Tag: extrovert

Sunday Morning, Rain is Falling

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been in the office since 0600, because it’s nice and cold out here. The air conditioning is set at 76, but I think it’s cooler than that outside. I don’t think it’s even kicked in. Plus, I have a ceiling fan, which necessitates either a jacket or a bathrobe depending on time of day. It’s not so much that I’m cold, but that I don’t like the feel of the wind from the fan on my skin. It is a constant sensory issue, so I have plenty of long sleeved t-shirts to stay cool and unflustered. Last night, I fell asleep on the couch. It’s a huge overstuffed blue leather job that will SUCK YOU IN. However, it was really cold and I only had one blanket, a wool sherpa throw. So, I’d get under it and get too hot, then throw it off and freeze. It was special. I finally went upstairs and changed pajamas (wet with sweat) and tried to sleep a little longer in my bed. No dice. The couch was already so comfortable that I slept in until 0600. Now, I’m hydrating with a punch I made from a sugar free berries and hibiscus aguafresca I got off Amazon and some lime zest. I generally wait to have my coffee until I’ve had lots of water first. Being dehydrated is most of the reason I think I need caffeine in the morning. I still do, I just need a lot less than I thought., because caffeine doesn’t help you hydrate and that’s what’s making you feel sluggish.

I took a break to make an eight-cup pot of Cafe Bustelo, because making it mug by mug often leaves a lot of grit in the bottom that a paper filter will catch. Normally, I drink it with whole milk, but today it’s black because I ran out of milk last night making macaroni and cheese. However, Cafe Bustelo is delicious black. It’s not like I feel like I’m missing something. If I did feel like that, Bryn and Dave left some CoffeeMate here. Ironically enough, I think it works better in strong black tea. That’s the only reason it’s not gone already.

I’m sure they use milk in the UK, but to me CoffeeMate is superior in tea because it doesn’t cool it down. It also doesn’t fundamentally change the taste of the tea, and I think it does fundamentally change the flavor of coffee. It makes black tea sing, and it makes coffee taste cheap. Therefore, I love it in Folgers and Maxwell House because it doesn’t make as much of a difference if the coffee is cheap as well….. or maybe I’m just more likely to adulterate it in that situation, who knows? In fact, I should get a can of Folgers to make cheap summer coffee. Cheap summer coffee is perfect for flavored creamers, because I don’t know about you, but I keep my favorite coffees unadulterated. Coconut coffee creamer was made for Folgers with ice.

And frankly, all coffees taste better if you make them perfectly. By “perfect,” I mean in measurements. Be exacting. For me, it’s taking the time to create a level tablespoon of coffee per cup. Cafe Bustelo is an espresso roast, so this is incredibly satisfying. It’s just so beautiful and smooth. I have converted David. I don’t get a toaster when I make people gay, I get a toaster when I sell Cafe Bustelo and Jonna Mendez’s books, mostly because they are a great combination. Cafe Bustelo is almost as smooth as Jonna Mendez. It’s trying hard. I still haven’t finished “In True Face,” because I thought I would be done with it by the time the museum closed, but I’m having more fun stopping and starting, getting lost in her world for a little while, then returning to my own and digesting what I have just heard. I hear her differently than most people, having friends like Zac. It has slowed down my willingness to be in that world 24/7, because I don’t have any security clearances. Therefore, no one can tell me anything that would make it more specific and less scary.

For instance, when Zac travels, I am not always allowed to know where he is going. I am not allowed EVER to publish where he’s going. Sometimes if Zac is comfortable with it, I can say he’s out of town on temporary duty and leave it at that. But it’s a “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” sort of relationship because that motherfucker can rock heels and earrings better than me. Just one of the benefits of dating a queer man with red hair that sets EVERYTHING off. He’s such a clothes horse. Zac and I don’t live together, so one of the ways we check in is that he sends me a picture of himself in his car as he’s leaving for work (or standing next to his motorcycle/bicycle). I get to see his outfit and tell him he looks pretty. 😉 My favorites are the pictures where he’s wearing “my glasses.” It was actually his glasses frames that inspired me to start calling him “Smiley,” because they were the type of frames I imagined George Smiley would wear.

George Smiley is John le Carre’s main character if you’re lost- le Carre used to work at MI-6, and Smiley is an MI-6 operative, the perfect fictional character to represent someone who works with all our intelligence agencies, not just one. Let’s be clear, though. Zac collects data through servers. He is not an operative, nor does he work for a three letter. The three letters are his clients, not the other way around. That’s how he was able to get into the gift shop at Langley.

Zac is on the brain because his brother and sister-in-law just had a baby. So, he’s now Uncle Zac for the first time in his life and the pictures are so gorgeous. I have also been Uncle Leslie for the last 15 or so years because my ex-girlfriend and her partner’s daughter called me that once and I’ve never lived it down because I love it so, so much. As in, I have never WANTED to live it down. I like it because even though in the UK, Leslie is a male name, in the US it comes out as male/female, the perfect representation of me to a child. “Uncle Leslie” is me to any child, because I have the reflexes of a mom when a kid is hurt, but I want to throw a kid around like a dad, too.

I actually opened up to Supergrover about this the other day, that what really stopped my baby dreams was my mother dying. I realized how little it mattered to me to have children if she was never going to meet them. I feel this way about dating moms, too. That I will totally date moms and STILL feel like it’s a shame that my mother is not there to see my stepkids. She would have LOVED being a grandmother to Sam’s kids, because Sam’s kids are basically me. Both BRIGHT musicians vocally and instrumentally. I know that she would have loved any child I brought home, but bringing her grandchildren with whom she could do duets? Get the fuck out of here. I, with no shame attached or involved, wanted to be with Sam because she reminded me of my mother, but not in any way that was creepy. They had the same personality professionally. Sam was a church choir director and a singer in the Army. My mother was a church choir director and an elementary school music teacher. It was a way of keeping that part of me alive, the one that’s deeply connected to singing……. because the universe gave me someone with whom I could do duets, too.

I was so miserable when we broke up, because as Bryn so aptly summarized, she “busted my fairy tale.” I invested too much, too fast because I missed my mother so much. However, if your partner feels like dreams for the future are threatening, then they’re not the person for you. Just like with Supergrover, I wasn’t expecting everything to come together in 15 minutes. I was checking out the future to see what it would look like. I get uncomfortable in chaos, and tend to unravel.

That being said, Sam created her own chaos and then couldn’t hack it. She failed me, and I will not apologize for saying so. I met her a week after I scheduled my first date with Zac. I told her this during our first conversation. That we would need to discuss boundaries because if she was monogamous, I would cancel the date with Zac because I didn’t want anything to mess up this relationship. I knew that the relationship with Zac would be casual, and with Sam, the universe was trying to tell me something. Neither one of us listened. She told me that she was just getting started with her business, trying to get it off the ground. That she didn’t want to picture me sitting at home waiting for her all the time. So please, go out with Zac. I am too busy to be a full-time girlfriend. She kept up that facade until after Zac picked me up at the Metro three weeks later, then broke up with me while I was at his house.

People do not say what they mean.

I don’t know what she thought I was going to do that was negative. Maybe she thought I’d call off the date in theory, but date him on the downlow so she’d always have to be worried about him. No matter what it is that she thought, it was wrong. Because I said plainly and up front “here is my situation. What do you want to do about it?” She hid her feelings until she was so frustrated she exploded at me…… and that’s how I knew it was the wrong relationship and don’t look back. It is one thing to call off a first date. It is another to tell someone you’ve been with someone for a year, so no dice on monogamy.

If she had said she wasn’t comfortable, I wouldn’t have stayed at home waiting on her. We’d have the same relationship Zac and I do now, which is staying out of each other’s way unless we’re together in person. I write A LOT. I don’t need constant stimulation from my partner. In fact, that was a huge problem in being married to Dana (absolutely no shade, she was my sweetheart and a beloved one at that…. a practical problem, not a dealbreaker). Being married to an extrovert is not my jam. But here’s the secret.

It’s all an act. Dana is extremely shy. She will give you all her canned responses and you will love her to bits….. but you’re not really invited in until you see Dana in her silence. You don’t know Dana until you’ve seen her in a situation where she has run out of canned responses. That’s why it took me so long to fall in love with her. I had to get past the mask, a recurring theme in my life.

The truth that Dana is lovely and also it’s hard coming home to an extrovert can both exist in the same universe. Our relationship got so much better when I moved into the spare room, because then she could be extroverted while on the phone or something and I could escape to a room where the door locked. I learned during this time that it’s all about sensory deprivation for me. And in fact, I do not know whether Supergrover is shy and/or introverted in person, but I do know that it was easier coming home to the sensory deprivation chamber of writing to her than it was doing all the social masking of living with an extrovert. That is not a slam on my ex-wife, just a practical reality thing. It is hard work keeping up with an extrovert.

In case that was confusing, “shy” means you don’t want to talk to people. “Introverted” means you don’t have the energy for it whether you like the person or not.

I fall into the latter category, because I am very funny and engaging when my social battery is full, and it usually is because I don’t go out and do things very much. I spend so much time alone that when I actually do go out, meeting people is exciting and not draining. I have the most fun with my Uber drivers, because they’re usually from Ethiopia or someplace equally exotic and we end up talking about faraway places for the entire ride. I owe my love of Ethiopia to the opera AIDA and to Uber. Hearing so much about Ethiopia has convinced me I must go there.

Although Africa is another continent I wouldn’t want to visit without Zac…. some countries, anyway. I would need him a lot more in Uganda than South Africa, and because he’s queer, it’s not just protection for me. I hope that Zac and I do eventually get to travel. We’ve been talking about going to New York for months (it’s not that far, maybe four hours, and we can stay on the base so it’s a cheap vacation). Neither of us has put any legwork into it, though. That’s because we both let things drop and I don’t think that there is anything better about dating Zac than going to his house and also getting to see Oliver, who is a dog. When I think about Oliver, New York pales in comparison.

But there’s all kinds of rules in poly that have to be followed regarding vacations, too. It’s a balance, right? Like, you have your own full-fledged relationship, but there’s no need to have one partner that goes everywhere with you while the rest stay at home. Of course the ones left behind are going to be jealous. All of that gets spread out, too. One of the truisms in poly is that sometimes you see the same movie five times without saying anything. 😛

So, I ended up in a poly relationship because Zac is poly, not because I didn’t want monogamy with Sam. I haven’t sought out more partners with Zac because I find that I don’t have time for more than him right now, anyway. I have my own life to figure out, and in a lot of cases, it’s hard as shit. It’s embarrassing to be my age and not feel like you’ve really launched, while at the same time having adoring fans all over the world who tell me I’m absolutely brilliant.

Sometimes, though, I need to give myself a break and believe the people who say I’m brilliant. I have certainly spent enough time thinking about the people who sum me up as a loser….. because most of the time, “loser” is code for autistic. Neurotypical people do not like neurodivergent people, but it’s not malicious because they don’t know what it is they’re reacting to…. and it’s impolite to say that you don’t like autistic people, so you describe their behaviors. Scatterbrained comes up the most. I am starting to think that I was misdiagnosed in college, that I am not sure where the line between autism and ADHD falls. There are too many similarities, but what I can say is that the reason I’m not sure where the line falls is that sometimes stimulants force me into hyperfocus and sometimes they make it where I can’t sit down.

Cafe Bustelo is a blessing and a curse depending on what morning it is, but I’m starting to count the days when I can feel the difference between ADHD and autism. It’s alarming/cool how quickly I can tell which processing disorder is driving the bus within 10 minutes of my morning coffee.

Autistic me hates coffee. ADHD me loves it.

Uncle Leslie.

It all fits.

If It Happened to You

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

The more I understand the disconnect in my personality, which is neurodivergent to a bigger degree than I thought, I understand more about why my reactions seem so two-faced when I’m not mallicious in the slightest and so hurt when I hurt people with my own fallibility. I am not saying that I have an excuse for every wrong thing I’ve ever done. I’m saying that maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself because a public lashing every day is only so helpful. When you have problems, you have to start searching for solutions. I always start with medicine, because you can’t live in a doctor’s house and not begin the process of thinking that way, just like when you turn 18 in a lawyer’s house should count as One L. Plus, for background on my novel, I got three books from the Kindle store on how to think like a spy, because one of the plot points is a recruitment in Paris with enormous consequences. My protagonist has to be a confident enough asset that a case officer can trust them.

I know exactly jack and shit about how to do that, which is why I spend so much time at the Spy Museum reading non-fiction set in France and Asia. I know a lot about The Cold War and the transition from OSS to CIA. I don’t know anything about Viet Nam, which is why it is both inconvenient and not that I’ve decided to write a book about it. Pros include going to places I never thought I’d go, meeting people I never thought I’d meet in real life that only exist as avatars, and possibly having a good enough proposal to get a grant to finish, and I believe with all my heart that I can do it because Jonna Mendez said, “maybe we should hire you.” 😉 Cons include leaving my house.

This is because half of my brain speaks ADHD, and half of my brain speaks Autism. The way those brains fire are completely different, yet there is crossover in behavior… not what drives it. Therefore, I am constantly tempted by change and hate it within a month. Why I have more energy than I think I do, constantly. Why I look like a vulnerable narcissist a good bit of the time and I can stop apologizing for it now. The way I describe situations hurts neurotypical people because they’re reading my words with a voice I don’t intend. I am being kind and not nice. They are being nice and not kind. I do not interpret words no matter how they’re delivered without running them through a million checksystems before I know how I feel about something. That’s because my first reaction is ADHD, no impulse control. My response is autistic. I go deep inside myself and ruminate, getting burnout quickly and having to regroup with no if or when as to my reappearance. This is because it takes time and patience for me to get the energy to do social masking……. because when I don’t my interactions hurt people.

The urge not to sugarcoat things anymore is how I’m letting myself off the hook. That I was doing myself more harm by trying to sugar coat something because my emphasis was on the wrong point. It’s not that I am not listening. It is that I don’t understand. I am not a narcissist because I’m direct. I act like one because I’ve made the executive decision not to care about what comes out of my mouth because I cannot control your reactions. I can only control what I say. I can be mindful about that without concentrating on my fear of your response. Fear is what causes burnout and isolation. Burnout is difficult, because you cannot predict spoons in advance. So, you take a day off and it’s fine, but it’s not enough transition time to reset anything.

The other thing is that my autistic nature has a tough time with having days off because of my need for structure and schedule…. and burnout because masking becomes exhausting quickly.

The main difference between being a narcissist and not is empathy. It’s not that I don’t have it. Far from it. I process it differently than a neurotypical brain and get edgy at being misunderstood all the time, even by other people who are neurodivergent because not all quirks line up. When you both have processing disorders, the way you communicate is sometimes more difficult and less. It’s hard to tell what’s a bad pattern and what is us continually reading each other wrong?

I learned in one YouTube video why my entire marriage to Dana was on the rocks from day one, and it’s something that neither of us would have picked up on because I wasn’t a writer back then in the sense that I am now. I didn’t spend hours alone every day like I’ve done for the last eight years. We did not have the coping mechanisms to deal with autism, ADHD, and cerabral palsy because only one of us had all three. I was never going to get as much alone time as I needed from an extrovert. She was never going to get as much interaction as she needed from me. The longer I went into writer mode, the more I got comfortable with receding into total autism mode…. where writing took away all my barriers in communication and I felt freer when I wasn’t constrained by other people’s opinions….. not that I don’t need other people in my life.

Writing brought on the process of unmasking all of this. Why do I write from the early morning and sometimes again into the night? Because I am not interrupted. There is no one to tell me to shut up because if my friends don’t want to talk to me, they don’t have to. Other people will read my words and it will resonate with them instead. The last thing I want in this world is to feel like a burden, so I retreat to an enormous degree. I want to invite friends into my inner circle that understand me, rather than having to save up enough energy to mask. I just don’t have that kind of disorder. I refuse to be continually uncomfortable all the time, and it was my 37th birthday that really got me thinking about all this… in retrospect, of course.

My birthday that year was at the end of my first year of friendship with Supergrover, cute and cuddly monster that she is. So, we’d had a year of talking nearly every day, nearly every hour. It was so adorable it made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I couldn’t have been happier on the first day of kindergarten. This is relevent because my birthday party was where I realized another, darker nature of the fissure with Dana and it was becoming more apparent. We simply were not compatible on a fundamental level and had ignored it for years. Keep in mind that I am not saying all the other reasons are now invalid. I am saying that they are the many cores I’ve been working through these past 10 years. The problem is that complex. No one thing is true, it is a wheel in which I stuck too big a stick. But the birthday party stuck harder.

Dana and my friends threw a birthday party for me the night before my first day at work. I didn’t have to be there until 0900, so it was no big deal. We weren’t big partiers. Even if everyone stayed until midnight, it was fine. Still plenty enough time to sleep, as I wouldn’t have slept a full eight hours on the night before my first day, anyway.

Well, people get there and I’m cool for about an hour tops. This is not unusual. What was unusual was being strong enough to say, “the house is huge. You guys go ahead.” I was okay with it and also not. My birthday party wasn’t for me. To design a birthday party for me is to make sure I am not completely overstimulated at every moment. But I didn’t know that ahead of time. I just surfed up and down, masking and not. Deciding on the fly and suddenly needing to leave. It makes me seem like an all-around self-centered jerk when in reality my nerves are on fire.

They’re on fire from masking and from trauma, inextricably interrelated so fire is never one alarm. One sets off the other, an alarm as loud as morning prayer in Damascus and which also changes five times a day. My prayer is to be stable, inshallah. We can’t always get what we want. I haven’t stopped trying.

I can only ask for so much patience from other people while I work out my shit, while also accepting that my brain and body are more complicated than most. I’ve been beating the shit out of myself for not understanding everything perfectly since I was born, and assuming that my limitations are other people’s fault a hundred percent of the time. None of that is objectively or subjectively true, but the neurotypical world is set up for me to feel like a failure. Representation matters, but in terms of autism and ADHD in adults, no one cares. Apparently, ADHD is only for children and we should have just learned to cope by now.

If I had been diagnosed as autistic, that is seen differently in other people’s minds. People look at ADHD and just see spazzed out little boys. You begin to see how ADHD works in women by looking at autism first. That’s because they aren’t the same, but again, present that way. People with ADHD tend to have problems logically. People with autism tend to have problems emotionally. My body has decided to cut out the middle man and have those two disorders duke it out for supremacy when both of them suck.

ADHD will only rescue me from autistic burnout for so long. That’s why when I travel, I’ve loved the seven and 10 day trips I’ve taken and hated the shorter ones. Not enough transition time to really enjoy myself. But again, “hating” is relative. I loved going to Paris, but it was a long haul for three or four days. It completely upended my rhythm for months. It was worth it, but for my thrill-seeking ADHD side. My autistic side was nervous and fearful the entire time. I am sure I was delightful company because of it, because my dad and sister don’t expect me to see fear in front of them when it’s relentless. It’s not fear of them. It’s that everything in my environment affects me differently than it does them. They’re both neurodivergent, but not autistic as far as I can tell. That’s because my dad and sister can change his environments at will and I cannot keep up with either of them.

It affects everything, from feeling out of place socially to the tag on my shirt to the people talking about their problems way over there that I’ve somehow managed to overhear. It’s too much stimuli in every outside environment, which is why I take public transportation. It is built-in, ironclad transition time. If I am driving, I am still in control of something. If I’m riding the train, I can fall asleep….. which I often did coming home from my job as a SQL developer because I could only handle so many people and problems in one day before I passed out. I know I prefer the train because I did have a car here for a while and wrecked it because of rumination. I got so lost in my own head that I took an unmarked curve a little too fast and couldn’t correct in time. Or, at least, I assumed it was marked until the cop told me it was marked on the other side of the freeway. Well, thanks a lot. That was helpful. I’ve never been here in my life.

I decided that being neurodivergent and having eye problems was not the best recipe for a driver. Getting my Fire HD and Bluetooth keyboard was the committment I needed to make the hour and a half on the train count. It’s a great writing environment as long as you don’t forget your headphones. I find that either movie soundtracks (Argo, The Bourne Identity, Syriana for me) or white noise are my best bets for being able to tune everything out except the motion the train makes, unperterbed by the sound. Reinforcing boundaries is hard when you know that some people are just crazier than you’ll ever be. Logic keeps chasing them, but they’re stronger and faster.

It’s not the sound of the train that’s bothersome, but the people on it. Most DC locals keep to themselves. Tourists will talk to anyone, for any reason, at any time. Most Americans are too polite to turn down genuine interest because we don’t want to seem rude, while avoiding tourists is a DC sport. There is also a huge difference between the federal government and the DC population. There is a reason that 5:00 in DC used to be called “white flight” and it has gotten so much better over the years, but we aren’t done yet. Therefore, there’s disagreements of all kinds on the Metro and you just have to ignore it when it gets loud…. that is, if I am completely uninterested in the conversation and not jumping in because I can’t not. “I had the right to remain silent. I did not have the ability. -Ron White

Again, ADHD vs. Autism. Am I worried about challenging my political beliefs on the subway to learn something and have more to talk about here, or am I worried that my sock is sliding down into my shoe? Are we going to talk about peace in the Middle East or why Whole Foods doesn’t have the veggie dogs I like and why I am nuclear pissed about it?

But if we’re going to talk about love, know that I’m not trying to hurt you when I describe real life situations, and I’m not trying to evade fault. I am owning what is mine, without speaking for you. I think that is being kind, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t nice.

I don’t need you to understand it. I just need you to respect it. Otherwise, I’m just another Leslie crying at her birthday party. I’m betting that if you are autistic, you have cried, too, when it happened to you.