixed point in time where I hoped it stood still long enough for me to take it in.

There are things for which I’d like to apologize in person, and it would feel so good to see her laugh. To be able to read her eyes and emotions as the conversation went on. To see if she judges for herself that I’m not nearly as weird as advertised. She has said that I am forgiven and she has moved on, but it would be different to feel it. To know deep within, to Robert Heinlein “grok.” But at this point, it’s just a pipe dream, and I will always walk the other way without an invitation.

After writing it all down, though, I realized that I was being ridiculous about it all. We aren’t close friends anymore, and she owes me nothing, ever. If anything, it’s me that owes her. Big time. Like, “if I win the lottery, then you’re getting half” big time.

It would help if I played, but it’s the thought that counts, right? Right? #crickets

Argo is included in this entry because invariably, if you think about a marriage’s beginning, you also think about its end, and this was a big piece. When I retreated into myself because I thought Dana didn’t want to be the person that made me feel heard, it was a small fissure that led to a big one.

But do I regret the seven years and change Dana and I were married? Not in the slightest. I learned lessons that could not have been learned in any other way. We had more fun than the law should have allowed. We thought so much alike that we joked that we shared a brain. But as time went on, we stopped sharing the deepest parts of our hearts, afraid to let the other one in for fear of rejection. And actually, I shouldn’t speak for her. I can only speak to what I felt at that time in my life.

I have come to feel that the relationship ran its course at just the right time, because both of Dana’s parents are still alive (as far as I know- we haven’t spoken in three years or so), and having a partner with no frame of reference as to what I was going through, especially in the acute moments after my mother’s death, have only made me feel relief at the fact I was single when it happened.

I know for a fact that I would have been irrationally angry that her mother was still alive and mine wasn’t, because I was irrationally angry at a lot of people back then who still had their parents, especially when they were much older than me.

If we had been living together, I would have made the huge mistake of taking that anger out on her, something she never would have deserved. She also would not have enjoyed being married to someone who became the equivalent of a shut-in. I am glad that I did not have the chance to dampen her spirit the way mine burned out until I could rebuild…. and I will never be finished. A parent’s death fundamentally rewires you down to the neurons about which you think don’t do anything. I act and react differently, my breath has changed, my outlook varies from nothing matters to everything does…. and when I say “nothing matters,” I mean the part where my mother won’t be there to see it.

She won’t be there to meet my as of now imaginary someone new, and the possibility of additional grandchildren (I don’t want to have kids at this age, but if I limit myself to dating only women without them, I will be lonely a very long time). Won’t be there to accept an autographed copy if I somehow miraculously get published…..etc., etc., etc. In the present, she’s not here to tell all my funny stories, or to read my blog and tell me everything that’s wrong with it. ๐Ÿ˜›

The thing I did miss then was having a companion, someone who would just lie next to me as I cried, and I mean that universally and not limited to Dana. I was ready to start dating again by October 1st, 2016, and on October 2nd, that thought vanished. I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging another person (especially someone I did not know well) into the freak show that was my life. I’m still not convinced my life is not a freak show at times, but at least there’s no opening song and dance act plus encores.

And even if my stories now are full of tangents that meander into other ideas and people, it is comforting to think that the river is rising, which lifts all boats.

Nothing Stays the Same

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wanted to wait to post my next entry until I actually had something to say. I know that not updating my blog reduces traffic, thus dampening my quest for world domination. On the other hand, I don’t want to be one of those people who doesn’t take time to think before writing…. anything will do, because it’s not about craft, it’s about attracting views, visits, likes, and followers. I feel like I have enough already. Not believing I have enough just leads to verbal vomit for its own sake… and to me, that just doesn’t cut it.

I mean, I’ve always been the type to just lay out everything on this web site and let people make their own decisions about what they read, and when I post often, it’s because having something to say comes along that frequently. It’s organic, never forced. Lately, I’ve realized that most of my ruminations are just continuations of things I’ve already said, probably more than three or four times. I promise that I am not regurgitating content. It’s the way my brain works.

I think about a problem right up until I don’t. The interesting part (or, at least, it’s interesting to me) is that I tend to start a couple of steps back and rehash, but when I’m thinking about something a second (third, fourth, fifth, 17th……) time, the overall arc is the same and different small details jump out, often changing the course of the dialogue… conversations that happen between me and me. Though Shakespeare was not talking about discourse with oneself, he might as well have been. The play’s the thing… especially in moments where I’ve caught myself red-handed…. infinitely more scary than feeling caught by anyone else. I’m better at kicking my ass than you are. Write it down.

I’ve scared myself for the past couple of weeks because I make it a point to look at my Facebook memories, and along with all of my funny memes is this mountain range of emotions. Note to self: more peaks, less valleys.

WordPress propagates to my author page, which means that I am equally stupid and brave enough to post things to my own profile. If I skipped doing so, old entries wouldn’t appear at all. It isn’t about torturing myself- many, many more readers click through from my profile because I’ve been on Facebook for 10 years. The “Stories” page has only existed since 2015, and as of right this moment, only has about 100 followers. After a decade, I have 745 friends and 38 followers. The platform is exponentially larger. My Facebook profile propagates to @ldlanagan on Twitter, and my author page to @lesliecology. Again, I have more followers on my own Twitter feed than the feed for my web site… the difference is that @lesliecology is nothing but a WordPress feed, and @ldlanagan is everything I post on Facebook, period. My profile is public, and my Facebook statuses are generally longer than Tweets, so anyone can click through to the original post.

So there’s the setup as to why I wanted to separate out my blog entries from my Facebook profile/Twitter feed, and why it hasn’t worked out.

Scaring myself the last couple of weeks has been about entries from four years ago, starting with PTSD as a teenager and it unraveling my thirties into divorce, losing a good friend, and so much compounded mental instability that I needed more help than my friends and family could give. Poet Mary Karr gave me the phrase “checking into the Mental Mariott,” and I’ve used it relentlessly since.

Joking about it covers up deep wounds, and that’s why I write about them instead of speaking. When I am writing, I have a bit of clinical separation. I can look at the land mines without detonation. I cannot say the same is always true for reading. Occasionally, I feel the distance of having grown as a person, so that the entry feels like it was written by someone else. More often, I am remembering every tiny detail about the setting and the arc of the story. Then body memory kicks in, and if my heart and brain were racing in the moment, I feel it again; it doesn’t matter how much time has passed.

It isn’t all bad, though, because I write in equal measure about how good I’m feeling, and those excited butterflies also return…. sometimes, but not often, in the same entry. The other plus is getting to decide if what was true at that time is still true today, and as a rule with some exceptions, it’s not. There are truth bombs that hit me just as hard now as the day I wrote them, but for the most part, this blog has been dynamic, and has changed just as often as I have (which is, like, the point).

Whether I’m reading an up day or a down, it is exhilarating to see that few things stay the same.

I will always have the regular, boring adult problems… and at the same time, my life is bigger than that. Managing Bipolar II, remnants of PTSD (anxiety, mostly) and ADHD so that I am not a ball of negative crazy keeps it interesting. I emphasize “negative crazy” because I don’t know anyone who isn’t crazy in a positive way. I am not attracted on any level to the mundane. Regular people with big dreams are often lumped in with “crazy,” because most people don’t dream big.

Even my dreams have been adjusted. I am still dreaming big, but the focus is not on starting my own church anymore. Perhaps in the distant future, I’ll think about it again. But right now, when I enter into any church building, consecrated or not, “my mother is dead” becomes an ostinato.

From Google Dictionary:

Ostinato

osยทtiยทnaยทto
/รคstษ™หˆnรคdล/

noun: ostinato; plural noun: ostinati; plural noun: ostinatos

a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm.

“The cellos have the tune, above an ostinato bass figure.”

Even the sentence used to illustrate the word is appropriate, because you don’t just hear bass. You feel it.

I have written before that she’s everywhere I look, because over our lives together, I cannot think of an element within church life where she was absent. I cannot think of a single thing that was all mine until I moved to Portland and began preaching at Bridgeport UCC.

I have always been the Mary. She was the Martha.

There was no judgment on her part. I just mean that I have always been the thinker and she has always been the actor…. Actually, I take that back. My mother was one of the few people I’ve met in this life that had extraordinarily creative ideas and the ability to execute them, which is rare.

Few people manage to live on the ground and in the air at the same time (it’s a miracle I can tie my own shoes).

In Luke 10:41-42, Jesus is speaking to Martha, who has complained to him that (I’m paraphrasing) “Mary’s just sitting on her ass while I’m doing all the work. Can’t you go rattle her cage?” And Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things. But one thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her.” He actually says this to the woman that invited him and his entire crew into her house and wants to feed everyone. Now, I don’t know whether you’ve ever cooked and served for 16 (fairly certain Lazarus was there- unclear), but I can see Martha’s point and I get a little bit irritated with Jesus. It’s not that one part is better than the other. Thinking is not better than doing. Doing is not better than thinking. They’re just different mindsets, and the evening wouldn’t have been possible without both.

I am certain that Mary and Martha need each other. Martha is grounded, and keeps Mary from floating away. Mary reminds Martha to look at the stars once in a while.

So when I think about the work I did to investigate starting a homeless ministry in Silver Spring, what comes up for me is that my Martha is no longer with us. It rends the mental tapestry I created, and I descend into darkness.

I am still excited by theology of all types- Abrahamic, Eastern, you name it. But right at this very minute, I’d rather spend my time thinking and writing, sometimes posting sermons on this web site rather than waxing philosophic in front of a physical crowd.

What I do not know is whether I will always feel the same, or whether my time is not yet here.

What I do know is that the fight has left me. I am too mired in grief to get passionate enough to affect change. In fact, I wouldn’t say that I’m extraordinarily passionate about anything at all. When my mother died, so did several pieces of me. I know for certain that it would have been easier had I gotten to see my mother live a long life and there was no aspect of “dear God, they took her too soon.” I knew I would be sad when she died, but I was completely caught off guard by the rage at getting robbed.

Embolisms make great thieves who never need getaway cars.

I am still grieving the future that I thought I would get, and piecing together a new normal. It’s a good thing that on this day next year, I’ll read this again, and perhaps that new normal will have some structure. The concrete has been mixed, but I think I added a little too much water, because it just. Won’t. Set.

Shared

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

…there’s a ghost in this house,
When he sings it sounds just like you,
When he falls it brings me down too.

Does it get easier to do?

-Robyn Dell’Unto

When I listen to this song, I can’t decide if the ghost is internal or external. Are the people I’ve loved and lost following me, or is it the feelings I have about them? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

For instance, if I could go back in time and not move to DC, would I do it?

I have many regrets, and this is one of them, but not because it isn’t wonderful, and I wouldn’t even think about it if my mother hadn’t died so relatively shortly after I did.

Dana made it clear that she did not want to work on our relationship, and I could not live in the same city with her and not obsess over whether I could abide by that decision and how and when to leave her alone.

Moving was a way to give her space to figure out her own shit while I figured out mine, without the need to check in with her every damn minute to take an emotional temperature. I don’t know if it was ever in her plan, but I thought that with time and distance, things would look different, that we might ultimately find our paths back to each other after an enormous amount of therapy on our own, because what we had together was spectacular.

I couldn’t imagine a lifetime of it just being over. I held on to that hope for about six months, and then I began to grieve in earnest. During that time, directly after I moved, we talked a few times, and then never again. And even in our discussions, it was never about how we were really doing, just catching up like ladies who lunch. It wasn’t a bad thing, but it was an adjustment.

I remember thinking, “this is not the Dana that I know… and that’s the point.”

I think the feeling of the rubber meeting the road in six months is relatively quick. At the time it felt interminable, but it wasn’t. Just a small part of the process in taking her from my reality to my past. The ghost that lives in my house, because I don’t lock her away and don’t care that she’s here. In a lot of ways, it’s comforting, because the memories that come up for me are of laughter and not of strife. I choose to block the bad parts and focus on the good.

And does it matter that these are the feelings I have when I’m alone, closed off to being with anyone else, because I just don’t want it? I don’t see it? That I am incredibly happy with having friends and family who love me, and that being the extent of my support system?

I am not over the way I treated her, and though I have made progress, I am not forgiven. It feels like letting myself off the hook too quickly, because I don’t want a repeat of this pattern ever again.

Also, I’ve never lived my life without a ghost that played tapes in my head, and I have work to do where that is concerned, as well. I’ve never had a mind free of wandering off into the past, reliving conversations of happier times and wondering why things went wrong… and two of them weren’t even romantic relationships, unless you count the complete mindfuck that went along with them. Although the second is self-inflicted. It didn’t have to be complicated, and I made it so.

But there’s a new truth in my life that is here to stay. Dana and I shared some incredibly privileged information that I won’t be able to bring up with anyone else, and I mean this on the serious. No one can ever know, and not because it’s dirty or bad or wrong, it just is. So part of my willingness to work on our relationship, no matter how bad things got, was the reminder that if I lost her safe space, there was no replacement, and never would be.

In that one way, our lives are connected as permanently as our matching tattoos. When I left, I made a point of calling them our honing beacons, but I wouldn’t use it now. It’s just another thing that is.

We were smart enough to be aware of the fact that we could break up when we got them, so we choose something that was meaningful to both of us severally and jointly. It’s not like I have a huge back piece that says “I love Dana.”

But in my worst moments, sometimes it feels that way.

I’m also not stupid enough to believe that her friends won’t read this, so let me assure them that I have no intention of moving backwards, of reaching out, of doing anything to endanger the peaceful silence we have achieved. My stuff to work out is owned, and I have no need for closure.

It’s been too long, it hurts too much to envision those conversations, and the ponderings of my heart are not to be shared… and by that, I mean that I don’t care if she reads my blog. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. I’ll never know or care. What I mean is that it’s not her job to care about what I think or even affect her life in any way. My thoughts, again, aren’t meant to be shared.

They’re just brain droppings, and maybe not even healthy ones. They just are. It’s not my job to judge their merit, just to let them come and go, talking about them with myself and probably my therapist.

I’m not stupid enough to think that any of my ghosts aren’t secretly reading, and I can’t care about that, either, because then this space ceases to be my own and starts to be a reflection of what I think their opinions might be.

My thoughts aren’t meant to be shared, leading to common ground.

It’s my weight to carry, and they don’t deserve (in good ways or bad) to take off a few pounds.

I am a product of my own inner landscape, sharing common ground with strangers who have had similar experiences… perhaps learning about the ghosts that walk in their houses. Reaching out, but not to anyone in particular.

I remember explaining this phenomenon to Argo, when she wasn’t a ghost, but very, very present, talking about someone else. That when I found out a piece of my past was lurking, she thought I was writing to it on purpose. I told her that quite frankly, when I found out the blood drained from my face and I nearly threw up. She got it, and we didn’t have to discuss it again. Once was enough, and I love her for that. She believed me the first time, and I didn’t have to convince her. It just was. She let it be, and it was the right thing to do. I don’t think I would have been willing to continue our unusual kinship if it had become a thing.

I could easily have let Argo become a ghost, listening to our made up whispers in my dreams instead of grabbing onto reality. The truth is that she is very present in my life. But those conversations happen in daylight, steeped in what is really right in front of me and not pipe dreams.

Probably because we didn’t have as many connections as Dana and me. I never shook her hand, thought her hugs would be memorable but never experienced it firsthand. A virtual x had to do. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if virtual became real, but only from the standpoint that it would have changed operatic swells of emotion into daily normality, letting minutiae temper the page. On paper, it’s easy to run off into flights of fancy. When someone is right in front of you, it isn’t. Reading when I was making her eyes glaze over or her temper flare was different than seeing it. It would have changed my direction and my distraction.

But what I know for sure is that I achieved my own peace with it not happening, it not being likely to happen, and just smiling like an idiot that I got to meet a piece of her at all. That for a short time, we walked in each other’s inner landscapes and it adding galaxies to me that I didn’t know I needed.

Still need, but okay with it being a long time ago and far, far away.

If I could go back and change anything, I would. In a hot second. But that’s not how life works. I got on the “think it, say it” plan without realizing its consequences, which were devastating in their scope. Knowing it was all at my own hand is the worst part, and something that 25 years from now, I will still look upon with regret and shame. Not being in my right mind doesn’t erase or excuse any of it.

But because I’ve seen her picture, her face does cross my mind, choosing to ignore the raw parts and focusing on the joy she brings me now. Memories are powerful, as is happiness surrounding them.

The one that makes me laugh all the goddamn time is, “you like to rap to Eminem? Explain to me exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.” Because of course, I was kidding, but she took it seriously and said, “you might fall in love with honesty coming through our chord, but you won’t fall in love with me, as adorable as I might be.” And that makes me laugh just as much, because it is so undeniably true (both that she was right about misreading falling in love with honesty and falling in love with her as a person, AND that she is, in fact, adorable- she’s so much funnier than me, and the degree is annoying. As an aside, there was one joke between us in which I came in kings full over aces, and though I don’t remember which one it was, I do remember feeling like I’d checkmated the king using just a pawn and a knight, when every day previously had felt like grasshopper would never reach satori).

To paraphrase Maya Angelou, people may forget your words, but they will never forget the way they felt. I’m paraphrasing because I don’t like the actual quote, which is that “people will never forget the way you made them feel.” No one can make you feel anything. Your response is your response, and not anyone else’s to own. What is yours to own is either the laughter or the fallout.

I feel like that is what I do on this blog to a tremendous degree. I deal with my own responses, and their consequences. I can’t take responsibility for anyone else’s. What I can do is learn from the fallout, and try to make new mistakes. To think that everything will one day go perfectly is its own delusion.

What I do reflect on is interconnectedness, how my every response creates consequence, and how I live with it.

Because my thoughts aren’t meant to be shared.

Life, Abridged

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Today has been all about scrambling to find an original copy of my birth certificate, which I thought I knew exactly where I’d put it. It was supposed to be in my top dresser drawer, where I keep all my important documents, like my ordination papers in case anyone needs to get married in a hurry. So far, it’s just been the one. Since I have completely torn my room apart, and I have no other stashes in any other areas of the house, I have decided that I must have given it to an employer and they failed to give it back.

Update: I mailed it to my dad for safekeeping. Total dumbass attack that I didn’t remember. It will be here in plenty of time to get a rush passport.

I need it because my dad and I booked a trip to Paris just after the new year, and then my sister and her husband asked if they could come, too. My dad and Lindsay have been before- not sure about Mathew. Years ago, when I was living in Portland, my whole famn damily went to Paris for vacation, and I could have gone, but there wasn’t enough time to get a passport by the time they invited me, because they thought I already had one.

I did get a passport when I went to Mexico, but the story behind that is my (now estranged, but still Oregon legal) wife accidentally gave it to Goodwill, when I left it in a pair of shorts I threw in what I thought was the laundry pile. I’ve been thinking of her a lot lately, what with the cooking and all. Dana has actual Le Cordon Bleu badges, and I don’t. I would have loved to take her to the real thing. And while I still love her in a friendship sort of way, we’re also estranged for good reason. Mostly because I was a total jackass to her and vice versa. In separation, universally, no one gets away with clean hands.

There’s nothing I’ll ever hold against her, but there’s nothing I’ll ever (ever, ever) forget, either.

But I do remember her a lot, and Paris is a place we both wanted to go, both from the food perspective and the several couples we asked to leave locks on the bridge for us to find when we eventually made it. Those conversations are memories that now make me indescribably sad, because I will indeed experience the divinity of Paris, just not quite the way I imagined.

But then again, I experience the divinity of The District every day, but not the way I imagined, either. It’s a good thing that I now think everything worked out the way it was supposed to resolve. I am glad that we never took a vacation here together, as I love living in a place that doesn’t trigger me all over the place. As I was telling a friend, being with Kat in my early 20’s is the part of my memory that is not so good (we lived in Alexandria, VA), and for that I am grateful.

Many, many people have now given me their recommendations for places to eat, although I hear that I need to go to a cafe rather than a restaurant, because they take forever. I can’t imagine that we won’t go to a restaurant at some point, but it’s a relatively short trip, so we shall see…..

Paris also reminds me of Anthony Bourdain, because I’ll never forget that he stayed in the hotel where Oscar Wilde died, his last words being, “I’m in a fight with the wallpaper, and it’s winning.” Bourdain did the ritual of absinthe, dripping it over a sugar cube, and realized what Wilde meant. ๐Ÿ˜›

It tastes like Fernet Branca, rich and herbaceous in all the right ways. I know because they sell absinthe without wormwood in the United States. I may or may not try it. I hardly ever drink, so my tolerance for alcohol is incredibly low. But I’m sure my dad, sister, and brother in law all want to hear how much I love them at 0200.

The last cocktail I had was when my sister took me to a Mediterranean restaurant here in DC. I wanted a something that would complement the food, so it was pomegranate and ouzo. I thought it was delightful, but I love the black jellybeans. Lindsay was not nearly as enamored with it.

I’m glad that I will have a passport again. The next dream I have is going to Helsinki for December 6th,fid Finnish Independence Day. I would tell you why, but it’s a long, long story and one that I don’t want to let go…. more than I already have, anyway. I’m sure if you look through my archives, there’s something in there somewhere. But the story reminds me of a dark time in my life, and how one celebrated holiday had to become another, and Finnish Independence Day was available. I basically had to bring a lantern into the dark, and for better or for worse, it came from a country I’ve never studied, and never cared about one way or the other for most of my life. But now, sufficed to say, my love for it is real and it’s deep. Finnish Independence Day threw me a life raft, and I took it.

Plus, Anthony Bourdain went there and now I know some good places to eat, if they’re still open when I eventually make it. I don’t know what I’m doing with my culinary life if reindeer pizza isn’t #goals. I also tend to buy soccer jerseys when I travel, or ask for them if others are going to another country. I would proudly wear the Finnish one for the entire month of December…. although I doubt it would make as many people jealous as my Honduran one. Half my kitchen is Honduran, and every staff member there has said they wanted to steal it when I’ve had it on. I didn’t wear it during service, just over my t-shirt on the way there so I’d have something to wear afterwards that wasn’t covered in food. I had to make sure it was completely hidden, because I don’t think they were kidding.

It feels nice to relax now and be able to enjoy my day off, but I do have to put my room back together after completely tearing it apart in fear that my birth certificate was buried somewhere. I think it’s time to read or watch a movie. I’ll flip a coin.