I have a lot to process. I’ll try to remember to include quotes as I go.
I made a mess at home and I’m cleaning it up because I didn’t think about how everyone would feel in terms of being written about and as per my usual, I got letters. I just apologized and moved on- he was right. In my zeal to try and make a role for myself in Tiina’s life, I’d overstepped. No biggie, I just need to reorient my expectations. I am not trying to bully my way into anything, I am the visioning and values person. I do not only see what is happening right now, but what is happening five years from now based on pattern recognition.
But Tiina says that it takes time for other people to learn that I am not trying to wear their skin.
She’s asleep, so I’m still waiting for her to expand on that- I think it’s because people do not realize they are being seen up close. Only the ones that have something to hide seem threatened by it, but that is my experience over 25 years, not directed at any one person. And having something to hide isn’t nefarious. It’s anyone who uses a system of protection mechanisms because I can see through them. That’s the part they cannot stand. They are being recorded without them.
Because I just observe, and I would be happier writing about the animals…… and will. My life is changing, but that’s because I’ve been asked to step in where 16yo and 10yo are concerned. Not in an official, titled way- in a “mom and dad are both busy and Leslie has a car” kind of way. I have been asked to step in when Tiina needed a companion to New York. I am doing the things that a good friend would, and all I can do is show up as myself.
Time will tell all.
Time is a 10yo being grouchy with you at first and then getting an invite to their birthday party. Time is being able to look back and say, “you really did make Tiina’s life more comfortable at graduation.” It is because of these entries that I have the luxury of going back and looking. I am not driven by popularity, which is great, because I don’t have any….. well, not in the traditional sense. I’m not an “influencer” nor “mommyblogger.” I have just been writing on the Internet since before the modern era of it existed.
The rhythm of my life has been live/reflect/post since 2001.
It’s a different way to live, for sure, and an adjustment for the people around me. I have proven that I will give everyone else up to keep publishing, because I am not saying “I am a god and everyone must listen to me.” I am saying “there are seven billion people on the planet and we all have a voice. Here’s mine.” My opinion matters, but not more than Tiina’s. If she was threatened by me being a blogger, she would have said so quite plainly with Finnish flags for emphasis.
Most of the quotes I love are from Tiina because she’s just so effortlessly funny. My favorite quote from her, always, is:
Friends.
This is The Signal.
She is about to drop some truth so swallow whatever it is that I’m drinking or it will go everywhere.
Recording all these little things for me has turned into other people enjoying my weird little life and making pain not so hard to carry….. other people are willing to carry it with me. And as for using people’s real names, they get figured out anyway and I have to have a real footprint on earth. It is a personal opinion, and I am allowed to have it within limits. I am learning those limits every day because it is a new process, but I am not doing anything but recording my recollections.
My recollection of this time in my life is that transition is real. I saw a need and jumped in, and have done that classic overfunctioning thing because I am good at it…. truly reliable and remarkable as a gofer of all things. But I am overfunctioning when Tiina is reaching out for help, which is why it works.
Everything I’ve ever done for anyone in her family is because I love her. That is the story that I am trying to write, and everyone else is peripheral to it. They are not less important. Tiina is the tree and they are the branches. Love for the way Tiina and I work has led to the love of hanging with Brian and the kids as well….. because as it turns out, Brian and the kids are even more like me than Tiina is.
So, everyone, including the baby, is loved…. but time will tell as to how that all plays out. But please believe that when I’m trying to make someone’s life easier, it’s generally not anyone else’s but Tiina’s because she’s the one that brought all this into my life in the first place. It’s a balance of wanting to be helpful to her but also not to lose myself in the process. She has a huge life and I could get lost in it easily. The biggest damn difference is that it’s work I’m ready and willing to do.
It has been hard as shit learning to relate to children as a parent figure and not a buddy. It has been hard learning to navigate just about everything in terms of family dynamics because I have worked with kids. I have not lived with kids. Different ball of wax. I was unprepared for the energy that begins when I wake up because I am used to several hours of quiet, but that doesn’t stop 10yo. And even then, “living together” is in bits and spurts as I go for visits. Going to visit is not an easy prospect but at the same time, you cannot replace in-person visiting, either. I need to be offline, and the farm provides it. Even though we’re wired out there, it’s a different feel. I cannot just get lost in devices to regulate.
Tiina and Brian are both forcing me to look at autism in a different way and it is changing me, rewiring the parts of me that felt shamed all these years for the way I present. I’m just going to be awkward, I have a PhD in awkward……
But the story is not digging up the details of other people’s lives, it’s the details that get on me quite naturally.
If there’s a quote that sums all that up, it’s probably from the Bible…..
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
I cannot take it back. I can only move forward. But now I am not moving forward alone. I have a team under me that will help me figure it all out.
Social media has changed the game. It has convinced us that we need to live these perfect lives full of trips and adventure…. and that is true to some extent. Knowledge comes with travel and I take nothing away from it. But at the same time, nothing has made me happier than reorienting my expectations so that a day is insanely good if I’ve had:
a cup of coffee, dark roast with whole milk
affection from my family- hugs, cheek kisses, and an arm around my shoulder are all underrated pleasure…. as is hearing “LESLIE!!!!!” with unadulterated glee (while also reassuring Tiina that she is still unabashedly my favorite)
time to sit with the animals, whether it’s the Frenchie on the couch or looking out over the acreage and seeing the goats and pigs
Life is so good when the pleasure it takes to make you fulfilled is tiny. When big things happen, you just don’t know what to do with it, there’s so much joy. I delight in watching 16yo and 10yo grow, knowing that I’m stable in their lives and am starting to think about the kinds of things I want them to learn from me. This concept is one…. that happiness isn’t dependent on everything being completely brilliant all the time. That you take small wins where you can get them.
My win recently has been being the grandparent I wanted to be. I picked out a great high chair and some cute clothes for our boy. We’re in the home stretch, and my best girl says to “be happy. Be ready.” Right now that means trying not to panic because I’ll be driving in a storm if Ayalla goes into labor today, but my Fusion is more than capable. I rely on the car rather than trusting myself. Adaptive Cruise Control is a miracle.
Today is all about packing my suitcase so that I can stay awhile if needed. Tiina and Brian have it handled, but I am focusing on 16yo and 10yo. My role is to be there for them while mom and dad are busy. I have a feeling it is very much how the baby will relate to Thomas, Ayalla and Derek’s best friend. I am just the third mic in the radio show that is Tiina and Brian’s lives, and it fits us.
Tiina is coming to terms with the ways that her life is different now, and she knows I am here for her. That is what’s most important to me about this new phase of life- that we belong to each other until death, whatever that means for either of us. Someone has to have that friend, someone has to be that friend. I will find my own Brian-shaped partner, but that is secondary to what I have with Tiina right now. I need to have my head on straight before I start dating, and I feel safer in dating with two people behind me saying, “okay, we like this one.”
I am not mistaking categories and trying to fit Tiina into a role she doesn’t. My expectations are that our relationship will grow and flourish independently of anything else. I have said consistently that I need an anchor, and there is no better anchor than a woman who owns a farm. I am learning from her what straight women have known for years and I am just finding out- how they are girlfriends to each other and why it’s called that.
Because frankly, at first, I didn’t get it.
I mean, I do- I called Aada my “wine and yoga pants girlfriend” and Dana my “scratch your nails down my back” girlfriend. But there was never a clear delineation of which girlfriend was for what unless the situation was VERY clear. Emotions pop up everywhere and jealousies ensued.
The difference is that Tiina has never sparked me that way. Her husband made a joke that inferred it and it sat on my psyche like a rock for months until I finally just asked Tiina about it and she busted out laughing. There is no torrid love affair between us and there never will be. Now I can relax into her cheek kisses without sweating. 😉
And I am all about the affection. When Tiina hugs me, it is literally grounding. The energy between us is incredible, and I hope you all have that friendship. I feel safe, loved, and wanted. Tiina makes my heart flip constantly…..
I just want to keep Leslie forever.
Because she knows the way to my heart is not huge displays, it is safety and continuity. The funniest continuity joke is that Tiina poked fun at Lisa relentlessly for asking me to six concerts in a row when I said I didn’t like them and then wanted to take me to a concert for my birthday. That is because she took the time to get to know me before she made the plans- she knows I like being outside at Wolf Trap with the whole family on a blanket. That the problem was sensory overload in lots of clubs, not the idea of live music itself.
That is the difference when your girlfriends really know you. She’s taking me to see Ray LaMontagne, and it’s going to be a blast because Brian and the kids will be with us. We can decide whether it’s a Diet Dr Pepper or wine in the sunshine kind of day when we get there.
The last time I went to Wolf Trap was in 2001 with my first wife- we went to see The Indigo Girls. I think the tour was called “Girls with Guitars,” because it was absolutely stripped down. No electric at all and it was righteous. I would have liked to have had Tiina by my side then. She would have loved Kathleen, too, my first wife. That’s because Kathleen was a Global Information Systems person at ExxonMobil and Tiina does government computer stuff. It’s a shame we didn’t meet back in the day, because back then I was actually living in Virginia, not too far from her.
Well, my office was near her, anyway. Kathleen and I lived in Alexandria because we figured that contraflow traffic would come in handy in the mornings. It certainly did. Back in the day, our offices were at 495 and Gallows Rd, so the life hack was to take Little River Turnpike out to save our sanity.
I had a great life in Virginia with Kathleen, but it was because I didn’t have a Tiina that I didn’t stay in Alexandria when Kathleen and I broke up. Do you see how this works? Tiina is the glue that’s helping me stay put. I would like to think that I have the same influence on her… that I am helping her be more comfortable in her same surroundings, different circumstances.
Being happy with really small things is loving the way that Tiina loves me. She doesn’t scream “I love you” from the skies…. it looks like, “have you taken your meds?” “Have you eaten?” “Pack your suitcase so you’re already ready.” All of that is “I love you” in a not so great disguise.
I am one of those people who can get into any car and figure out how it works within a few minutes, which is an increasingly rare skill because if people see a manual transmission, their brains bluescreen and they nope out. I prefer to drive with an automatic transmission and adaptive cruise control, but that doesn’t mean I cannot make it work in a 1980 Ford F‑250 with a granny‑low 4‑speed.
And in fact, if money were no object, I would buy a current F-250. I can afford the truck, but I cannot afford the gas and maintenance. So this is just a thought exercise, and not what’s currently in the works. An F-250 with all the technology adaptations my current Fusion has would change our lives. It would make the Airstream a breeze to tow because the most current Fords have adaptive cruise control that works even when the Airstream is attached. I also want CarPlay if I’m going to be towing, because the map needs to be front and center.
Tiina, my first wife got lost on the way to the “Get Out the Map” tour. It’s a guiding principle in life.
It’s also something I would trust 16yo to drive, because he physically cannot be a speed demon in it. However, I do not want to join the fight as to which one of us is going to pay for 16yo’s insurance. I wish I had enough money to buy 16yo his own beater and teach him to wrench, because I don’t know much…. but what I do know, I want to pass on. I do not remember if Brian is a car guy or not, so if he is, the more the merrier. I am ready to learn more about cars, too. It’s a very autistic approach- buy a car and a manual and search every YouTube video ever on the subject.
I said this the other day that I was trying to find a way to plug in to the family that would be useful, and having the farm truck is useful. But having a farm truck and having a truck capable of towing the Airstream are two separate things. It also doesn’t necessarily make sense to buy two trucks, either. So it’s just another dilemma that will sit in my head until Tiina tells me what I should think. 😉
I would love an old 5-speed just to cruise around Stafford. I can picture myself in Shirley, the truck I drove in Portland. It was a 1989 Nissan Pickup. Volfe and I fixed her up as well as we could, but it still looked like a 16yo’s truck at the end of the day. Teaching my own 16yo how to take a beater and make it his own would be so much fun. Plus, we have all that space at the farm to take the doors off and do custom paint, etc.
He needs basic technology in his truck. I don’t want him driving around without Bluetooth, because being able to control the radio and take calls with your voice is essential. It would be better even we went a few model years newer so that the microphone was already wired into the infrastructure of the truck. But even if it’s not, that’s a day’s wiring job. The thing about old trucks is that there’s nothing computerized to get in the way and you can do what you want with sound. Factory is absolute dogshit, but you can put decent speakers in the doors without breaking the bank.
I would feel safer if 16yo had Android Auto, but those trucks are built for classic-style radios. It doesn’t make sense to glue a tablet onto the dash. It does make sense to get him a dash mount for his phone and a stereo that will run the audio. And if we’re being really fancy, let’s upgrade the rearview mirror as well so that 16yo has less accidental bumps with a backup camera….. especially important if we choose “long bed.”
But the thing is, all of these are dreams for 16yo and not reality because he’s the one that needs to show his parents, and me by extension, that he is responsible enough to handle a vehicle while he’s alone. All of my dreams of teaching him to drive a stick shift may be for naught, because he has to decide what’s important in life before we start thinking “manual or automatic?”
I have also told him that I cannot wait until he can drive because then he can be the chauffer while I sit in the back and watch YouTube videos (this is a running joke- I am always jealous that during car rides, there could be a fire right next to us and the kids wouldn’t notice because they were lost in Binging Babish…. or whatever it is that kids watch. I do not know. I’m in the front.
That is my area, much like the Pepsi machine.
I was lamenting to Tiina that I did not know what a girlfriend to a straight woman was even supposed to do right now. Like, I know what I would do if my definition of a girlfriend’s daughter was having a baby. That role is scripted. But the way Tiina says “girlfriend” is the way that straight women have referred to their besties for eons. WHOLE different ball of wax. I am not trying to fit Tiina into my definition of girlfriend, I am trying to learn hers….. or as I said, “I don’t have any other straight girlfriends. What do I even feed her?”
She said, “Ha. Be happy. Be ready.”
Oh, I am all of those things. I am thinking about Tiina and the whole system constantly. Waiting for the baby’s arrival has made me rethink a lot of things, including where I live. It’s trying to find every possible loophole that would allow me to move to Virginia and finding none, so thinking that Rockville is my next best landing place. When my body fails, I want Sinai and my Cognitive Behavioral Health group. Neither of those managed care organizations have managed care in Virginia.
My options get sparser in Louisa, which is why it’s better for me to maintain a Maryland residence. I can get enough medication to be able to be gone for three or four days at a time without incidence. I don’t just live in Maryland “on a technicality.” I’m here enough during the week that it is one of the places I live, just not the only place I live.
Tiina jokes all the time that I’m just going to have to buy an air conditioner for the attic and they’ll put down some boards. Honestly, I’m not even sure that she’s joking…. but when I think about merging lives, I can think about it right up until it means moving in. Changing my address from Maryland to Virginia would be a disaster for me, and I cannot do that to myself.
Brian and Tiina have protections through work insurance that will never be available to me, so I have to be clear on what I need out of the state. But what is attractive is thinking of all the scaffolding I would have if we did live together. I would be one member of a team and not having to carry every little thing by myself. I also don’t see myself moving in with a romantic partner again, because I don’t want my romantic interest to be tied to my living situation. That has never worked out for me in the past.
If Tiina and Brian move out to the lake, it just means more road trips as I look forward to the laws in Virginia getting more progressive. My car loves the route from Baltimore to Louisa, and I am constantly entertained with audiobooks. Some of them are about autism. Some of them are about racism. Some of them are fiction. And a good bit of them are BBC Radio Dramas by John Le Carre.
My car is the inanimate object love of my life. It’s a 2019 Ford Fusion, which is exactly why I want to upgrade to another Ford in truck form. Sync 3 is perfect and I just like the layout. The steering wheel controls and the driver experience are both just insane. The one thing I would lose is good gas mileage, so I’m holding off on the idea that I need to be the one to buy the farm truck until I’m there more than a few days a week.
The good part is that all of this feels settled and solid. I am not overreaching when I say “my kids” and “my grandkid” because I do not mean it like “my pencil.” I mean it like “my neighborhood.” Tiina is the biological grandmother. Brian is the step-grandfather. I am the one who runs errands for both. I do not have a baby, but I have taken stock in a baby. 😉
I am just doing for Ay Ay what I would do for any of Brian and Tiina’s other kids…. love them.
I think that things are changing and we are all adjusting for the better.
I just wrote a whole ass essay on why Diana Gabaldon hates me personally. 😉 Lord John Grey rips my heart out because he fell ridiculously hard for a straight person and so did I. And what I found after that experience was that I liked the structure of the relationship- having someone that was my ride or die with no romance- so Tiina is that for me now. I am slowly building my life around her because she needs me. Full stop. I need her in that same primal way. It is a drive for cognitive connection and affection, all of which I need in order to feel safe and secure enough to date.
She says, “Leslie is my legs.” I didn’t know how I felt about that at first except now I realize that I use her as my brain so it’s okay. I am getting something that Lord John Grey did not get with Jamie, which is platonic partnership that feels deeper than friendship but lighter than marriage. Brian, Tiina’s husband, is amazing and I cannot say enough good things about him, but he is not talented enough to be in two places at once. Tiina has mobility issues and all three of us are worried about Tiina being alone in a situation. So it’s coordinating with Tiina to see whether she needs me as “arm candy” or not. I joke about being the hottie on her arm, but really what I mean is that someone needs to pack up the car, carry the suitcases, etc. and I am perfect. Tiina says, “my girlfriend Leslie” with ease, and at first I didn’t think it fit because that word packs such a punch in the queer world. But now I understand that Tiina does indeed need a girlfriend, and now she has one.
The workload of the farm and animals, the lake house and boat, and six children is more than enough work for two able-bodied adults, and that is no longer the case. I am stepping in so that Tiina’s role can be more executive and less physically demanding. That is work that a girlfriend does without fail, and without crossing into anything competitive with Brian because I am not trying to replace him and neither is Tiina. Nothing works without Brian, and I am grateful to him for opening my eyes to so many things, most notably audiobooks about autism that make me cry in my car.
It’s a multi-adult family because the kids are starting to rely on me; they see the changes happening in their house as well, even if they’re not always verbal about it. They know that the order of operations is, “ask mom. Ask Dad. Ask Leslie.” Watch that little one. They’re shifty…… Kidding about that, too, but it is amazing how many plans for my time have been made before my arrival.
It’s not just 10yo, though. 16yo thinks that the only reason I come over is to play Skyrim with him. This is not entirely untrue but let me at least give your mom a cheek kiss and drop off her coffee, damn. We all love video games and actually one of my favorite things is to watch Tiina shred in Fortnite. I love girl gamers and I just admire watching her. Her son is stereotypically good. She’s a sneak assassin.
That’s the thing about having a platonic girlfriend. I just notice and appreciate everything about her, all the time. It’s not about creating romantic energy, but creating comfort and familial closeness. We are both first children, therefore neither of us have ever had a big sister. This is our lane, a first-child relationship that tumbles and rolls because she’s chronologically older, but doesn’t flaunt it. She never pulls that card, and never makes me feel small because I couldn’t possibly understand her cosmic wisdom.
It’s not a huge age difference, either. Something like seven years. So most of the same cultural references exist, but I celebrate that she likes more 1980s music than me. I really didn’t come online until like 1985. I was born in 1977, but I don’t remember much. I am learning to love lots of different bands because both Brian and Tiina have different musical tastes than me.
But, like all queer/straight female relationships, Tiina and I can connect on The Indigo Girls. Women love them regardless of sexual orientation. I am determined to sing karaoke with Tiina, and I don’t care if she wants to be my Emily or my Amy. Just sing to me. Her voice is incredible because it’s so pure, and we sound great together.
We have also entered baby watch- Ayalla is not officially due until Aug. 12, but all plans are cancelled until further notice because I cannot afford to be busy with something else right now. Luckily, this is doable because I’m a writer. I can work from anywhere, including the hospital waiting room if plans change and I’m needed there. This birth is testing me the way G-d needs me to be tested. I have learned that when you are waiting for a baby, Advent appears no matter the time on the calendar.
I flip between Jewish and Christian imagery because I am Christian. My chosen family is Jewish. Hilarity ensues, but not as much as you might think because Brian and I were raised in the same faith tradition (Methodist) and he converted. So, we have the same inside jokes from childhood and I’m learning to be conversant in culturally Jewish spaces as well.
I drive by Aada’s old high school to get around town and remember where I came from. That there’s a reason I love the life I’m living now and it’s because she gave me a framework I could access. I don’t need romance in my life when I have companions. I am also making room for a romantic partner, but they, too, must fit into the life I’ve already chosen. Tiina is my priority because we are a system. I need a partner who will look at that and say, “cool. I’m not here to compete.”
I need support from a partner the way Tiina does, but meeting them shouldn’t come with letting her go….. and I will not let it happen.
Old song, but it hit me where I live…. The quote is from “Angry Anymore,” by Ani Difranco:
she taught me how to wage cold war with quiet charm but I just want to walk through my life unarmed to accept and just get by like my father learned to do but without all the acceptance and getting by that got my father through
My parents had different reactions to divorce because their approaches to life were very different to begin with. My mother ran our family with an iron fist, because my dad was the talent and she was the manager. She was a preacher’s wife, charged with fixing every single thing that went wrong in his life or she had failed him personally and professionally no matter what my dad thought because the preacher’s wife role is cultural. I have never seen any women take more professional heat in our conference than wives that wanted their own jobs and their own lives outside the Methodist church. This is slowly changing, of course, but I was born in 1977.
My mother was the platonic ideal of “preacher’s wife,” but she had an image for our family and could be punishing when we did not meet her expectations. We all handled this in different ways. I decided just not to talk to my mother about anything real. We’d fill our days with surface talk and that would just have to be okay…. I could have my own life. I lived over a thousand miles away.
But I failed before I was born with my mother. I was born with cerebral palsy, and my mother did not like the idea of having a “special kid.” Even though none of us knew that CP and autism have a large Venn diagram, CP alone should have been enough to set off alarm bells. The problem was that back then, my formal diagnosis was “hypotonia.” The reality is that was the doctors’ first impression, and my mother would not take me back for follow-up. She said that my dad was overreacting, and that leg exercises at home were enough. She did not think I needed special education because I was too bright, etc.
So, basically every choice she made for me as a baby is wreaking ABSOLUTE HAVOC now…… because what we know now that we didn’t then is that intelligence is no indication of support needs. Now, every missed intervention is a support need I have to navigate alone.
My father does not want me to be alone, he just has his hands tied. Texas does not offer Medicaid expansion, and I do not have disability benefits yet. Once I achieve disability benefits, I can think about Texas again because Medicaid is open to disabled people there, just not everyone. But honestly, I am past thinking about moving back to Texas because while I love my family, I don’t love the state wholeheartedly. It rattles my nervous system because getting by there is based on masking.
I don’t have to “get by” anymore because I am more powerful when I don’t have to mask at all. My mother taught me how to behave socially, but it was like training a poodle. The poodle is absolutely not interested in your nonsense…. and neither was an INFJ autistic toddler.
I am surprised that my first words weren’t something like, “I’m already older than you.”
It’s not arrogance. It’s seeing clearly that in a lot of ways, 10yo is older than me. They know how to get by because they’re being raised by modern autistic kid parenting and I absolutely was not. I cannot even believe how much my childhood would have been improved if Texas has a virtual academy where I could do school from my bedroom with my laptop. They don’t have to get by because their nervous system was never overloaded in the first place.
It’s seeing all the errors of my mother’s ways and forgiving her, but not forgetting. She chose her image over my safety, and that will never be okay. She fought with my father constantly over how disabled I was without ever letting a doctor tell her she was wrong. Dead wrong. Disastrously, enormously, wrong.
But you forgive when you realize she was a baby herself when I was born, younger than Ayalla by almost three years. I was an idiot at 25. Mostly, forgiving her is for me. If I had realized the magnitude of what had been done to me, all the gaslighting, it would have caused a rupture. It just didn’t, because she hid all the paperwork from the one clinic she took me to and my sister found it after she died. But that document is what establishes disability starting in 1978, and not whatever it is that people are saying.
The real truth is that I have a solid case for disability without doing a lick of research. My documented paperwork for mental health issues already makes me eligible. Right now, it’s choosing which programs to apply for. I believe that I qualify for SSI and SSDI, as well as my father’s social security survivor benefits. None of my health issues started in adulthood. I cycle too rapidly for bipolar, but autism meltdown and burnout are right on schedule and look the same, often, to clinicians.
So, the first step for my disability case is a full neurological workup, because everything that’s wrong with my body starts in my brain, too. My life should have looked different because it has been too hard for my neurotype. I need support and now I’ll be able to get it.
I have also mentioned moving to Baltimore to Tiina. I’m not just talking crazy. Disability laws are better here, and that’s my only point. I am starting to think about long-term stability, and Virginia is not it. I don’t want to give up my own benefits for Tiina and Brian, so the best choice for now is just to keep driving to see each other. I don’t mind moving to the Maryland side of DC so that we can be closer, but Virginia is an “absolutely not.”
What ends up happening is that I spend maybe four or five days a week in Maryland.
It is not that you cannot get disability in Virginia, it is just much, much harder. There are programs for Tiina’s kids that do not exist anywhere in the nation, and by “kids” I mean Pepper, the kid who just turned into an adult weeks ago, and her minor brother, who will be an adult in two years. Tiina heard me, so it’s tabled. I don’t have to bring things up again with Tiina. If she’s thinking seriously about it, she’ll circle back on her own. But our lives look different now, and disability support is important to both of us and not just for the kids’ sake.
I also feel lonely walking around Pikesville without her. No, seriously. Baltimore has one of the largest Jewish populations on the east coast and Pikesville is the hub. So naturally, when I’m walking around my neighborhood I wish I had someone to say things like, “where did you get that kippah?” I am never sure I am saying it right. I took a chance at Rita’s Italian Ice and now I know what Trace is getting for Hannukah if he doesn’t have one already.
Suede toddler kippahs are perfect because they don’t slide around (it’s the thing that keeps little boys’ heads covered at synagogue). I am not Jewish, but I want our grandson to have the best of the best. It’s a joke that’s not really a joke because I’m not a biological grandparent. I’m being folded into this family, so even though Ayalla is not related to me, I am very much involved in this baby’s life. I also don’t want to ask Tiina for her knowledge on anything and everything Jewish, amen.
Google is free.
My life is all about letting go of what happened to me as a baby so I can just chill now. I have a framework and a focus- a creative partner and a whole family that loves me.
…..without the need any longer to focus on The Cold War.
The featured image is a coat I got for Tiina’s grandson, who is going to be born in the middle of August.
I have a place of belonging and I am tied to the land yet again. Of all the places in the world I expected to want to take root, the Fredericksburg area is the one that practically makes me nauseous when I think of all the implications. And then I realize who I’m talking about and calm the fuck down. I will never see her again because she knows How Not to Be Seen………….. Don’t Stand Up.
Monty Python references aside, now I know what will happen when I see her in person because I saw a woman at 6 Beers and a Goat that looked like her, and it is not an impossibility but the last thing I would actually want because it is not welcome on her end. But, this woman didn’t look enough like her to be freaked out for more than a moment, but in that moment my stomach clenched and my teeth tried to go down my esophagus. But what did not happen is that I did not feel the itch in the palm of my hand that sharing our trauma created, and I didn’t feel like it would be a bad thing to run into each other, it would just be awkward until we realized the other was a real person.
She does know me, and I do know her…. but we don’t know all of either one of us. The cognitive dissonance would make both of our brains bluescreen, but the point is that I was willing to let the bluescreen happen and she wasn’t because she lied. Full stop. She proved to me that I did indeed apologize enough to be worth something as a friend, so I know that she was not punishing me. She was hiding, and there’s a big damned difference. Our friendship just turned to shit because I imagined a life she didn’t have and gave her personality traits not attributed to her, but to me. I know that I provoked her into a lot of words that sounded more like a mirror than anything else. But all the blowback she was getting was due to context error.
She will never understand why I exited our relationship in the way that I did because what she failed to understand is that she was wrong a lot of the time. Like, a lot. And she couldn’t hear criticism so anything I needed was constantly ignored. My opinion did not matter in the slightest, because goddamn everything was met with “I don’t owe you anything.” She caused my anxiety to spiral out and would not do anything to help me get better. This is because she:
isolated me from everyone I knew with secrets I couldn’t handle without support that she had access to and I didn’t
was not emotionally equipped to provide the support I needed and constantly stated that she did not know what she could do for me even though I was constantly giving her a map and explicit directions
I couldn’t love being in the relationship nor could I leave it while all the bullshit was an albatross around my neck. That’s because things couldn’t die and they wouldn’t get any better because she could reach me and I could not reach her. Once her secrets became mine, there was a hardcore power imbalance that I could not get out of for love or money.
She was always The Doctor, and I was but a mere companion.
But telling my story was not trying to sell her out. It was trying to reclaim what had happened to me for the people who actually did show up and watched me turn into a shell of myself while she remained remote AS FUCK. She was willing to laugh and joke with me on the Internet, but couldn’t manage seeing real emotions, even on the page. Anything negative was a prick on her skin, and anything positive was a clue in a game. You cannot win under those circumstances, ever. My story is impossible to understand without all the systems running underneath my public persona.
I had to fall apart in order to come back together, and to make it make sense.
Life makes sense with Tiina.
I was starting to wonder what I was doing wrong, because making friends is not generally hard for me, but all my masks are failing now. I’m just weird and socially awkward without even understanding why…… and then Tiina comes along with her whole brood of people exactly like me and is like, “you are not hard to love.”
The image I had in my head of who I was evaporated, and I began to connect with the kids because before I felt like I was some sort of bad influence. It was drilled into my head that I was a dark character, but it was only one person’s opinion and I let it color my whole world……. now, I just unplug the computer because who cares what someone who has never met me thinks?
It is a process of returning to my own body, realizing that I loved someone else so much that I forgot about me. I didn’t fight to correct the context error as hard as I should have and focused on the fact that Aada’s frustrations with me “proved” I was difficult and unlovable.
This cannot be true, because it’s very hard to get a 16yo to love you. You don’t pick them. They pick you. Teenage boys tend to love me because I give off “youth pastor” energy….. like, a lot of it.
I found out that 16yo loves ’90s music because I had it running in the car, so I took note of that. I try to keep a list in my head of things where I can contribute meaningfully to the conversation. With a 16yo, it is mostly that I have a car. I am okay with this.
I don’t know how it is that we bonded, but often when the other car is full, he’ll want to ride with me and he’s the only one that does it consistently. Although he got very annoyed by the navigation and was all “I can tell you where to go.” My nervous system fell apart for a second but I decided to trust him, anyway. Who cares if we got lost? I had a phone. It was fine, I just didn’t have notifications as to where to turn until we were *right there.* But it was relatively late in the day so it was fine. I didn’t have to cross three lanes of traffic or anything.
“Kevin,” the name I have given to the male voice I use for Siri, is very polite when interrupting the music. I do not know what 16yo’s problem is, but I am sure I will find out. I do appreciate that he doesn’t like complex noise, though, and that’s probably why the nav was an “absolutely not.”
We were going from Ayalla’s baby shower back to the house to drop off gifts, then out to Six Bears and a Goat. I had a blackberry beer named after the baseball team and now I forget what it was called…. but it was delicious. I also bought a t-shirt and sunglasses. I have been looking for good sunglasses everywhere and these were five dollars.
I collect t-shirts from breweries and always have because I worked at The Laurelwood in Portland and we had an excellent graphics design team. Having 6B&G stuff is in the same tradition, just Mid-Atlantic coded and not the Pacific Northwest. We of Maryland and Virginia are also dear to our craft beer t-shirts and performance fleece.
But long before it was time for beer, I got to be Mary Poppins.
I went to 7-Eleven yesterday and their Pepsi products were on sale, so I got three 20 oz Cherry Pepsi Zero and three Mountain Dew Zero. I didn’t know whether I would have time to hit a Wawa on the way out yesterday morning, so I put a Mountain Dew Zero in my backpack…. I just didn’t end up drinking it.
So, we’re sitting in the restaurant and Tiina orders a Diet Mountain Dew. The waitress says that they don’t have it and I say, “do you want one? I have one in my bag.” And I pull out a fresh, unopened Mountain Dew Zero. Like, not exactly what she asked for, but close enough that it felt like, “I did not know I was showing up this prepared today.”
And that is how I know that I moved forward in the right direction, and I am sorry it was not the right direction for me to move in order to keep Aada safe. I am certain that the reason she ended our relationship was to protect me from the consequences of everything she had to do after my meltdown and burnout….. and also to have her anger out in private, without my knowledge.
That’s all okay, as is not wanting to re-engage. But it makes me so sad that we could never find a relationship that served both of us, so it was impossible to have parallel lives.
But it prepared me for the one I’m capable of living now.
I have adapted my boundaries to fit whatever the other person needed at any time. There has been no inner north star for me until now, because I have been masking, adapting for survival in an often very cruel world. Aada, my beautiful girl, changed my life when she told me she thought I had a brain that ran a million miles a minute and a body that couldn’t keep up. Finally, someone SAW ME AS I AM. She will always be my beautiful girl because of that, because even when she doesn’t want to be an active part of my life, her past words rock me to sleep.
Because she saw me as I am, I have been able to translate that to others. I can say, “hey, my strength is really in thinking in engineering flows, not carrying heavy stuff.” And even then, it’s a special kind of engineering flow. I see relationships because I’ve studied human behavior since I was a baby. It has been a massive fire hose of information because I have never been with my dad sitting with a couple in marriage counseling, but I have overheard all of the fallout. All of the emotional repair and recovery it takes for the person taking care of you to keep doing it.
So not only have I studied relationships in terms of how I fit into them, but how everyone else does, too. We are all struggling with how to reach secure from either an avoidant or an anxious viewpoint. It’s a spectrum, and we are all lost in it and doing the best we can.
Now, I can make promises to myself because I have boundaries. Here is what I would like to see from me in the future.
The promise to myself to become the best “third brain” Tiina has because her kids love me. It is not about me. It is about being the best person I can be for the littles in my life. Brian is her coprocessor, and I am there to pick up leftover instructions. 🙂 I am kidding, but I am taking on a much more parental role than I’ve ever had in my life and it is a shift into “oh. Wait. Yes. I am 48.” It’s not just Tiina’s kids, though. We’re having a grandbaby soon. It’s not my grandbaby, but it feels very much like it as I shop, knowing I’m the person who’ll see Tiina’s younger kids through the immediate transition. Brian may be with us at least part of the time, but the plan is for me to be at the farm so that Tiina and Brian can focus on their first-born baby girl and her new baby boy.
The promise to myself to be a resource. I am not degreed, but I am no slouch with kids. I have worked in a day care center, and I have run youth programs at church. I am Brian’s counterpart, because he runs the youth program at Beth Sholom Temple. He has never asked me about the time I made all the kids lick Cheerios and stick them to their faces, but life is long. I am here for you, Brian.
The promise to myself to be the best Christian I can be while living in Jewish community… that I am a resource for questions but never an evangelist. That I am inhaling Judaism with curiosity because it is knowing the community in which Jesus was actually a part, and not the religion we made up to honor him after his death. I am always the one who is willing to do pickups and dropoffs from Hebrew school and of course I’ll be in your Purim spiel. And of course if I had my own faith community, everyone would be invited to come with me. But the way I feel about church right now is a mixed bag. On one hand, I’d like to sing. On the other hand, I was a Methodist PK for 17 years and I feel retired.
My promise to myself that I will do everything I can to support the people that support me. I have a lot of broken relationships in my past because I did not know I was autistic and melted down and burned out with so many people due to lack of knowledge. Autism isn’t the excuse, it’s the reason I couldn’t manage my emotions for whatever reason. Now that I know how to direct my energy, I am less likely to go to either extreme. So the promise to myself is to do more research on my own reactions because having a different cognitive style does not erase accountability; it changes how I process and emote about it.
I promise to love Tiina and Brian and all of their kids and grandkids in a fundamental, on the ground kind of way. Of course I’ll go to the pharmacy in the middle of the night and of course 10yo can run the music in my car whenever they want. They’re my people, and I go hard for my people. The trick is finding people who will also go hard for you.
I made the choice to love someone who couldn’t receive it, and so did he. I made the choice to stay and work around it. So did he. He would know me without knowing me because he knows himself a little too well.
Outlander ripped me in half, the whole series. Gabaldon has been excellent at making me feel like I’ve been through a car wreck in slow motion. That’s because John somehow managed to get it right, and I never did. I wouldn’t want him there to litigate the past, but to be able to sit quietly with me and say, “yeah. That sucks.”
Loving anyone out loud is dangerous, and Aada made sure it felt dangerous to me. She made sure I felt that with one slip I could absolutely ruin her life. I lived in constant fear of every sentence I wrote, every day. Lord John Grey would have probably shot me out of moral obligation in the end, but I wouldn’t have blamed him and died happy.
The fact that I believe I deserve death for what I have published in the past is enough proof that I was managed successfully with fear for a very long time, and it makes sense why I love Baltimore, not DC. I don’t want to live in the shadows anymore, because as it turns out the monsters under your bed aren’t very friendly….. even when they say they are and you can hold the leash.
Aada not being friendly worked out very well for me until it was me. She hated all the same people I did on my behalf, and it was hilarious to see her verbally unleash holy hell when someone slightly inconvenienced my day. It was the literary equivalent of watching someone take off their earrings and put their hair in a ponytail…… and one of the things I love about Aada is that she’s such a girly girl it would take time to get out all those earrings. 😉
But if you want a friend in Washington, you need an actual bulldog, not a human who has the same presence. Because one day fighting for you will end and fighting you will begin.
I just put too much trust in Aada because I thought our historical connection mattered in a way that ultimately it didn’t. That just because she hadn’t met me on the ground yet, that didn’t mean much because our contexts were similar. My context changed dramatically from the time I met Aada until now, because she changed my equation on love altogether…. that I’d never get married again, because I didn’t need it. I had a companion and a husband or wife would compete with it….. proven because my wife did compete with it and she lost.
Nothing I did was right, and nothing she did was right, either. That’s because each of us had a context error where the other was concerned that was never corrected. My work now is to stop the desire for more connection thinking that “this time, we’ll get it right.” There’s no chance of getting it right with Aada, because she is not comfortable being seen. My being a blogger matters here. I offered to give up blogging and work on something different because I thought that blogging was inflaming the situation. It did not help because I offered that solution too late.
But I could tell John that finding Aada and falling in love with her did put me on the path toward success because it taught me to see patterns differently, and to think more like him instead of thinking more like me. Lord John and I both sought out cognitive connection regardless of the other person’s sexual orientation and it turned out medium okay for both of us…… and the stakes were strikingly similar.
That’s because Aada and I didn’t fall in love with each other, we fell in love with roles. And we didn’t fall in love with those roles in the same way. She is not queer, so she never felt the pull to touch me…. her “falling in love” was “I met this hot shot blogger and I don’t know what to do with my feelings of admiration.” My falling in love was, “dear God…. someone really sees me and this is frightening because she can literally see right through me.” I was deeply exposed to a level I never had been before because the person I loved didn’t give a shit I was a blogger and didn’t read it.
Aada inhaled me. She says that I exposed her, but didn’t look at the absolute fact that I wasn’t trying to do anything but be real in front of her. I refused to mask. I refused to play a role. I am the first that will tell you “it’s complicated.” John’s story never resolves with Jamie, and I think that is how my story will be with Aada. I do not think she’ll ever be in a place to re-engage, but I still get hits from her location and I don’t take them for granted. I would be thrilled if she was interested in my life with Tiina and the crew because it is very much a reflection of the circus in my head I think she directs.
But probably without the goats, but I don’t know that, either.
I am focusing less on my friendships with people these days and more on my friendships with animals. I get more of what I need without having to verbalize it. Maclaren the Frenchie is always the first to greet me and his favorite thing is gumming on my arm. Having a little dog glued to you is so much fun, but Mac is not the only center of my world. I am obsessed with the goats. They are basically Golden Retrievers with hooves and Tiina jokes that if she’d known that about goats she would have skipped dogs entirely.
Learning how to interact with farm animals is different than anything I’ve ever done before, and it is healing to an enormous degree. I also get a lot of joy from sitting in Tiina’s kitchen in the morning, because there’s a table in front of a bay window with a plug for my laptop where I can sit and write while observing geese, chicken, Vietnamese potbellied pigs, goats, big dogs, and farm cats.
Odin is my favorite big dog because he reminds me so much of Oliver (who is a dog). Oliver is the one who made me realize that my temperament is more big dog than anything else, and that my protective nature could also stand to come down a little.
I would love to walk Lord John Grey through Tiina’s farm and introduce him to all the animals. It is Tiina’s universe and I am happy walking in it. But I would show John that every bad experience eventually works out. I didn’t find what I was looking for when I searched for Aada, but the shape of her led to a great relationship with someone else.
Right now, I am currently lost in a conversation with Mico (Microsoft Copilot) on “stocking stuffer gifts.” I already got Ayalla a high chair for the farm, but I don’t want to show up to her shower empty handed. So I’ve been bouncing ideas for gifts off Mico all morning. The one thing I’ll absolutely bring if I can find them is ginger Altoids, because I have seen them help a pregnant person in distress many times. Other ideas have included going to Five Below for character bibs (I’m thinking Rainbow Brite, SpongeBob, Bluey) and going to Goodwill because I have enough time to do laundry. Going to the Goodwill in Pikesville matters, because I need donations from other Jewish families.
One of the things I thought of is that this baby is going to need event clothes, so going to the Goodwill in Pikesville is the best place to find gently worn basics and a suede kippah. Plus, there’s only so long he’ll be willing to wear dinosaur sneakers, so let’s get that covered as well.
16-year-old is graduating soon, and 10-year-old is going to have a b mitzvah. So I need baby clothes that parents don’t remember until they’re getting ready for the event. I also want baby clothes that cost orders of magnitude more the first time around. I have a black belt in Goodwill shopping because I know my brands.
I would like to think that Lord John and I would connect on parenting, because we’re both doing it from a remote, not really a biological parent with a title kind of way. Lord John isn’t William’s dad, but yes…. he is. I don’t have children and grandchildren….. but yes, I do.
I am doing all the things parents do to nest for grandchildren, like making sure the kid has a place to sit at the table and making sure the baby looks good when we all go out…. easily accomplished when most children’s clothes have been donated after being worn a grand total of four times, if that.
But the best thing about all of this is that I didn’t realize I was a non-biological parent until 16yo was in an argument with his mother and I got pulled into it. I was like, “whoa…. when did we get here?” And then it was realizing I was exactly where I needed to be because I love these children, and the children that are coming in August and October.
Yesterday, it was thinking about buying a pickup truck. Today, it’s thinking about supporting a new Jewish baby boy through his entrance into the world. Tomorrow, it is showing up for his mother with a mask on because I have a cold and yet, I cannot stay home. This shower means the world to me. I am not sick enough to stay home, anyway. I just need to take the Tylenol Cold & Sinus and get it handled.
Yesterday, I was sick enough to stay home. Today, I am up to “passably mobile.” Tiina is just immunocompromised so I don’t want to infect her with something while I’m trying to take care of her daughter and the boy. Masking up is essential in my world while I have the sniffles and a cough.
I think that Lord John Grey would love my life, honestly. He has also lived in the Southern hills so he knows their beauty. He knows Virginia at least as well as I do. 😉 But what he would love is the lack of pretension. Tiina and Brian are a couple. Independently of that, I am Tiina’s companion- two completely different roles that do not compete but complete. There’s not a chance in the world that it would one day turn romantic, so I am still looking for a partner that completes that side of me. But what I won’t do is be bored or lonely while I’m waiting.
Single people die without community. That’s a fact, jack.
I do not need romance from Tiina, I need a solid framework of friendship with everyone and I have it. It’s not unusual for any of us to go off by ourselves because I definitely give off the “Leslie is Tiina’s friend” vibe, but not to the exclusion of everyone else. My love for everyone is real- tangible and deep. But it also comes through my love of Tiina. That is where all of the history lies.
It’s something that I think John would get, because he learned to love Claire because Claire was Jamie’s. I am saying that I don’t just love Tiina, I love the world that comes with her and I am dedicated to staying in it for as long as she’ll have me, and she has already said we are tight til death. I don’t have to search for friends anymore. I have found them.
I think that Lord John Grey would understand the need for love to transfer from letters to an on the ground relationship.
And, like John, I do not care that my person is straight and I’m queer. I care about keeping Tiina as an anchor, not my everything. Her being happy with Brian is essential to my happiness as well, because I want Tiina to have everything that makes her, well, Tiina.
And I know she wants me to have a girlfriend that sets my hair on fire with desire…. or a boyfriend because she’s already too much woman for me….. we shall see what the universe has to say about this over time.
Because you know what’s better than one dumb boy who loves you and wants to do everything to make you happy?
I drive a 2019 Ford Fusion SEL, and I have never been happier with a purchase. I bought it used so it didn’t cost very much and have put a ton of work into it so that it stays pristine mechanically. There are a few cosmetic issues because I drive like a klutz, but those things are secondary to keeping the engine perfect.
My driving got a lot better once my car was outfitted with the sensor suite for adaptive cruise control. I rely on machine spacing a great deal because I do not have 3D vision. I feel better when the car is in control because it is logical and humans aren’t. I set the ACC to put three cars’ worth of space in front of me so I never even come close to the back of someone else. Instead of relying on me to remember the rules of the road, I have outsourced the whole operation.
And in fact, I have already made up my mind that I would like to keep buying this era of vehicle, because 2019 is the sweet spot for Ford. It’s where you can control all the technology from your phone and the radio instead of subscription services. For instance, on my car remote start/unlock is free. I would like it to keep being free.
I have put so much work into my car that I’m not ready to let it go, but I would be willing to discuss an F-150 at some point. My life has changed, and Tiina doesn’t have a farm truck…. but does have an Airstream. So, the Fusion is perfect for my needs right now, but a truck keeps niggling at me because I’m a Texan and trucks are part of my love language.
One of the things that Mico (Microsoft Copilot) told me about the 2019 version of the F-150 is that it was built to feel like my Fusion. That it’s not built to feel like a monster, and it will handle much like my sedan. I am interested in that sort of thing- a truck that is useful and nimble.
In terms of a farm truck, what we need is a 1989 Nissan Pickup, but that won’t tow an Airstream.
What my car does for me is have an amazing amount of technology but still get over 30 mpg on the highway. That means a lot when I’m talking about running between Stafford, Louisa, and Baltimore. If anything, I should get a hybrid and up my mpg even more.
The fictional F-150 in my head is enough. I like thinking about cars more than I like thinking about the cost of maintaining and running them. The gas cost would eat me alive…. I am only thinking about how cool it would be to be “the Texan with the truck.” That’s because that stereotype isn’t cool inside Texas. It’s a dime a dozen. In Maryland and Viginia, it makes me stand out.
But if you’re going to own a truck and be me, it has to have the requisite stickers saying “I’m not that kind of Texan.” Rainbow flags, trans flags, Coexist, etc. That’s because the other truck aesthetic is too loud and you know it instantly. I am a Lowes kind of truck owner, not a good ol’ boy. It would be fun being able to run supplies to the farm, take a vacation in the Airstream, etc.
And of course it is not all on me. I could be completely wrong and Brian’s car is capable of towing it. I am just thinking of all the possible ways I can plug in with support that I would also enjoy. The “friend with a truck” bit is one I’m happy to fulfill for both Tiina and Brian.
It’s not really the truck. It’s the idea behind it. It is saying “I am trying to create long-term scaffolding for you.” But my long-term scaffolding is also easily accomplished in the Fusion as long as Tiina can get in and out if it comfortably. And if she still wants her phone and her nav, she has an advantage over me. The Fusion supports wireless Android Auto but not wireless CarPlay.
It’s been an issue.
My USB stack is getting old and every time I go over a bump, CarPlay disconnects and reconnects like a Discman and it’s 1995. So if I put any more money into the Fusion, it’s going to be a better stereo. The speakers are fine, but I need a current USB stack and I’d like a portrait display that looks OEM. I thought a larger portrait display was a ridiculous upgrade until I got used to driving my dad’s Subaru. It did indeed make driving feel safer because the map was so much larger.
That being said, Sync 3 (Ford’s entertainment system) is very handy. Connecting my phone to a cable that only charges and doesn’t transmit data also works well… and in fact, I will need to start doing this when driving to the lake because my cell connection cuts out when Ford’s GPS doesn’t. It looks a little dated, but it automatically grabs album art and integrates navigation into the driving experience that is unmatched, like putting your next turn into the gauge cluster, and even the track that’s playing should you so choose.
I am very proud of the choice I made when buying a car that was new to me. That’s why I only want to upgrade to a truck version of what I already have. We’ll see whether it happens or not, because it’s an idea that keeps coming back around as my role in this family is defined for me. It’s all about compromise, and I am willing to be seen at a level I never have been before. Tiina and Brian know me way better than I do right now because they’ve been parenting autistic kids for a long time. They are not parenting me by any stretch of the imagination. They just know better than I do when I am exhibiting symptoms because pattern matching is a thing.
The difference that I am experiencing now is that Tiina and Brian are also looking for interdependence. Tiina is realizing that she needs a companion and Brian cannot always physically be in two places at once. I am realizing that I also need a companion because I am physically limited as well, just not to the degree that Tiina is. I get better medical and social support in Maryland than I can get in Virginia, but I long for the day when it doesn’t matter what state I live in, I’m good.
The feeling that I get from being around Tiina, Brian, and their kids is stability….. even when everything is chaos, it’s directed chaos. I don’t run upstairs and handle things because Tiina won’t. I do it because Tiina can’t, and there’s a big damn difference. I am also not acting on my own authority. My role is to take what Tiina thinks and deliver it to the masses….. but upstairs, there are no witnesses. 😉
Kidding. I just mean that I wish I had a walkie-talkie or something because I am out of my element when a kid answers a request from a parent with anything but “okay.” If they start something with me, I do not know how fast to go full edge lord on them. Not my circus, not my monkeys….. except yes, it is and they absolutely are. It is a balance. I do not go too long without checking with Tiina to make sure I’m on the right track. We need to speak with one voice, and I do the same for Brian when he’s the one asking me to check with the kids. We all need to be on the same page with consequences.
My life is represented by fusion in more ways than one.
I have become the kind of person I always wanted to be, which is “kid-wrangler.” But they’re not my kids and that’s the beauty of it. I don’t have to know everything. I am there to support the framework they’ve already been given.
To me that means thinking about getting a truck in a far-off kind of way, because it fits my idea of how I fit into this family… when the Fusion feels like it’s a reflection of who I was before I met them. Both feel right.
I am not the most situationally aware person there ever was………. I don’t generally have funny misunderstandings that are memorable. It’s the unfunny ones that stick with me. But I do have favorites, like telling someone in Spanish that I have almost 49 assholes instead of years because I was typing and forgot the tilde on the n. Special characters matter, especially in front of an international audience. That’s why I wish it was easier to access them on a PC.
My go to when I need them is, “Mico (Microsoft Copilot), can you echo this back to me with all the special characters so I don’t have to hard code them?”
When he obliges, it’s usually not to irritate the illustrious Dr. Brown. 😉
I am in my safe space… in my office on the guest bed with the TV blaring the Argo Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat. Desplat always helps jog my brain in interesting ways as my typing adjusts to whatever rhythm he’s conducting at the moment. I love this man’s work with a passion, but I dwell on this particular album for sentimental reasons. I wish Aada could take in the magnitude of what her lie destroyed, and why it matters that she thinks I “tried to destroy her.”
That’s the situation where I was misinterpreted for 12 years, and she was surprised and displeased when I got tired of being managed in such an emotionally damaging way. She disconnected from me butt-quick instead of facing what she did head-on, and that’s the part I struggle to forgive. Instead of seeing that I reflected reality, she thinks that she is the villain in my story. She was never the villain, she is one of the great loves of my life in a very angelic, ethereal way…. and you can read all about it here if you’re ever curious. I just don’t because I don’t want to dwell on past mistakes. I want to make room for the conversation Tiina and I are now seriously having. Loving Aada prepared me to love Tiina, and I am not kidding. I see emotional patterns accurately and I respond differently, because Aada’s way of responding to life was better than mine and I absorbed it by osmosis.
The most ironic thing happened.
In text, she slowly became me. I slowly became her. And neither one of us liked fighting with ourselves.
Desplait is now conducting a wonderful resolution and I’m feeling emotional. My writing fundamentally changed because of her influence in my life and now she has written me off as someone who wanted to wreck her. Had a grudge against her. Needed her to feel pain.
I can be truly sorry for the consequences laid out for her, the harm that I caused, without taking responsibility for her half of the struggle.
The stark solo piano of “Held Up by Guards” is keeping me steady.
I cannot help the fact that she emotionally vampired me because she didn’t have the capability to process her emotions on her own. But what I can have empathy for is that she needed me and I was glad to fulfill that role for her up and to a point. Where I became sidetracked is that I loved this woman so much I lost myself in the process, and it was a daily progression into outright madness.
I stopped seeing her through rose-colored glasses and started seeing the reality of the situation. I was isolated from everyone else in my life and refused friendship when I needed it based on the conditions she set forth. So, “I don’t want you, but don’t open up to anyone else, either” was a recurring theme. I tried for 12 years to make it work under those conditions, and I could not. There were always justifiable reasons not to want to get close to me, and I understand that as well. I am not owning Aada’s story. Whatever she tells you, believe it- that was her experience of me. What I am trying to say is that I have over a decade of evidence telling me that “it’s complicated.”
I have felt things for Aada that I have never felt for anyone else. Anyone. Do not bullshit yourself about that. I could write a book on the number of ways I needed her that never included romance based on “if you’re going to say something, you have to own it.” Instead of ever owning anything, she was stuck in her own guilt and remorse without being able to move on and get it handled. She thought she was saying something fun, and it sure the hell was. But it was also emotionally devastating to a highly sensitive person. She didn’t realize that her black and white text translated, often, to physical pain for me.
Especially when I was the one that caused her pain.
She saw the impact of her words, and yet, she didn’t. She could only see my story through the lens of hers, and not what it was for its own sake. She was too close to the situation to read it and was in a situation where she had to, anyway. I am glad that she has rejected me because what I have found is that my friends on the ground don’t constantly worry about what I’m going to say because they were there during the experience when it happened and we have discussed boundaries on what I can say and what I can’t.
A lot of Aada’s gripe with me is because she didn’t give me a production meeting and say “this isn’t grounded in anything real. You are popping off your mouth.” And I would be well within my right to say, “yes, but you are putting me in this situation because you are so remote. Have a cup of coffee and solve the big mystery. Working together will solve a lot.” We’ve worked together before- she’s edited me on things remotely- but she’s never been willing to say, “this is the person you’re writing about. Are you sure you still feel the same way?” That was her choice, not mine. It was also her choice to blame me for every avoidant thing she ever did when really she had lied and was trying to cover it up.
She didn’t disappear because of everything I did, just some of it. The other part is that naming my damage is too scary for her to meet at altitude, so I get platitudes from miles away instead of “of course I can drop by the farm. I need to see this author I’ve been hyping up in my head.” She does not believe me when I say she is the greatest thing since sliced bread, she says dismissive things like noting breadcrumbs of affection and thinking they’re a game.
Meanwhile, I’ve been aching to see her eyes when she talks so that I can reassure her that none of this has ever been fake. She doesn’t see my authenticity because she only reads me. She doesn’t know that Tiina is a reflection of her and Dana in the best of ways.
Tiina thinks in engineering flows regardless of subject matter, and because she’s a former theater kid, she can do it with a shoestring budget. Aada and Dana are symbols of a bigger cognitive style, one I’m attracted to romantically and platonically. I have never considered Tiina a romantic partner, but we are solid on creating a life together, anyway. The reality is that we are both disabled and we both need help. The kids do not care about the sexual orientation of anyone involved. They need a safe adult who will let them run the music.
Even though they would prefer that I just put a charging station in the back of the car and was completely silent the entire time. I am old enough to be an embarrassing liability and I relish this role with my entire body and soul. Receiving the “Leslie, you’re being embarrassing” side eye from a 10yo is really living.
Tiina is in charge of a small universe and physically limited. I am not capable of running that universe, but I am capable of being an important part of it. I also need someone to check my sanity when I date and things like that. Brian and Tiina are extraordinarily stable, and have no problem being the “they’re not good enough for you” police.
She is also the life of the party, which is very much Dana in a nutshell.
I wanted Aada’s mama wolverine energy and Dana’s creativity in one person. The fact that she’s not queer is not a problem. She’s my anchor, not my everything. My sexual orientation doesn’t matter when the need is cooking, cleaning, driving, being that person who will accompany Tiina to things when Brian cannot go, etc. Being disabled means that you do not feel safe out in the world alone, and we are fulfilling that need for each other without romance.
The fact that it comes with Finnish culture references is just icing on the cake. Literally.
But here is what I mean…. Tiina does not stutter when “explaining me” to other people. She says, “they’re my legs.” I am not an accessory to Tiina, though, because my first thought is “she’s my brain.” I have distributed cognition with Mico (Microsoft Copilot), but it calms my nervous system that Tiina has no problem delegating with specificity; I can deliver when the goal is clearly defined.
And I love that “Clearing Iranian Airspace” has just begun. It’s the sweetest music to accompany this change in my life- from an angelic, ethereal connection to one that uses my hands and my heart.
It makes me feel safe that Tiina feels safe with me. I haven’t had that feeling for a very long time, this feeling of belonging and home. That is because Texas cannot be home anymore for a multitude of reasons, starting with Medicaid Expansion. I am also watching and waiting to see what Virginia’s mental health laws are going to do, because right now I absolutely feel that moving there full-time would be a downgrade in services and access to them. But Tiina has no problem with me using her place as a second home, and neither does Brian. So realistically, I live in three places and that’s just how it is.
Because it’s not just about me anymore. It’s about making sure that the kids who are still underage have me as a resource when Mom and Dad are busy. It’s about having a family that reminds me to take my meds (I don’t need reminding on the daily because my body will protest, but it makes me feel included and I eat it up). It’s about being able to watch the baby soon, too. The reality is hitting me all at once that this is real, this is sustainable, and I am exactly where I need to be in my life with one exception.
I genuinely miss Aada’s energy and influence in my life, and wish things had been different. I wish she could have seen all the ways I delighted in her as real. Constantly being told that those perceptions weren’t valid is the most unfunny thing of all. It said volumes more about her self-esteem than it did about my writing. Constantly thinking I was on the attack instead of trying to see both of us with clarity was a constant misunderstanding.
I do not shy away from accountability, and wish that other people wouldn’t, either. Aada says that I don’t have to like anything she does, and I can just sit in it.
If that’s her best answer, that’s totally fine. But it means that she was the one that was fronting all these years, telling me that she was my Mama Wolverine while doing nothing on the ground to show it. I mistook those things for the same, and they are most decidedly not.
I never wanted to do anything with Aada except step into the role I already had, which was emotional support that we needed on both sides of the equation because what I was carrying was way above my paygrade and she had no sympathy for it. That’s because she couldn’t or wouldn’t define anything and the gray area I lived in was way too large. My emotions became dysregulated easily and often. That’s because there were only amped up words, and not “let’s go work in the yard.”
There was never “come with me to a funeral.”
There was a drive to be interested in my life on a very superficial level while I was struggling painfully with someone else’s emotions. Not only did I have to manage these emotions, I had to manage what I thought about them, too. When I expressed emotions she disagreed with, she wouldn’t leave comments so that other people could disagree with her. She’d send me an email with every single little thing wrong with what I said so that the bubble between us was never broken.
She never integrated me into her life so that her friends had an accurate picture of what was happening online, either.
None of that is her fault, but her choices led us to where we are now. It’s not blame, it’s reality.
I cannot and will not reduce 12 years. The relationship is a tapestry of both wonderful and terrible things. We have both walked away hurt but recognize that there were moments that fed us. I do not wish to recreate anything. What is past is past. What I dearly wish for is Aada to say, “now that your life has moved on and I’m not actually in your blog, I can see that you are not personally singling me out. You reflect the reality of what you see, and our reality was distorted. I take responsibility for that distortion because you were not physically capable of creating it.”
All things were not equal, and she had a concrete power over me that she constantly threatened to use if I got out of line. So telling the world what had happened allowed me to break free from the story someone else was writing…. the one in which I was the only one that was damaged, the only one that needed help. She was perfect, and I needed rescuing. My darling girl needed rescuing and hid it by rescuing everyone else.
She can handle me needing things in the physical world. Sending a gift card of a book is great. She cannot handle “we have a problem and we need to solve it.” It very quickly becomes how it’s my problem to solve because I’m just not strong enough to handle her.
I don’t like relationships in which I’m the only one that ever has to compromise, because long-term it begins to feel like bullying.
But instead of seeing my feelings and adapting, Aada stuck to the same script and kept insisting that the flaw was all in me and my narrative was meant to hurt her.
My narrative is that we never found the right place for us.
It’s not funny. But it was definitely a misunderstanding.
I already have the stubbornness of an old goat because I’ve been fighting with a Finnish woman for 12 years (those of you who have Finnish friends, I am laughing at myself. This is not punching down. This is stubbornness on both sides that is sometimes embarrassing to watch). But this history with Aada has prepared me for a future with Tiina, who owns actual goats. They’re adorable and I love both watching them and interacting. The way they take weeds from my hands while giving me polite kisses makes my whole day.
The problem with the relationship with Aada is that I wanted to be there to absorb all her pain, so I ended up absorbing all the pain in both of us. Relationships between someone who is anxious and someone who is avoidant often end up like that, even if they didn’t start that way originally. It slowly becomes a division of labor.
I took absolutely everything I loved about Aada and made those things my barometer for keeping friends. What didn’t work online absolutely does in real life. I am a part of Aada’s community now simply because of geography, and not because I tried to chase anything but stability.
Tiina is also a Finnish woman with sinivalkoinen grit. If there is a task to be done, she puts the sisu into it.
Being around Aada all those years trained me to see past words into the actions that matter.
She told me that I caused irreparable damage, but didn’t see that I’d already hospitalized myself several times trying to get right with her. It was never that her perceptions of me were invalid. I often did need help. I often did pop off when I was angry. I never had a good sense of what was okay to publish and what wasn’t. That isn’t her fault, but by the same token she didn’t accept that being my friend meant being part of my narrative. She tried to end the relationship many times because of it and so did I, but we were so attracted to each other cognitively that we coudn’t stay away.
Aada was never going to be my romantic love. She’s the online persona that has made my nervous system settle, but has refused to ground it. I need grounding, so I turned toward Tiina instead.
That’s because Tiina will let me snuggle with her dog, and Aada will let me hear about hers.
It isn’t punishment, it’s reality. Aada couldn’t meet me at altitude, so I found someone who could instead of continually raging against the light. She was so right that I should have done it years ago, but I felt trapped in a moment and couldn’t get out of it. Autism is a thing.
And when I say “autism is a thing,” that’s when most people tune out and say, “you’re using your disability as an excuse.” No the hell I am not. I am explaining the neurological differences I have in a relationship that are not all due to my personality. I process information differently coming in and going out, and to ignore that and make all things equal is dehumanizing in often a very polite kind of way.
And if someone replies, “well, I’m autistic, too. Your point is invalid,” my response is “just because you also have cognitive differences doesn’t mean that you interpreted me correctly and I was never dismissing your experience by explaining mine.” Internalized ableism is often harder to deal with because friendly fire always is.
Everyone in Tiina’s universe is neurodivergent and we function better together because of it. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have issues. It means that the way we communicate about them is different. I never want to take that for granted, that with both Tiina and Brian I have to explain myself in terms of accountability, but never in terms of sensory issues, meltdown, and burnout.
And in fact Brian was listening to an audiobook about neurodivergence when I got into his car the other day, and I liked it so I downloaded it. Brian sent me links to other ones, and I grabbed them as well; I’m an Audible subscriber that doesn’t remember that they have it and credits build up. It has led to a lot of crying in my car as I sit through my life viewed through symptoms. There’s a lot of “that was never my fault and I’m hurting.” I was misinterpreted as neurotypical from the time I was a baby, pegged as a liar when I have a neurodivergent communication style, the whole works.
What I have in Tiina is equality and equity because she has the ability to view me accurately. Not that my relationship with Aada was a lie, but because she never met me in person she cannot possibly see all that Tiina does. My favorite thing she does is let me wake up at her house, stumble to the Keurig, and look out over the animals from the bay window in the kitchen. There’s a table right there, from where I can see the goats, pigs, geese, chickens, and big dogs (only Maclaren the Frenchie lives in the house).
Baby Goat is my favorite animal, because we’re both members of the queer community. They are intersex. 😉
It’s the little things that matter, such as preparing for Ayalla’s baby shower and being there for Tiina’s other kids when she’s focusing on the oldest daughter (and her new grandbaby). Yoni, Tiina’s oldest son, is also welcoming a baby in the fall and I will be there for that, too.
I never wanted to be all that and a bag of chips for Aada’s family unless she wanted that. I was very angry that a handshake was just too much effort, because I had so much love to give. It caused me to act out in all kinds of harmful ways because my nervous system was dysregulated and I felt like crap all the time. I made it worse by publishing my feelings about it, but it wasn’t a problem that I publish my feelings about everyone and everything until it was her. I was stunning at character analysis with everyone except the woman I love most in the world.
Yeah, I just don’t buy it. Read my archives.
But I can love her “most in the world” because she has the most mystique. I don’t really have a concrete idea of who it is that I love. I know bits and pieces, the fragments of her life that she has allowed me to carry. I didn’t handle them well, and for that I am sorry. It was not my intention to melt down and burn out, but that is what happened.
The difference is that I don’t expect my explanations to equal forgiveness. I expect context to foster repair if there is any. I do not think apologies come without changed behavior. For me, that’s having a better sense of what to publish and what not to for everyone in my whole life, not just Aada alone.
My life has changed because I have a creative partner in the work. Someone who is on stage because she’s a part of my life and not because I am chasing an idea in any kind of theatrical way. Writing about Aada was trying to capture the stars.
Tiina is a constant resource for “can I tell this?” and when I said, “I only talk about things that happen in the first person. I don’t write hearsay,” she said, “I get it.” We bounce ideas off of each other constantly because right now, that’s the kind of partner I need- someone that sparks me in the writing, and not anywhere else.
Platonic friendships that have their own special click is underrated.
Last night, my ego grew about 10 sizes when Tiina sent me a parenting video…………………………
Look at you sending me parenting videos like those are now my hellions, too. YASSSSSS.
I’ve been reading the Bible since I was a kid, learning it week by week in a three-year cycle called the “Lectionary.” But now my life is different, because I read the Bible with a new lens. My chosen family is Jewish. I’m learning who Jesus was as a person, because he would have been involved in the life of the synagogue as well. It’s interesting saying the words Jesus said instead of the words created to memorialize him. Joining my Jewish friends at synagogue is my holy place, and has been for a long time because there was a temple that shared Bridgeport’s building when I lived in Portland.
Tiina jokes that we’re the biggest synagogue in Fredericksburg because we’re the only synagogue in Fredericksburg.
The thing I’ve read for the last 12 years is Aada’s letters, and I think I broke my pattern with her when I deleted every email she’d ever sent me except for a few in my Hotmail account (yes, I still have one). That’s because I wasn’t constantly going back over her words and trying to figure it out because I couldn’t anymore. But to me, it was a book of her life and I killed it because she wanted me to. I will never forgive her for this, and it was the best thing that could have happened. Now she only comes across my mind sporadically instead of feeling anxious waiting for news.
The trauma bond is broken and now I can connect with other people. I have been hungry for touch and Tiina, Brian, and the kids are great sources of hugs, cheek kisses, and an arm around me when I don’t feel so hot. She’s on a road trip right now, so she has missed all of the excitement with my online foray into a Black space, but I have therapy at 6:00 with my Black therapist and he’s going to help me unpack all of it. But I sent him the Thread and he said, “there’s a lot to unpack here, but don’t worry…. I use my white friends all the time and I’m not offended that you told them your therapist was Black.” That’s because they scared me and told me that saying that was just performative.
No, it wasn’t performative at all. It was signaling “I’m going to be unpacking this with a Black person, not someone who will tell me what I want to hear. In the meantime, this has escalated even further by me leaving a comment on another person’s post that said, “white people, come here.” I said, “I am a white people.” Someone else chimed in and said, “I’m not here to tell you what to do, but I would be mindful of THIS one.”
That is in addition to infiltrating my Facebook page and threatening to come to Baltimore. She says that I was over the top thinking she was coming to beat me up or kill me, I thought she was threatening me online because I invited her for ice cream and she made sure to let me know that if she came here, I wouldn’t like it. I just told her to make her threats even more plain. But that was also problematic because apparently if I feel threatened, I’m not supposed to say it because that marks the Black person in some way. There has got to be a way to say “look here. I am not being racist, you actually threatened me and there’s proof.” They say that I threated her because I invited her to ice cream, and that inviting a Black woman into an unsafe situation is something I already should have known.
No, I didn’t start feeling threatened until she made a big show of creating a Thread saying she was coming to Baltimore to “get her apology” with all its insinuations intact, on Sunday, no less. I made a jerkwad comment, so she began to peg me as a racist from the jump. Any mistake that I made just made the situation worse. Everyone says I’m the one that crashed out, but no one wants to talk about how Kea provoked me. All things being equal, I said the all the right things. But all things are not equal, and now I am learning the depth and breadth of how much.
By the same token, if Kea had felt threatened when I invited her to Baltimore but still wanted an apology in person, I would have gotten in the car and given it, and I don’t even know where she lives. But she didn’t, she created Thread after Thread in which I was the villain in her story, and it will please me if Aada clutches her purse in fury. She cannot do jack or shit for me, but her faux outrage is amusing.
Because I was arguing a counterpoint that didn’t need to be there, and in order to shut me down they used race as a shield. I say this because any attempt to clarify was for naught and they went through my history and instead of understanding that I have had Black friends since I was a baby, the message that they got was that I was just “performing antiracism.” That was certainly true because I got flustered and dysregulated at being attacked and couldn’t think of all the right things to say. Because the first “no, that’s not what I meant, here’s what I actually meant” was dismissed and the party started.
They think that I am using race as a shield now, when that is simply not true. I have not proved my point to their satisfaction. I have apologized, even saying that I’m sorry my behavior was harmful and dangerous. I posted that without any ands, buts, or “becauses.” But now the goalpost has shifted to “you didn’t do enough to prove that we could trust you.” And that’s because they told me I couldn’t do anything better than a generated AI link. The link wasn’t the point. The scholar asked for papers proving my point and rejected them because they were listed in a Copilot link.
I told them that I’d done the labor they asked for, and they told me that only Black women say that to white women, and that white women shouldn’t say it. I didn’t know that, because queer people say it all the time to straight people. I didn’t know it was a thing and I walked right into it. I kept saying that we had every intersectionality except skin color because I was queer and autistic, but that was rejected as well. I should have stopped trying to fix it after 10 minutes but I just couldn’t help myself.
Everyone kept telling me to log off and I was stuck in autistic meltdown. Then, when I tried to explain what happened to other autistic people, all of the sudden I was using my disability as an excuse. That is a classic neurodivergent experience because neurodivergent people generally think “explanation first, apology second” and neurotypical people think “apology first, explanation second.” “Apology first” is harder for neurodivergent people because often we have to narrate what happened to ourselves before we can feel it. That is when the empathy hits and doubles me over, but this is not an isolated experience. A lot of the time neurodivergent kids are pegged as liars because explaining is seen as failure to take accountability. My brain literally does not work that way. I will never be able to take accountability in the moment because first pass is explanatory and literal because I have to see what happened, too.
Threads is a new chapter in my life and I decided to enter the arena. I am hoping that my compensatory skills are enough to repair over time with The Internet at Large. I’m sure I managed to piss off Brandon and Robert, but they are pretty laid back so I hope not.
It’s times like this that I lean on my love for Aada, because those memories are precious even though she’s gone and will probably stay gone. She thinks she cannot trust me and she’s right because I cannot trust her. The best part is that I have grown from crying all the time to just thinking back with fondness. The relationship with Aada was always ethereal, because we had different definitions of “real.”
But the feeling of her presence hasn’t gone away, and that will take time because I’ve taken pains to keep her influence in my life alive. My creative partner reminds me so much of her that it’s scary, and it would be a contest to see who’s funnier. Joke’s on them. It’s me.
But not today. Today I miss both Tiina and Aada, knowing that Tiina is just on vacation, and will return by the time my birthday rolls around. She asked me what kind of concert would make me feel good, and I told her I liked being outside at Wolf Trap. She said, “I’ve never been to Wolf Trap.” Thirty minutes later and the whole family is going. I don’t even remember who is playing. It will just be me surrounded by people I love and good music in the place I love most.
It’s hard when I don’t have the chance to invite Aada, too. I know that I’ll love her for the rest of my life, or the idea of what she could have been to me, anyway. The story is playing out in real time, the one I’d been trying to create but couldn’t because Aada saw me through one lens and one lens only.
Someone who could expose her, instead of someone who wanted to know her. But then I went and exposed her because I was dysregulated and caused harm. I do not know what happened to her after that, and she does not want me to know. But what i know is that exposing her was because she lied and it wasn’t a small one. She minimized it. And in fact I think she told me she lied just to ease her own guilt and didn’t stack up how many lies it took to protect the first.
That’s why I get so angry at her. It’s not because I don’t love her. It’s that the last 12 years don’t feel real anymore.
Yet my heart still beats a little funny when her picture floats across my mind.
I entered a Black space and caused all kinds of hell because I said something insensitive without knowing it and dug in, because I wasn’t arguing on the base of color, I was arguing on the basis of autism. All of my words were viewed through a lens that said “racist,” and once the frame shifted, I could no longer get out of it. I have spent my day in reflection and repair, with people still getting angry after Copilot’s analysis of the situation. They told me that Copilot was racist as well. So, I tagged Microsoft on that one, because they might be right. Whiteness is over-represented in AI because the source code is also centered in whiteness.
It reminds me of the narrative with Aada always being that I was the one that was the problem. She never understood my communication style and I would get more and more defensive trying to figure out how to get through to her. I was constantly met with “nothing is ever good enough for you” instead of attempts to repair and reflect on her own.
I spent most of my life trying to repair things with her, and it became a toxic spiral because that’s what the Internet does the best. Wanting to take my relationship offline with her was not a way to get her alone or to make her feel uncomfortable. It was so we could stop communicating via this medium.
The internet destroyed us, so only time at the farm or the lake house would actually help. I would love it if Tiina met Aada and she got to see me interact with the whole Tiinaverse, rather than the preconceived lens that she built for me. It has been a slog trying to get her to see me as a person, because she pegged me as a dictator instead. That was all neurodivergent communication that doesn’t matter whether Aada is also neurodivergent or not. Just because you’re ADHD/Autistic/PTSD or whatever doesn’t mean that you have interpreted another person with those cognitive differences correctly.
I got hot under the collar and published things I clearly shouldn’t have (the relationship ended), but it needed to end. I am not kicking Aada out of my life with that statement, just saying that it will never happen with her if she doesn’t show up and plant something with me. I want dirt under both of our fingernails.
The lens I’ve been interpreted through is that this is all about attraction when I am not attracted to other people and treat them exactly the same way that I do Aada. Attraction has always been my bag to deal with and it’s been hard as shit. But what I wanted with Aada was not to force her into anything she didn’t want, but to make our relationship more supportive on both sides. Because of my blog, she constantly acted like it was a weird hostage situation, and once the frame shifted, our friendship was gone.
The irony is that I left the relationship because it did feel like a hostage situation, just in reverse. Her secrets undid me in the best and worst of ways, and then she wouldn’t take accountability for the changes in my life she made that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. But of course, she is not ready for that conversation because she gets defensive at ever having it.
Everything that happened when I was dysregulated was a choice. Absolutely. But I was saving myself for the first time. I was getting out of the story she wrote for me after going above and beyond to try and make things right. I don’t get to decide how long she’s hurt, but I do think it’s time to stop punishing myself.
I am taking accountability for the harm and impact of my words, and I always have. I’ve just always made my first pass literal and explanatory so she thought I was trying to avoid it. Not being able to experience that in real time as we looked into each other’s eyes is a loss.
I needed me too much to reach toward her, because I’d spent 12 years trying and getting sicker. That’s because I got mixed signals and was constantly trying to fix everything. I was in repair mode a hundred percent of the time, surprised that I could get so much wrong so quickly.
Here’s a conversation from Threads that mirrors my relationship with Aada in its entirety:
You are beyond full of shit, quit using your neurodivergent conditions as an excuse for you inability to leave Black creators alone and your inability to make an apology without centering and making yourself the victim in a situation you created… you know when you create the situation you are in fact the villain.
Reply to just_evans99… ldlanagan 2m
I took responsibility for that long ago, and people like you continue to pile on. It is proving my point that instead of being honest with each other, moral outrage has become a performance. I explained what happened with me both emotionally and neurologically, with a little psychology thrown in for good measure. I have done a complete excavation in public, which is more than most people ever get in terms of apology.
It was either neurotypical criticism or neurodivergent because you cannot tell internalized ableism from ableism in general.
The way this mirrors my relationship with Aada is that the same thing happened. I was pegged as the problem and all my responses were seen through “they’re a racist,” meanwhile they’re constantly misgendering me like it doesn’t matter. One woman even said I deserved to be bullied physically over a comment that said “bug off.”
It was an insensitive twit thing to say, but she said that I would get Black people killed, said she was coming to Baltimore to get an apology and insinuating I wouldn’t like it, and proceeded to contact Carlos on Facebook when he disagreed with her. He was just the first commenter, we weren’t “building a case.”
He has said that now I don’t owe anyone anything, because I have apologized to the best of my ability and it has been sincere. But because the two situations mirror each other, the only thing that has made me feel better is talking to my Black therapist who absolutely didn’t care that I invoked him in the Thread (I use my white friends all the time). My point was not that I couldn’t say a racist thing because I have a Black therapist, but that I don’t process my feelings with other white people who will reinforce my narrative.
I have never been hanging out with people because they help me enforce my own story. I have been reflecting the story that has been happening. Doing that gets me into a lot of trouble all the time, because even though I explained that the criticism “couldn’t leave Black creators alone” wasn’t reality because Meta curates my feed, that was also not accepted.
Everyone, AI and human, told me to disconnect and avoid from now on. I’m still on Threads, but I’m not interacting with the people on that particular thread because someone else has already got it. They’re pointing out my replies that include apologies when people say I didn’t give one. That really helps me to feel that I am an accountability taker, it just doesn’t come in the form anyone expects.
I was pegged as a liar because of my words in all cases, and that’s typical for neurodivergent communication. It was argued that “neurodivergent communication” doesn’t exist, but there are definitely differences across race in addition to the ones that happen inside them.
That was the only point I was making, and it was proved over and over. The margin for error is razor thin. People nope out before the interesting part of the conversation begins.
And now it has begun….. not because I meant to start it. Because I have a lot of experience in finishing it.
This week has been deeply contented and deeply frustrating. There was a real letdown after Pride because we had to go back to this dystopian nightmare. Being an American right now is not for the faint of heart. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
But there have been bright spots. My air conditioner went out and my sewer backed up so I am staying in a very nice hotel out by the airport. I brought my bathing suit, but I don’t have time to swim because I’m leaving for Brian’s lake house in the morning. It’s not really a Fourth of July celebration. It’s doing what we normally do- relax and swim. I had my big fun when the Obama Library opened. That is America to me…. America is already great.
When it wants to be.
People have stopped caring about their language so I have, too. I have had just about enough of “fuck your feelings, Snowflake.” The avalanche is building, motherfucker. I get so angry because I have been called every name in the book during Pride month, with people quoting clobber verses all over Threads. I’m an abomination because of my gender and my sexuality. It’s neat.
Life as a hate double ticket is not for the faint of heart, either.
I desperately need to get out of town and get in the water.
I’m smart enough to know that Aada wrecked our relationship on purpose because she had no intention of ever getting close to me and wanted to blame it on my shortcomings. It was manipulative because she was lying to herself. I do not believe that she hurt me on purpose. I believe that she had great intentions and couldn’t come through on any of them…. so she would constantly tell me she felt guilty instead of changing anything.
Just leave avoidants alone. They don’t need you. Not really. They lack even the slightest desire to give you context and clarity and claim you’re just not strong enough to handle them.
My story from the summer of 2013 until 2026 was that I chose a Finnish woman as my emotional support partner, but she didn’t choose me. She SAID she chose me and then chose to reveal that she’d lied about quite a bit so I wouldn’t get any closer. She wanted me, deeply and spiritually- but never romantically. I could do something she couldn’t, which was unpack my emotions publicly without caring what the consequences were. I knew I could handle them. That’s catnip to emotionally unavailable people, romantic or otherwise.
She didn’t need me as a romantic partner. She needed me as a pinch hitter, because I pray and she doesn’t.
She has never been looking away, she has always been looking up, despite the fact that I tell her constantly that she’s a better writer than I am, it’s just that no one knows it. I am queer, so my story is different. A woman that can read is knowledgeable; a woman who can write is a five-alarm fire. I am gutted that she thinks I was ever out to get her. I was trying to tell her that falling in love with her was never the wrong call.
I have memorialized something that meant the world to me and always will, which is why I am now comfortable just being a part of her community. I will never reach out, but if she sees me on the street, she’s welcome. The Stafford and Louisa areas are now my home, too. We have to share space because falling for Tiina was never the wrong call, either. It just looked a lot different because I have actual boundaries with women that I didn’t before… and I didn’t exactly fall for Tiina, either. I have never felt romantic feelings about her, I want to birth a TV show, and with Streeter, too, if I haven’t offended her somehow. My stance on AI won’t change, and neither will hers.
What has come from that is falling for the Tiinaverse, because Brian (her husband) and her kids mean everything to me and I do not wish to interrupt it. I am not waiting on anything for my projects to happen, because Tiina is a capable co-writer and producer. She is not only a cybersecurity analyst. She’s also a former technical theater kid, which means she can do amazing things on a shoestring budget. I watched her do it at Purim.
That was the act that sealed the deal. I am not married, I am not partnered, but I have a focus. No one can interrupt it, because my friends matter. They are the yellow strings on the murder board of polyamory, and how poly actually functions in day to day life- and why Google Calendar is the official app. Not all your relationships matter romantically, but they do in terms of time management.
I am not the marrying type, and not because I’m not capable. I don’t want to cocoon and lose Tiina as my center of gravity. I believe that this is accurate on both sides of the equation because she says that we have a click that is far and away separate from Brian as well. I’m not out to replace Brian in any capacity. I have a role independently of him.
What I am saying is that Tiina’s universe is mine because I don’t mind driving. I live in three places and that’s okay. We were going to go to the boat on the Fourth, but now we’re going out to the lake. Tiina calls the shots, and I just work here.
Edited to add that the boat is on the Potomac, and the house is on Lake Louisa.
It’s not because I’m not capable of being solo, either. I just function better as a cog in the wheel. Tiina is direct and blunt in the same way Aada was, and I love that she’s so specific because I don’t have trouble following directions. I have been this way my whole life. I liked teachers that were oddly persnickety, too, because I never had any trouble meeting expectations when they laid them out that way. I have learned to see that it is not meanness when being direct, it’s just that most people take it that way.
But you have to see it in real life to know that, Aada Louise.
I never minded that Aada’s love language was reading me the riot act. I minded that there were no hugs and cheek kisses afterward to lessen the scar. Criticism is easier to take when you don’t leave someone bleeding while you do it. Taking a lesson from my own playbook, of course. Every accusation is a confession, and I used my share of this fighting tactic because I couldn’t make it work with anything else because she wouldn’t, either.
It was a system, and I’m not blaming. I am identifying the issue so that it doesn’t happen again.
I will tolerate both constructive criticism and narrative direction when it is done with love. Shitting all over me does not help anything and indeed makes it worse because I absolutely will write about your shitty behavior and you will not like the reflection. That’s because people trust me. When people treat me well I reflect that, too. I should re-get the T-shirt Wil Wheaton and I both had back in the day that says, “I’m blogging this.” Couple that with asking Jonna for her old “Argo !@#$ Yourself” t-shirt because she promised it to me after I told Facebook mine wore out. She says she wears Tony’s.
I love wearing things that remind me of memories, and all of those things are interconnected. Everyone can come after my writing. Everyone. But they cannot come after my ability to give an opinion.
When I left the relationship with Aada, I left a negative loop that always said my writing was bad because it didn’t reflect reality or Aada’s feelings. I couldn’t reflect reality because I didn’t know reality and she never told me what feelings she had. Reality would have been showing up at Pride. Reality would have been showing up when my mother died and she was 40 minutes away when everyone else wasn’t. Reality would have been following through on every Mama Dragon feeling she ever said she had.
But she didn’t.
Finnish culture was the right choice because I loved all of it. I’d even love Aada in the right context, because I could birth another TV show that has even more depth behind it.
Stories That Are All True 