Trauma Bonds -or- Go to Hell, Michael Jackson

July 9, 2023July 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Bryn,

I have to start this entry as a letter to you, or I will lose my courage and not post this at all. Clearing it up with the Fanagans that you have said “write whatever you want. I don’t care.” So, fair warning. I will.

I also know that you are not frightened by the title, because you know where I’m going with this because we just talked about it this afternoon. All of this is to avoid blowback. I know that “don’t go bitch to Bryn. You only think I’ll fuck you up. Bryn will hide your body” is sound advice.

No one would ever know. In order to be truly frightening, you have a big backyard…… of which I am stunningly aware in case I’m ever an asshole. 😛

I have loved you for three lifetimes, and I will love you for as many as we have left. I have no idea what our future holds, but I know that whether we’re together in the same city or apart is of no consequence. Facebook video calls travel, and we don’t waste time on small talk. My pain is yours, and your pain is mine.

My heart sighs in palpable relief that our lovebombing has been genuine for over a quarter of a century. As I told you on the phone, I should have known the first time we disappeared at a party that it was for life…. the way it would have been with more people in our circle if they hadn’t been such dipshits, and I only use that word specifically because our mutual friend’s partner didn’t understand trauma bonds and said friend was absolutely handfasted to me whether she asked me to marry her or not.

If that partner had wanted to undo it, she should have shown up ten fucking years earlier. Michael Jackson is more famous, but he has too many fucking faces. Some of them are round cheeked and have a great smile.

If our “friend” had been truly honest, she would have said as much. She would have said to her partner that she had roped me in and there was nothing she could do about it, so fucking deal. She should have said that it would injure us both. What she told her partner was that she “thought I would go away when I was 18.”

The partner before her was a fucking mess, so she dicked me around. She needed someone, but it shouldn’t have been me for two reasons. The first is that I was in middle school. Take that in, bitches. The second is that as an INFJ, I could feel her emotions coursing through me better than I could feel my own. I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL.

I know you know the story, but you weren’t there for the beginning. You weren’t there when I lost my life and started living hers. You weren’t there when I was 14 at school and 25 at home. I’m so sorry if sitting in this shit is painful. Don’t read it all at once.

You notice that no one asked about the other little girls.

But I fucking noticed.

I talked, and most of our friend group shot me to shit because they couldn’t see me as a hurt child. They fucking wrote me off as a bipolar adult and people were STILL BEING HURT. Oh my fuck I am never going to stop being angry about this, even though she’s forgiven honestly and completely. I cannot carry that much pain, and I refuse. It’s just the lingering anger that irritates my trauma bond. Hearing Cynthia Erivo sing the Rutter Pie Jesu on Fresh Air almost sent me to the hospital because I thought I was going to die and it was just a panic attack. Do you know how traumatized you have to be to feel like there’s no difference between a panic attack and a myocardial infarction? (LMGTFY)

Yes, you know what that is (say that in a Dalek voice- obligatory Doctor Who joke).

All the love that doesn’t belong to Oliver (since you are aware that you are in second place with both puppies),

Leslie

Once I started talking about being abused, I couldn’t stop. I would drop another Google tattoo, except every time I see her name I want to fucking throw up. That’s because she fucked me up, and never apologized for it except one e-mail in 23 years….. she said, and I quote, “I can see how some of those conversations would be confusing and upsetting to you.” AYFKM? That’s it? That’s 23 years’ worth of apologies?

Then she had the audacity to make an “It Gets Better” video for young people. I won’t link to it, because it makes me vomit. She became the director of the Portland YOUTH Philharmonic, and no one knew SHIT. I protected that path for all it was worth, and I am so done. SO. DONE.

There’s going to be a lot of cursing in this one because I’m so fucking angry right now. One trauma bond snapping reminded me of that one, in which the relationship was over twice as long a time period and every bit the same outcome. It’s just that in this case, she was the one that fucked me over, and I did not stop the cycle. I took it out on someone who absolutely did not deserve it, and I cannot blame anyone for that except sitting it at that woman’s table and making sure she doesn’t return the fucking casserole dish. I had no culpability. None.

That’s because I realized that my beautiful girl lovebombed the fuck out of me, and I did it to her right back. Here’s the thing, though. People who have been lovebombed by narcissists don’t recognize when it’s genuine. They don’t recognize love that goes that deep, that crazy, that a relationship can keep up that intensity, because they’re constantly wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. There is a moment in every relationship with a narcissist where you do something wrong, the sun turns, and you’ll never see it again. You will be trapped in a trauma bond with the wrong ass person. You will grovel like a worm to get that dopamine back, because childhood PTSD doesn’t allow for much else. Narcissists fucking bank on it.

I didn’t trust Supergrover’s love as far as I could throw it, and acted as such. For her, I’m betting that’s relatable in The Later Years. I know this because changing her tune from lovebombing to no affection in her tone at all and completely shutting down emotionally let me know she was in protection mode, strengthening the fortress so that I couldn’t get in.

That’s because if you think trading dick for a live in chef is offensive, you should have seen what she let me get away with in The Early Years. It fucked me up, because I knew I had no chance at any real relationship with her again. She fucking told me she had to lose weight and I told her I’d take it off in a week. Joking was fine before, but not fine after, and it would have been a beautiful thing to know that before I stepped into it up to my ass. I even joked about having an affair under everyone’s radar, and the way I phrased it made even her laugh. So, to have that be a trigger instead of a source of amusement also ate my lunch, because it made everything seem so much worse. I would hope that she has found in retrospect that my sapiosexuality had been groomed. That I did not escape perpetuating carnage, but when I realized it, there wasn’t a hole in the ground big enough.

THANKS FOR THAT. I won’t go into namecalling, but you can imagine what’s in my head right now. It’s not great. I want to tear her limb from limb the way I wanted to take her partner apart WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. I had all the rights and responsibilities of a loving partner without any of the fun stuff, because she has had and will have emotional affairs with anyone dumb enough to fall for it. People don’t change without significant work, there’s no statute of limitations on guilt, and there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “can’t.” If you become her best friend, which she will tell you often that she is, but really you are her pet person because she knows she’s better than you. She doesn’t pick people smarter. No predator does. I also doubt that age matters. She can take a fully functioning adult and make them a shell of a person and it doesn’t take even a week. I can name names, and I would if I could ask them first. I blocked the minors on Facebook because I didn’t have enough strength to reach out. I also didn’t have enough strength to look at their faces in my feed. If she read this, she’d be furious, because she doesn’t see what I saw. She lovebombed the fuck out of every woman around her, no matter whether they were little girls or grown ass adults. In order to find people to control, you have to put out feelers.

The relationship with my beautiful girl was a reflection of what had happened 10 years earlier, and it’s eating my fucking lunch, so may I repeat myself…… THANKS FOR THAT. She should have had to destroy herself over it. Get right with God. What the fuck ever. But let me let you in on a little secret. Her actions fucked me up so bad that a therapist told me she was too close to retirement to take me on… that healing me would take five to ten years….. and because I couldn’t see the feelers, I couldn’t take in real love, either. It was suspect. Unsafe. My heart beat to it….. “unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe.” I became the Master when I took in the whole vortex at once. Here’s where I surprised Zac by going dark. All abused children are “The Timeless Child.” Even The Master and The Doctor are the same person. If I think about that long enough, it gets chewier.

It leads my mind to Dexter violence. Thank God I’m not violent, I’m just a kid with a keyboard, which is absolutely more than she’ll ever have and very effective. I won’t physically hurt you, but in a letter I’m Hattori Hanzo. I will leave you in ribbons. You’ll never get me out of my head, which is far superior to a good ass kicking. That’s because my therapy is right here where I can go back to it. If I falter in strength, I have a place to go that says fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

What killed me was pointing my sword in the wrong direction, and dear God I didn’t mean a double entendre but I see it and I can’t decide whether to leave it or save my ass. Eh, I’ll leave it. It’s a brilliant self own, if nothing else.

But what I’m really saying is that I lost my mind and she fucking stole the TARDIS and said, “drinks on the moon?” It has never occurred to me before now, but I’m not Rory the Roman. I haven’t been. For 10 years, I have been The Master and her Impossible Girl. She has no idea how much I mean this, and because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she won’t take in its enormity. For every bit that I felt a connection with The War Daniel, I felt the same pull toward her in a different way. I wanted both of them not just for this regeneration, but for all of them. The child, the teenager, the decades with different stories and faces. I would have loved her with this much intensity until she died if she would have only let me. Our bond makes it almost impossible for anything else to seem important, again, so personal to the two of us that I just don’t want to let go of it. I never will, even if people don’t understand and I have no choice but to look like a nutter. It makes me anxious that people will again write me off as a bipolar adult when they couldn’t find a clue with both hands.

Also. I love how The Doctor says they’re “not that kind of Doctor,” yet The Master and The Doctor are the same person and their initials are MD. To all the Whovians who will gatekeep and say I’m wrong, they just share DNA, Southerners never let facts get in the way of a good story. See title of blog.

I have to be angry here, because if I don’t, the MIDDLE SCHOOL trauma bond will reactivate. Who else would she tell her secrets besides someone she could control? It was too risky to be vulnerable with someone she couldn’t. My beautiful girl tried to control me in the same way, for entirely pure reasons. There is nothing in the world I feel more than her right to feel however she wants. It’s just that she seemed to be wrapped too tight, I was wrapped too loose, and we never rapped.

“You like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.” (When did you say that? Day one. She appealed to my ego, and no writer in the world would react differently, especially an unknown quantity like me.) DO YOU SEE WHAT THAT WOMAN MADE ME LOSE? I perpetuated the cycle, and I lost a friend who would have moved mountains for me. I know that because she did it. In every way possible, I wanted to save her because she saved me first. I wrote that line about Dana, but only half of it did I really mean for her. It didn’t make my feelings for Dana less intense, only shared.

I spent 2003 obsessed with The Eminem Show. I am not sure she didn’t. Now, I listen to “Love Game” all the time and nearly fall apart with laughter.

“Have a blessed day.”

She’s told me what she drives, and I know damn well that if we were screaming down 66 we’d have all the windows down and the music blasting loud enough for the entire city to enjoy. I don’t think of this song as being about her. I imagine us both enjoying thinking about subject matter.

Now, when I have a genuine need from my beautiful girl, she only tells me that she is frankly tired of being guilted over it. To take an example from the song, neither one of us forgot the other’s birthday……… at first. That’s actually the thing that drew me to her the most when we started talking reconciliation. She forgot several years running and then couldn’t always e-mail me on my actual day, but started remembering again. She even sent me a fairy tale book last year, and I ate it up (it wasn’t Stephen King. It was a reimagining of Peter Pan). It wasn’t that it was never enough for me. It’s that remembering my birthday is a huge damn deal. I don’t care about the presents, I care that she’s so busy she can’t even breathe. She barely knows the date and time. And yet for a moment the clock stopped on Sept. 11th, with a note saying she’s sorry she forgot. I was completely fucking undone, because that showed me so much love and respect that I could not even. It wasn’t that she couldn’t commit to small things. It’s that she thought I was too much for her on the big things. Even the big things could have been solved with Jack Daniels on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Eight years since the original break (seven and a half at most) and she thinks all I’m doing is trying to rattle her. Does this even make any sense if my letters are the same as my blog? That I see everything as a spectrum and not only will I let her know what is going wrong, but what is going right? I have been every bit as rabid with love as I have been with you. How she could look at that and say I see nothing but negative says I’m not the only one with rejection sensitivity dysphoria.

And yet, I am careful about painting my feelings as fact, because even though I write like that, I am relentless in saying “this is only my opinion.” Take it or leave it, seriously. I don’t care how you respond. I care whether I’m stuffing down emotions because all INFJs get ill from negative feelings. We feel everything, which is one of the reasons I think my bond with both women was so incredibly hard on me.

So.

Fuck Michael Jackson.

If you think the two stories aren’t inextricably interrelated, you’ve never seen my abuser work a room. Fuck me. She’s so powerful she can suck up everything. The carnage in her wake…..

She was a fucking opera singer. In what world would a lesbian who looked like that, had that much talent, and made it unclear whether she was romantically interested or not would I not lose my fucking mind? I was 14. My hormones had kicked in very, very recently. I had no idea what love was.

Here’s the reason I’m a ninja blade. It is now 33 years later, and I am only now able to really staunch the bleeding. To say she didn’t know what she was doing is criminal, even though she didn’t break any laws. Let’s say she didn’t. Let’s say all the other women were totally above board, even though anyone with eyes could see something was wrong. She was 25 years old.

23 years of the monster in my head and the ghost out to get me.

Now, I’m living my life by telling everyone who doesn’t believe me to go to hell, because you were there and you did nothing. You didn’t save any of the others, and you didn’t believe me. You should check in with them and make sure they’re okay, because when I saw them, they were FUBAR and you were silent, because you thought you were better than them, too…….. because she was still lovebombing you. You didn’t walk into the game, because you were stronger than her. We were weak and couldn’t hack it. Seems legit.

It’s interesting that she met me when I was 12, but I didn’t feel sexual energy in my direction until I was 14. Two things are completely fucked up about that. The first is that it shows grooming with intent. The second is that no healthy adult tells a child things that are way too big for them. It created my most devastating secret; I learned the power of what childhood emotional abuse could do. We don’t understand it, but we crave our abusers. We walk toward it because the control is complete. We feel ourselves wanting to have sex years before we’re ready, because whether you’re a monster or totally clueless, you’ve already fucked us no beers.

So, to my beautiful girl, thank you for everything. Thank you for listening all those years. Thank you for loving me to the best of your ability. Thank you for publicly declaring your love for me, because it showed me how much I mattered to you. Thank you for letting me walk away with my head held high, because you were there to catch.

To everyone else, CHECKMATE.

Wordless

July 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite genre of music?

I am the one that provides the words.

I need music to flow like water around me. I love the word “soundscape.” I love how composers and writers make love to each other, birthing individual creativity that feeds the other.

Probably one of the reasons the partners I’ve had haven’t been creative (except Dana). I thought it was a good thing that we were so different, because we were feeding each other. Now, I realize that nearly every relationship I’ve ever had with a woman became based over time on division of labor. They’ll do all the thinking if I’ll do all the feeling.

I was comfortable with my beautiful girl’s availability because it was no different than any relationship I’d ever been in with a woman except the relationship I was currently in. That does not mean I choose wrong, or that I’m a bad person for not getting rid of the Internet relationship. There’s several reasons I couldn’t do that, and even when I realized it was necessary, it was too late.

I can’t remember which entry I was reading where it became clear, but I know for sure that I am trauma bonded to this woman and perhaps it just didn’t present for her in the same way. That’s fine, and I don’t expect anyone to have my experience. I was just reading over what I’d written when it hit me….. “that’s a trauma bond.” You need her so bad it physically hurts? That’s a symptom.

If she doesn’t have an itch on her skin when she thinks about disconnecting from me, then of course we are not the same. I wish I’d thought about that years ago. I should state for the record that I am not saying she caused trauma. It’s the opposite. She came into my life while I was experiencing acute trauma, and sat next to me while I took my own medication. No one who sat with me at that time isn’t bonded to me in that way, it’s just not as extremely loud and incredibly close.

I think the itch on my skin is thinking that I am too incomplete within myself to do life without her, but that’s my trauma talking, not my personality. Even she would be surprised to see how vulnerable I really am, because I don’t write from that place often. It never left my mind that she’s older and wiser, so be on your A game. Seeing her as younger comes from getting to know her inner voice. I care for that child as much as I care for that adult.

I betrayed everything I believed in because my disease started managing me. I don’t think I came back to myself until I moved to DC and had been here long enough to feel stable. I had to get away from Dana, and I had to get away from Houston. Our relationship looked so much different without those two things, and I was grateful. This is because I moved to Houston with Dana because she wanted to teach, but then when we got there, she didn’t do anything until she had to.

So I was managing my career and all kinds of PTSD triggers everywhere I went. It was unsustainable, especially the day when I learned that my new therapist’s office was a couple streets over from…. That house.

Getting out of Houston so that I could be myself again might also have been the answer to saving my relationship with Dana, but I don’t think anything could have done that. We got into a pattern where she’d check out on her phone, I’d decide she wasn’t interested in interacting, and e-mail my Supergrover. It wasn’t a big series of fights, just more that when we each looked up, the other was busy, so we assumed we could just keep on doing what we were doing. We woke up months later and didn’t have much of a connection anymore. The reason that a straight girl did not and could not have had any culpability in this is that if Dana and I had made more time to be emotionally available to each other, we would have been okay. We just stopped communicating.

Just because Dana was jealous didn’t mean anything my beautiful girl did to contribute had purpose. Dana chose to get angry at the wrong woman.

Actually, she forgot to get mad at two women. She should have destroyed me, and also herself…. Because I am betting that she does not think of herself as checking out and not caring, and how that might affect my relationship with her.

Because if I tried to engage her and it took more than a few minutes to get her to engage, I gave up. Maybe it was too fast, but I don’t have patience for saying “just five more minutes” when it comes to a video game and I am offering to take off your clothes.

Gay or straight, Supergrover whooped Dana’s ass, and here’s how she did it. Dana didn’t start acting like I had serious value until Supergrover noticed I was brilliant.

So, everyone can think I’m the bad guy until I’m dead. I don’t care. But the relationship started to fail before I shot it out of its misery.

In a perfect world, I would have seen another woman looking at my brilliance and thought, “oh, that’s sweet.” It’s not a perfect world, and she’s hot as shit…. Therefore I lost mine.

I was the one that tumbled out of reality, because at that time in my life, reality bit (if you’re my age, you wore out that disc. It’s probably scratched to shit yet still in your parents’ basement somewhere).

I just wish that I’d used music to help me more than I did. I wish I could have drowned out both women so that I could hear me more clearly. Perhaps my need would have been filled by something healthier, cleaner.

Music definitely would have helped me move on for good, but even that was confusing because I did have a relationship with my beautiful girl. Tenuous, but there. It was a note that grew up to be a symphony, because I love dissonance in the right chords.

Too much had happened for either one of us to feel the same way about each other without work, and we decided for whatever reason that this was a conflict that could be solved by writing. In retrospect, it made things more complicated because neither one of us can read when it comes to the subject matter. How would our conversations be different had she ever put her arm around me? How would kissing each other’s cheeks and hugging tight have mixed up the equation? I go back and forth.

It’s not something I think about a lot, because it’s pointless except in determining that I don’t know as much as I thought I did. It’s just not possible for each of us to feel as much fear in person, because there’s more to grab onto in terms of context.

Because of what has happened, I am wary of online dating, because I know what a shit show it has become. I’m getting a taste of my own medicine in terms of not being able to deal with others’ emotions, because a guy who randomly reached out to me now thinks we are in a much heavier relationship than I do. I just tell him everything she’s told me and surprise, it works. So obviously I know that we were not on the same page and she was trying to fix it as well. Our approaches were just so different that they prevented us from seeing what the other was doing or even understanding it.

But it’s not the same situation. I did just meet this guy out of nowhere, and he started acting enamored after a couple of conversations that had legit nothing to them. Nothing was said that could have created a trauma bond, because I don’t talk to anyone about that unless I’m writing on my web site. I feel like people get enough of my problems if they’re fans, so I won’t talk about my issues unless people ask….. or with Zac, I’ll just ramble around until he finds a point. 😉

I am finding out that being bisexual has nothing to do with sex at all, ever. I have learned that I have dated few men not because I’m not wired that way, but because men legitimately have no clue about what women go through societally and are so damn condescending about it that some dude will say two things wrong and I’m like “block.”

To be fair, I haven’t specifically started seeking out men or women. I just connect with people. However, I notice how I’m being treated and overall, men treat me like I’m little and cute. Boy, I will fuck you up. Respect me as such.

It’s because men aren’t looking at me like I’m half a husband, and it is their downfall. I will never be “the little woman.” I don’t understand most social constructs and step all over them, so expecting that I already understand everything about male/female relationships is a mistake on both our parts.

When a trauma bond snaps, it feels like quitting caffeine cold turkey and then having to deal with the headaches. So, that’s a lot of fun as I negotiate being a new person. It’s why I feel like I’m not good at dating. I go out and I’m not focusing on them, but about how long it’s been since I had at least a goddamn Diet Coke. My body doesn’t feel right, and the one friend that’s always been there for me has taken a back seat…. When music could have handled the detox on its own. Music and I have been together since I was born.

My mother was a classically trained pianist with a degree in piano performance and pedagogy. My father played both classical and jazz trumpet, getting 26 full rides for college. Curtis, Juilliard, Oberlin, you name it.

I am what happens with “the Mozart effect,” but I’m not sure whether that’s a ringing endorsement.

Music has a way of focusing me that other things don’t, and I’m going to have to make a Supergrover playlist as well, because the music I needed to get rid of romantic feelings isn’t the music I need to feel calm. I’ll start with the color green. She reminds me of new life, new growth, new everything and the music should reflect it. I’ll have to go through my music apps, but it should start with something like “Sheep May Safely Graze” yet not exactly that because I’d be whistling it 24/7.

I just need things that are mathematically complicated in a major key.

Actually, that would be a good tagline for her, if there was one. Never have I met anyone with such a range of emotions that centered on light, often shining it into my darkness while I cleaned up. It was easier because I could see.

I listen to classical music a lot while I’m doing other things, because it relaxes my ADHD mind to have at least one plug filled. One less way for another stream of thought to interrupt.

That’s how I think meeting in person would have helped. Talking would have avoided all the traps of going down the wrong road too far before having to figure out an exit strategy, which as you can see is going really well. Obviously I’m not bothered by the situation because I never write about it. Eyeroll.

The writing prompt today reminded me just how much I cannot separate the music of my life from life itself. I am put together with blood and bones and skin, and yet that doesn’t mean music’s contribution isn’t there. Music is the invisible fourth wall providing structure…. So thick you don’t even have to have a stud finder. Just decorate it up, it’ll hold. Like concrete, music drips like water into all your softest places and hardens. Music that moves you will call you to you forever, and not everyone is attuned to your beat.

To turn that back on me, my rhythm changed and I didn’t realize how different it had become. I was a basic 4/4, with a new composer who only knew how to write time signatures by subbing in random numbers. Today, it’s a waltz. Tomorrow, it’s a march. Tuesday is experimental jazz odyssey.

I am living my life with the map on the table, knowing there’s no way to fit it back into the package.

Which ultimately leads me to my favorite song in life, and a story about my ex wife. I thought it was hilarious that the Indigo Girls were on tour, and Kathleen was late to the concert…….for the “GET OUT THE MAP” tour…….. 😛 😛 😛

The thing that stays with me from the first time I heard it until now is “I’m going to love you good and strong while our love is good and young.” The hope for that love is eternal, knowing a piece of it is in me. I can stop the itch on my skin, I can go back to my life, I can move on. But there’s never going to be a moment in my life that is bigger than “you think I’m smart? You? Really? Are you sure?”

Things Are Going Well

July 7, 2023July 7, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have come to a turning point in my healing. It’s going to sound harsh, but I mean it in the best way. I’ve had enough clinical separation that now both my beautiful girl and her man are the characters they’ve been in my head all along. They are very real, and yet very not. I cannot have them, but I can have the memories attached to them. I have every emotion I have seen come through my Supergrover for ten years. She is an uploaded consciousness, and now there is Silence in the Library.

Hey. Who turned out the lights?

God, it would be good if I were the sort of person that could end on a line like that. Just MIC DROP. I can’t say it any better……. AND YET I’M NOT DONE TALKING. 😛

The only part that’s sad is she chose this for herself, and I let her. It was time if we weren’t moving forward, and I am sure that she doesn’t see my point and she doesn’t see that I do see hers, and I’m willing to accommodate it and I always have. She’s been holding out on me and saying there’s nothing wrong. I don’t have to live with that, and I won’t. There is a very good reason I’m all in with her, it’s just too personal to tell the whole world, because it only belongs to the two of us. Even if it’s something we’ve told ourselves or others, our reactions to it are our own and should have come with beer.

Oh, wait. It did, one night. We celebrated my divorce virtually with beer. By that time, there was no conflict. I was just glad the marriage was over and she was glad for me. There was really no turning back, and we both knew it. She just didn’t pick up the extent of it because all she saw was me spiraling out in teenage blushing madness and not the very real possibility that we’d actually need each other.

My mother is dead, and so are all three of my grandmothers. It’s just one of the reasons I needed her- that loss of female energy all around me. I hope I gave her more than she told me I did, but even if she never does, I have my guesses…. And have to try to stuff down the automatic reaction that it’s probably bullshit according to her. I lost my sense of up and down, the feeling in all relationships as to whether open and closed door personalities matter.

It would have been ridiculous to dump someone that close to me if her marrying a man was my issue. It’s not, and it won’t ever be. It’s that it changed her identity in such a fundamental way that I realized just how much had been going on in her life that she just neglected to mention. She wasn’t purposefully hiding anything, she was protective of herself and unwilling to let go on the off chance that there would be more devastation emotionally. I understand all of that. Our differences come in where I was absolutely lionhearted in my belief that I could just invite her to do something and the spell would be broken for both of us. We’d become real people, and not even the people we used to be to each other.

It has not escaped my attention that I got shut down when I asked her for any attention at all. Those two things together told me that she might love me, but she was never going to actually commit to talking, she was never going to actually commit to anything because if she was, she would have by now. She would have seen my dreams and said “that sounds cool. I will totally come visit you.” She danced around everything, his Ginger Rogers and my Fred Astaire (I couldn’t lead at gunpoint, so if she can’t, either, we’re fucked up now. I would find it devastatingly hard to believe she does not know how to lead.

I pictured coffee with both of them at different times, letting my characters play. With him, I joked to her that he’d be all “wake up, loser.” But what I meant was being that person that I could look at with one glance and tell how Supergrover was maintaining. She’s a handful, and he’s capable. I would never put him before her- that’s not what women friendship does. But don’t think I can’t tell how Lindsay’s doing just by looking at Matt.

I’m betting they have about the same Starbucks tab as well, which I’m sure is extraordinarily healthy for both of them.

Again, letting them be characters is like the show at the end of “Dawson’s Creek.” OMFG. I’m going to cry. I’ve been Dawson at the end for ten years. Happy for Pacey and Joey, glad to be along for the ride, and eventually did his own thing just to get some distance….. where Pacey and Joey were the stars of the show. My God.

They became his characters, we just work in different mediums. If my characters are playing right now, they’re watching Dawson’s Creek and telling me I got something right, but they’ll never admit it.

It’s healing to be able to walk away while treating myself. I can’t treat myself with drugs, but I can certainly spend more than an hour a week on self-improvement. Pro Tip: Therapy doesn’t work without homework.

Here’s the writing prompt that got me started on the whole healing journey in 2003.

My mother never……………

I don’t remember the whole thing, and it’s gone now (I think). It’s from Clever Title. I wrote:

My mother never found herself. She stood behind a black robe, one after the other. (Her partner once my parents divorced was a judge, and my dad was a minister, which worked very well in this piece.) I talked about how she changed things bit by bit, like adding spices to a soup, but not enough to alter the flavor significantly. This is because I thought she cared wayyyyyy too damn much what other people thought, and I didn’t for the life of me want to be her. My mother was a gracious, loving woman crippled by so much fear of not being the perfect family that we all struggled to be that for her.

It was the start of realizing I could have an opinion, because no one else ever held back on us. Then, she died, without ever realizing how big the world could get when you actualize….. when you step into yourself.

She cooked her husband dinner every night and deferred to all his opinions, which weren’t bad but definitely more conservative than mine. I was actually close to one of his daughters, because she was chair of Mexican Studies at UTSA before she died and we were both geeked out over Tony Mendez….. and she was geeked out over me, and who doesn’t like people who think they’re amazing?

If it seems like that is extraordinarily harsh, it is a direct line to my personality. The one that hurts for everyone else. The one that wants everything to give to everyone else. My mother was like that to her core, built for it, and so am I. But when the person who is helping doesn’t have somewhere to go with their feelings, they resent all the people they care for who aren’t stepping up. That’s because I have been so reticent to express any needs at all that if you wanted to help me, you couldn’t.

So, for the first time in my life, I reached out to someone for help. It was the most embarrassing thing I’d ever done, because I reached out to someone who said “why do you expect everyone to fix you?” What I should have said is that I spend most nights thinking about your issues, where’s your five minutes for mine if I don’t make you pay attention for 300 seconds in a row?”

What I actually said was…….. nothing.

It was the right move and it helped me, but it didn’t help me get rid of all the bitterness and resentment because she could justify her emotional unavailability. What ruined my relationship with her was ultimately my relationship with Jesus, because my faith teaches me that we have to own the forgiveness of sins. Remission is right out.

This is because the remission of sin is their erasure. It’s sweeping it under the rug and pretending it didn’t happen. Forgiveness is saying you’re wrong, saying your’re sorry, and letting scar tissue heal over.

We had a remission/forgiveness debate and she lost, because remission wasn’t acceptable. She wasn’t growing with me, she was fighting me. I was regressing. Like I said, mutually assured destruction because she’d pop off with the same tired crap and I’d fall for it every time, escalation mode engaged. The one time I did come out of a fight like that clear headed, I was dumb enough to go back for more. It’s not because she’s a bad person. I just should have realized that if there was going to be a pattern change, it was on her, because I’d already spent eight years doing our work for me. Relationships grow and change and tumble and climb. What got to me was being able to say emotions and not hear them. She would probably say that my ears were clogged, but in the last eight years if I’d been deep diving into something, she wouldn’t say I had a point there, either.

That’s because if I bring up the past, she’ll say there’s nothing she can do about it. She’ll say she’s not a perfect person, but she won’t say “I’m sorry.” There’s no acknowledgement that talking is a good thing.

If she really wanted to put the fear of God in me, she would have texted “we need to talk.”

Although the last really funny exchange we had was that she told me it was interesting the kinds of people I talked to on the Internet, and I said, “many women before you have taught me to be wary when they say “it’s just interesting.” 😛 When I made her laugh all my feelings spilled out. She just does that to me. If she gets tickled, I’m not far behind and vice versa.

Speaking of which, she actually still owes me some work product. A 12 page report with graphs and color glossy pictures, if I recall correctly. I mean, she did send me the bullet points, so I think I’ve got it, but concentration is key.

If you know that reference, you are REALLY an OG. All I have to say to that is “well, I guess I owe her a report, too. My graph will just ride on more metrics.“

One of the things that we talked about that’s really stuck with me is the idea of the complicated construct. We are both forceful when we need to be, Southern when we don’t. Neither of us see gender in us as much as we see gender on us, because again, she’s been a boss for a long time. Her patois reads male, her voice…… music…. and I don’t think she’d phrase it that way, but I’m the reader. If I were to challenge her as a writer, I’d ask her to write a love letter to a person, place, or thing. I don’t think people ask her to do that very often, and it’s counter to her nature.

If turnabout was fair play, it would be a task list with two things on it.

WHY GOD, WHY?

I’m just feeling good that I can laugh and be out with it. All the feelings. All the love. All the anger. All the tears.

Things are going well, because I am healing through getting to know my own version of my characters, because even though they’re based on real people, they’re not exact because they can’t be.

“You want me to write accurately about your vibe? Show it to me. Put up or shut up. Not looking for an invitation, but not looking to be punished over what I don’t know, either.”

If there’s any anger that will stay, it’s that the line above didn’t do a damn thing to change our dynamic, so I knew it ultimately wouldn’t.

I suppose I’m rattling on because it’s twofold. She’s not listening, so I need to hear me. Also, these entries won’t mean anything in a few months. Then, it’ll be another ten years and I’ll be sobbing in reminiscence.

Because things are going well.

Me, Myself, and I

July 7, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

On what subject(s) are you an authority?

The only subject I am comfortable projecting authority is me, and you would find it amazing the sheer number of people who want to revoke my degree. It is my work not to take their opinions seriously, because they simply have not spent as much time with the subject as I have. Totally nuts, completely self aware, trying to put herself back together. That’s the elevator pitch, I guess. The “completely nuts” will never go away. It just has to be managed, and admittedly it’s not such a great time right now, but it is getting better.

I feel like I lost my shit yesterday, I was so blindsided by a wave of grief I didn’t see coming. Everything I’d ever done to offend anyone was beating down on me, so of course not only did I ruin my beautiful girl’s life, but because I didn’t know she had a boyfriend/husband, I couldn’t freak out about those implications, but I did yesterday because I was berating myself for a hundred percent of everything. Yes, she was a total jerk to me, but I felt that way after not being heard on the same issue for years and then being told that it was tiresome to hear about said issue. It would have been good to know that subject was tired because I thought she hadn’t read it. So much information was lost between keyboard and chair.

And that’s what I’m thinking about. All the thoughts between us that didn’t get expressed and now need to find a box for safekeeping. In allowing myself to get that angry, that upset, I realized what a mess I had created by assuming everything was fine, writing everything exactly the way I always did.

It wasn’t fine. I didn’t start talking to her any differently, same cadence, same tone, same temperature, some everything except the reaction my words would create. I tried too hard, and it came across as trying to get attention, when in reality I was just grieving a loss and hoping I was wrong… that I’d be found.

I’m not upset that she cannot forgive me in the way that I would like to be forgiven. That is not my call. I am frustrated that it took so very long to reach the same conclusion we would have had, anyway.

Or maybe I’m just being hard on myself, because looking at her words, I still cannot find a clear path. I am just going to have to chalk it up to the nature of the Internet.

When I am not looking at her words, I recognize others’ footfalls and get in line. The path that I’m creating is walking away from her indecision, because not knowing whether I was welcome or not made me walk on eggshells a hundred percent of the time while apologizing for my existence.

I could talk about anything with her except her…. which made me in the unenviable position of having to ask myself what to say, which was invariably wrong.

She’s right. It was a hundred percent clear I wasn’t getting what I wanted, because she didn’t want to answer anything, ever, at all. It didn’t make any sense, because she liked talking about my dating life, my mental health, my cooking, my career, etc. She felt free to tell me anything she wanted to about anyone in my life, but got pissed off if I said anything about anyone in hers. When I hurt her, I set up the double standard that she could be as close to me as she wanted, and also to be angry that I wanted to know things.

She could pick apart my dates, and I didn’t even know she was with anyone officially, because she told me she was seeing someone and then never mentioned him again. I am glad that I just assumed it all worked out, because it did.

Now I’m getting tired of the story in my head and wish it would leave me alone. I’m getting the distance I need to be free, and it feels like I’m tripping into the light. It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.

The story in my head is bigger than me and has to stop adding layers. Enough is enough. I just think I’m done and then another wave hits me.

That’s because during the original break, I never really gave myself enough time to pick out the shrapnel before I started apologizing. This time, it’s been months because something happened this time that didn’t happen before. My faith in her is broken. Hers in me had broken long beforehand, it’s just that she was polite and I was blind.

We just don’t fit anymore, and it was a mistake to think that with time, everything would look better.

Trust me. I’m the authority.

This is a Family Show

July 6, 2023July 6, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your definition of romantic?

I’m joking because of course the writing prompt made me laugh. “This is a family show” is how I generally reply when someone posts something on my Facebook wall that I know my mom and dad would have *loved.* If I could think of an example off the top of my head, I would gladly embarrass the people who said such things, because it wouldn’t be mean. It would just be turnabout as fair play. Your mom probably doesn’t want to know what I think of your rack.

Here’s my actual “fuck off” for the day. It has nothing to do with romance, but definitely fallout……………… Your dad absolutely wants to know what I think of your rack. In 2002, my wife’s best friend’s dad asked me to kiss my wife in front of him for reasons. At a party, in a bar, in front of everyone.

It’s actually the biggest reason I was scared that my Internet friend would tell her boyfriend/husband about me. I couldn’t protect her from what he would think/say, and I have no illusions as to how that conversation might have gone. Him taking me as a serious threat was never a fear for me, because I wasn’t. My biggest fear is that I would become a running joke with her husband because he thought it was funny. Every passive and not so passive joke available, that kind of thing. I do not know if anything like this happened, and I don’t think it did, really. I’ve just been through it before, and I’m betting she hasn’t. I’m sure I screwed up more for her than I can possibly imagine, but I’m not acting as if I already have. That’s giving myself a lot of unnecessary punishment, and I’ve lived like a monk for eight years in part because I thought I deserved it. I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, I am saying he is one of a species known for making jokes like that. I cannot know he’s not like that, I can only compare him to all the other men I’ve met and say it’s a probability like everything else. Maybe the percentage is high, maybe it’s low. It doesn’t matter, because no one would tell me something like that.

I hope he’s the kind of man I need him to be, and if he’s not, I hope he lays off eventually. There really is no limit to how cruel it could have gotten for her, and I thank God they’ve met. It’s not like she picked him up off the street when he fell off a turnip truck.

I do not wonder whether he’s better for her than I am, because I already have both my answers. The fact of the matter is that he is both better for her and it doesn’t matter, because there’s no changing either one of us. I’m not male and she’s not queer…. not only that, if I had been male, she would have seen the threat coming and disposed of it. I know this because I felt threatened and I disposed of her friendship first. I told her that I couldn’t be friends with a woman that excited me this much and stay married.

I knew what was going to happen and she didn’t.

Here’s what made everything go sideways. Whether it is true or not, I thought she needed me. Whether it’s my own mixed up mood and behavior or what she was actually saying, I thought she was inviting me to be a part of something bigger than myself, and it was worth the turmoil in my marriage to be that for her.

I am positive that in some ways, she feels responsible for my divorce, even though I have told her all day, every day that she’s not. That I chose her in some ways, in was an inevitability in others.What I do know for sure is that if the stars had aligned, we wouldn’t have been together very long. I’m Type B. She is…………….. not.

So, my perfect picture of romance is generally people who recognize relaxing together and talking about our feelings as productive. Relationships have problems, and ignoring them only kicks the can down the road. I can’t help but think that if we’d ever met, her husband and I would have been perfect for each other also, because we have more in common than we don’t in terms of being that support team.

The most romantic thing my beautiful girl could have done for me is to introduce me to her husband, because we love our girl. Period. If she’s in trouble, we will come. He just has to drive. 😉

That’s an old joke, too. I have vision issues, so I choose to take public transportation. I’ve said that before, but I’ve gotten a lot of new influx, so maybe catch people up a little. So, the idea that if my girl is in trouble he’s just the wheels is ridiculously funny. He’s a moose. I’m a squirrel.

You have seen this cliched high school movie a thousand times. I don’t care if her boyfriend is a big jock. That position has been filled. I don’t want to be Freddie Prinze, Jr. in every ’90s movie. I LIKE HER WITH HER GLASSES ON, OK? To me, you don’t really love someone until you love them at the beginning of the movie and not after the glam makeover. Believe me, that’s not her husband’s vibe, either. I’m just pointing out that I am perfectly fine with him getting all the actual romance, because I’m not trying to be Jamie or Roy. I’m Keeley, and she’s Rebecca.

Oh my God that is so apt it hurts.

To me, I couldn’t have any more romance than I’d need in my life if I had a friendship like that, and not because I’m not looking for it. I mean while I’m waiting, I do not see myself as lacking in love. I do not fall into the trap of feeling lonely, because even though the relationship is virtual, it rests in my heart and mind. It is the other half of me, and because of it, I’m not sure that either one of us is individuated in the smallest of ways. We’re not a separate person because we have never been that to each other. We’ve always been inner voices, because we’ve never made the effort to hear each other out loud. I mean, we have.

We’ve sent each other voice messages over the years because it was exciting or faster or both. Her accent has a lovely lilt on some words, mine on others. She has a queer sister, and I joked that I almost wanted to hear her talk more, because it would be like one of those baby gradients…. her accent, my sexual orientation. 😛

(Queer sister is unavailable and boy, are you guys sick and twisted. Abssolutelyfuckingnot. It would be like wanting an Oreo and getting a Hydrox and pretending they’re the same thing. Queer sister is an Oreo for someone else. She would only be my Hydrox, and no amount of devotion would fix it. At least if I was missing she’d know where I’d be. In her brother-in-law’s car. 😛

Getting my priorities straight is a big damn problem. I have been relieved of all my rights and responsibilities, and yet my mind hasn’t changed pathways to stop my feral nature. I’m not sure anything could be done to stop hers, either. I have a feeling that thinking I’m worth nothing comes from my own echo chamber, not what she was actually saying, but I don’t know what she was actually saying. I figured if I got that exhausted trying to figure it out, I just wasn’t going to. If I was a priority, nothing would stop her from letting me know that. When I said, “love me the way I love you,” it doesn’t mean that I was mad she couldn’t commit to me like a partner. I was mad that I wasn’t a high enough priority to shit or get off the pot, or to even let me know where the signposts were on the map. I am never going to get it if you’re wandering around in unfamiliar territory, so am I, and we’re not working from the same map.

She did not owe me any justification of her energy or time, I just felt frustrated that she felt justified in wanting my love and care, but stopped letting me know that she wanted it. The confusing part came from shutting down and opening up, It was a cycle for which I could not prepare or make stable because once I hurt her, nothing was ever the same.

She will carry fear of me forever, and it won’t stop the good memories from coming, but it will stop her from trusting me until we’re dead. She can say she trusts me, but her actions don’t line up. In a lot of ways, I got her out of mine, because she was asking me to be less. Be less of a writer, because I don’t think you have enough dexterity with words to keep me unidentified. That every bread crumb was an assault. If they are direct hits and I am that stupid, I hope someone will let me know, because here’s what even she wouldn’t have accepted. I would burn down the whole world if I thought she needed it. Fuck this blog. I’m not that good a writer. She is the only person I want in the world more than this. I have appreciated her willingness to grin and bear it over the years.

It’s just for me to tell where I am and where I’m going. We could have worked together, she just wouldn’t show up to the group project. We got an F due to lack of effort. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because she’s not taking this seriously, maybe because she doesn’t want me to jump in knowing she’s made it impossible for me not to feel that way about her.

I’m all like “have you read any novel ever?” 😛

This is because she’s novel AF.

Novel Jesus smiled upon me. I would have loved capers that involved me setting ’em down, her picking them up like clockwork. I picture Mme Precious Ramotswe and her secretary, the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and the Kalahari Typing School for Men.

I would teach the hell out of typing.

So would she. She’s mastered the art of typing on her phone. I have not. How she sends me e-mails without typos or spelling mistakes while also on the go is disturbing on so many levels, mostly that I couldn’t do it if you paid me. I’m one of those people that if I was on my phone, I would get a paragraph and she’d get “ok.” Come to think of it, that might have been a good solution to the problem of me saying too much. “Leslie, if you don’t stop talking, I am going to throw your keyboard off this train” would have been very effective. 😛

She can do sportsball, so now I am picturing us sitting on the train together and watching my keyboard thrown from our seats, perfectly hitting the trash can at Metro Center.

I think we both use the Internet to show people how smart we are, and that’s how we got absolutely wasted on each other’s brain chemicals. We were trying to impress each other, and it worked. She’s an amazing writer, funny af. She manages to convey her actual voice in punctuation, and I think about her cadence more than her actual words. They hit very, very hard whether I’m laughing or sobbing. I got so tired of rain, and frustrated and butt hurt and all the things. I really screwed myself, because I didn’t see that hurting her would result in me carrying around a lot of feelings I wouldn’t have wished on myself in retrospect, because I had no idea how much it would affect my future. It will never be what it once was, I assure you.

It’s a lot to carry even now. It is devastating that our conflict was really “the stuff you’re telling me is hard, but worth it if you’ll support me” vs. “I hate that you’ve told me this because you never forget to tell me what a burden I am to you.” That’s the root cause of every issue we’ve ever had, and I think she would agree, because we’ve both planted stories in each other that would make us feel that way. Our conflict with each other is the same from opposite ends of the spectrum. I just couldn’t express that love coming forward because she was only seeing the need going backward. I wasn’t telling her that she was a burden, I was telling her that I needed to hear more of her burdens in order to feel needed, and if she didn’t want that from me, please don’t give me false hope that will change. I want and need her in my life so bad it physically hurts, but not at the cost of giving too much and getting too little. It makes me feel like crap.

I am so much more than she thinks I am in the best way possible. She thought I was too much in a bad way. I thought she was too much in a good way, which made me fluctuate between elation and frustration. Because I hurt her, it felt like she was punishing me for the things I said to try and get her to open up like I was supposed to know whether I could say those things or not. Then even her responses were cagey, and I knew why. She thought she was burdening me with information, I thought it was really hard to be in a situation where she was emotionally unavailable and annoyed at me having feelings. It is absolutely okay for her to be that……………….. for other people. I told her that she obviously had friends she needed more than me, and it was time to let her go find them, because I was tired of up and down, hot and cold, feeling like a child being punished because I wanted more than she could give and she was a jerk about it. It bothered me that she cared so much and didn’t want to talk about it. It bothered me that she couldn’t tell me what she wanted from me, and if it was nothing, stop writing to me so that I can move past the kind of bond that I want and you don’t. I doubt she calls up old exes, and because she brought up those feelings in me and not in herself, I don’t think she realized how things would play out with me. That I’d feel at times that I was being forced into dealing with my feelings about her a lot more of the time than I could afford to spend. I had to manage my feelings not spiraling out of control because every time I went on a date, I felt like I was cheating on her, because she wouldn’t have cared if I slept with anyone. She would have cared at onboarding, and she worried too much about it. I can’t imagine how much it would have meant to both of us to have this conversation in person. I would have liked to hug her while I told her she was amazing.

That’s because overexplaining is a trauma response. I spent a lot of time wrapped up in how much someone new could have of me as well. A .01 percent of me will be polyamorous until I die, because I don’t have to be romantic with her to juggle what real love is. Real love is work. A lot of it. She asked me to forget an impossible amount of shit. I’m just sitting in it until I can. I am thinking these thoughts, and they aren’t going to the right person. That doesn’t matter, either. I need a roadmap on how to fall in love again. I need someone to drag me into it kicking and screaming. I need someone to fight through all the defenses I’ve put up, because I’ll never trust in the same way, either.

The hardest part of this whole thing is not trusting my own heart not to fuck up everything. That I’m shutting down so much no one else will ever have a chance. Why am I fine with that? Yes. Why am I? That’s a question we’ll both need to ponder.

That’s because I won’t even take a chance at finding another Dana, for everything good and bad that implied. God, I love her so much and she’s blind. If I’m willing to absolutely overfocus on my flaws because I think she’s telling the truth, I think she should assume that I am telling the truth as well. That maybe my assumptions aren’t as stupid as she thinks they are, because she’s got me pegged, shiiiat. I am absolutely the dickhead she thinks I am, and also the angel. However, I am not the angel who fell.I’ve been Lucifer Morningstar the whole time. That’s because I’m not evil, I’m chaotic. I have a full rage of emotions. We are all Lucifer Morningstar, children of God and superior angels complete with witty banter and xenophobia. So many people become Lucifer by thinking they’re God. Divine right of kings didn’t always work out.

Neil Gaiman’s version of evil is my favorite, because his evil is absolutely based on fallibility. Lucifer is a more compelling character than God in some ways, because God does not identify as such until Jesus is born. Lucifer fell from heaven, so he is under the same constraints as we found ourselves when Eve “didn’t read the apple terms and conditions.” I am not being literal, it is a metaphor (explaining it’s a metaphor because Evangelicals won’t assume I don’t mean it’s a fact. See title of blog.

I just want her to can it on thinking that I am always Lucifer’s basest self. I, like him, find “oh, my Dad” moments everywhere.

It makes me feel romantic about the state of the world, even when it’s going to hell in a handbasket………. to paraphrase a church bulletin, “Helen Hunt is now in charge of the Lost & Found, so if you can’t find heaven, go to Helen Hunt for it.”

By the way, Australia is beating the United States in terms of stats right now, and I think that’s an apt metaphor for the paragraph above (please think that’s funny).

Needs Work, tbh

July 5, 2023July 5, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How do you express your gratitude?

I feel gratitude flowing through me like water that my mental health issues dam. If I am trying to relieve emotional pain and trying to find its source, the path often leaves out how thankful I am because I am not working on that core. Particularly with writing, it gets out of control because I am not taking time to choose my words carefully. My rage ignites and it’s not pretty when it goes off. I am constantly learning to manage it, because I didn’t know where it was coming from for a number of years. It is hard work developing self-soothing mechanisms trying to recover from PTSD. I have said unforgivable things to the most important people in my life. It’s not their job to stay when it gets bad, so I am not trying to avoid culpability. I am having compassion for myself in the wake of my own consequences. I am entitled that without infringing on anyone else’s belief system.

It’s hard going back to the life I had before I had a goddess that talked back, very much a real description because since our relationship was virtual, the voice I made for her in my head echoed in my chest. “I’m averting my eyes!” “Well, stop it.” I’ve worked for years trying to shut down “The Committee,” the tapes in my head that provide my inner monologue. It hits different when you’re trying to shut down your external monologue that is also, in fact, your internal monologue.

The best part of a virtual relationship is that it’s all still here. We don’t have to create new memories. I’ve saved them all up. When I need her, I’ve got her just as much as I ever did. That’s enough, and she makes me smile and feel strong. So whether she ever thinks working it out is a good idea or not, I think she’s fantastic. No author has ever met such a beautiful character. I hope I can do her justice, because nothing will mean more to me over time than having a real picture of her in my mind that is not all good or bad but true. That it’s possible to drive me up the wall without dulling my curiosity or want to be near you.

I’ve always thought of myself as a Merlin-type character. I’m not so much into fantasy, but my favorite character when I was a kid was Merlin from “Sword in the Stone,” because even as a child I was a grumpy old man.

If I have the heart of a grumpy old wizard, she has the heart of a knight. Brave, crazy, stupid, wild, glorious, swings at every pitch and hopes for the best while I am the world’s biggest baseball fan when she’s at bat.

I’m fairly certain that if you could call it a sport, she could letter in it.

I’m absolutely certain that if you could call it a sport, I couldn’t.

I think one of he biggest things that was helpful in our relationship is that she had to wear suits and crap for work. I didn’t. Our perspectives are completely different. She’s been a boss for a long time. It’s fun busting her balls because I can tell she’s wrapped a little too tight. I am constantly rubbing up against her ire with kitchen humor, because as she got used to me being an asshole, she could flip shit back at me like the best chef I ever had. Nobody has ever made me laugh harder or be prouder with two letters, and you have to be an OG to know that one.

Guess you had to be there.

Nothing made me more grateful than laughing together, and nothing destroyed me more than realizing she’d always see my attempts at humor as negative, because I’d hurt her. I have never avoided accountability. She has avoided talking about how we could make things better so that I don’t constantly annoy her. I feel stupid that I thought I mattered more than I did- that I could have just walked away at any time without discussing anything and she wouldn’t have noticed.

It didn’t start out that way. How it started is not how it’s going, and that meme is solid. Because I hurt her, I was not a grumpy old wizard anymore, and I would have walked away happily if I’d known then what I know now. I thought she was reaching out to get closer, and now I don’t know what she meant by writing to me at all. My guess is that she has never believed any of this is real. That people develop real feelings even when the relationship is virtual. That surely my love for her can’t be as real and solid as it is. What I love about that is she doesn’t know how stable we are, but I do. I don’t have to dwell in negativity. I can just be grateful we met at all, because in some ways she was a character I needed to meet. In others, my writing has created a character for her. I hope that character loves as deeply as my beautiful girl, because I know what her real life sunshine is like. She turned the sun away from me, but I set it in motion. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, because it betrayed who I really am.

I’m a sweet, quiet geek who fell in love with the smallest place inside her, the one that had been missing. She was a catalyst for that change, so I fell in love with her, too. That’s because the love didn’t center around who she was entirely, but the two of us because I liked who she helped me to be. I’m stronger than I was. I’d have to be to walk away. I just got tired of trying to be less, so I asked her to be more.

And that was that.

Teaching Me, Part II

July 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I found a poem which expresses my feelings toward my beautiful girl, the platonic soul mate sent to shake me out of complacency… yet so far not designed to be a lifetime appointment. I am not letting that change me, however. Love does not depend on the recipient.

I told Kristina that she had saved me trying to translate my soul. Everything she writes guts me, but this takes me back. It is my entire personality, and the heart of miscommunication in a hundred percent of my relationships with neurotypical people. I have been this person in every relationship I’ve ever had.

It’s nice to see it clearly.

It’s More Simple Than You Think

July 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What makes a teacher great?

I’ve been close to Bryn’s mom and dad since I was 19, as well. Here’s the most important thing her dad has ever taught me, because it has influenced a lot of what I write and preach. The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.

It’s a very difficult thing to be enlightened and also remember the dark. If you can record that transition, you might be able to explain it. You can help others by acknowledging their fear, and being their Moses.

The phrase “being Moses” means something to me, because Tony Mendez has taught me a thing or two about being a writer/teacher. In “Argo,” he tells State that the only way out of Tehran is through the airport…. That State should “send in a Moses” to bring them home. Because the meeting was speculative- so State could say they ran their ideas past CIA’s best ex-fil guy- I am not sure that Tony Mendez meant to say “it’s me. I’m Moses.”

The next scene in my mind is Tony preparing The Six for their trip to the grand bazaar in the middle of the city. Moses is sweating bullets for two reasons. The first is that if he is caught, The Agency cannot claim him. He’s working without a net. The second is that it’s not just his ass on the line. He and The Six get caught, as Jack points out, they die badly. The entire world will be watching.

That is an extreme example of having to teach someone, but it illustrates frustration on both sides of the equation. If Tony doesn’t prepare The Six, one if not all of them will be pulled in by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for questioning. Alternatively, The Six are just basic policy wonk diplomats with no training in deception and Tony has to teach them to walk their covers in a day.

It’s not the same as remembering what it was like not to know multiplication and division, but it’s the same concept. The difference is an age-appropriate level of fear. It clutches your chest whenever you leave your comfort zone, which is not the same when you’re five and when you’re fifty. It’s a proportional response.

Remembering what it was like not to know is often a failing of mine, because things that are so patently obvious to me are hiding in plain sight for others. I am going to be able to feel you before you even say anything. I can tell what kind of mood you’re in simply by watching body language. I can feel the frustration, anger, etc. steaming off you and the moment when that energy changes. I don’t have to learn someone’s mannerisms, habits, mood, and behavior to do this. It happens automatically. I will not be able to tell that there is a problem, but I know what it looks like to move in the world showing different emotions. The more people claim there isn’t one, the more I know whether they’re telling the truth or not, because there is an energy behind truth and white lies. I can feel that shift, and can feel you bullshitting me. Your next words don’t even matter, because the way you stiffened up before you answered betrayed you.

I feel like I can tell the most about people’s personalities and group dynamics without saying a word. I stand there and soak up everything in the room. I’m not just feeling how we are interacting, but how everyone is. I can tell not just how your behavior affected me personality, but also how well you know how to read a room…………

I am not bragging on myself, because others have this gift. Bryn is better at it than I am. Having her is like having a bloodhound. She can sniff out when I’m upset, and sometimes I think she does it by reading how the phone rings. 😛

Speaking of Bryn, she told me that she feels like a celebrity when I write about her on my blog. I told her that she is not the first person to tell me this. My friend James nearly made me die of laughter when he said, “I really just go to your page and search ‘James.’ Yes, I am that fucking shallow.” She told me that my entries were the perfect length for a morning constitutional, and I told her that she was nowhere near the first person to tell me that.

I missed my calling. My blog should be called “The Shit Show.”

It was more simple than I thought.

No lol

June 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

I have no idea what this means outside of Oregon. In Oregon, there’s infrastructure for sustainability. In Maryland, it is “good luck, God bless.” I want to talk about things I do to sustain my own life.

Being a writer has changed my perspective on everyone and everything who isn’t me. I will make them me by inhaling, life as ink on the exhale.

“Life as ink on the exhale” is the perfect phrase for all of this.

“Writing is ink on the exhale” is a better sentence than I’ve written in a while. I should quit for today. 😉 I realize this is extrapolating data from an incomplete set, though, because I can never explain in a catchphrase how experiences go in and ink comes out. I can’t tell you who and what and why is most important that day. The only reason my beautiful girl pops up so often is that as I’ve said before, she’s my muse. She’s the ink. What is sad about that is the absolute confusion as to why it’s the last bottle. How do you cope with not knowing whether someone even wants to meet you or not, yet tells you nothing’s wrong and you’re the only one who ever trashes anything. I have lived long enough to know that I am only trashing the relationship she wants with me. I can have the relationship I want with her on my own, and in a lot of ways, it feels the same. To me, that is also trashing a relationship……. letting starvation rule over your compassion.

I did not want to be in a relationship that was starving, particularly one that had flourished. The problem came in when I’d wronged her and wanted to be forgiven, because she never got over how it felt to be hurt by me. She could forgive me, but she couldn’t open up again…… at least, not for years. Then, she started to loosen up and I hadn’t been so profoundly happy in years. I invited her to come with me wherever I went in the world, dreaming pie in the sky- and told her to bring her husband, kids, dogs, books, wtfever. I felt safe enough to say something like that because she was opening up emotionally.

I don’t know what would have happened with that train of thought, because she never told me what she thought and I got tired of living in grey area. I would have given her an organ. I never got a fraction of that level of emotion from her, and I’m supposed to believe I’m the one that trashes everything?

What I have to remember is that we don’t know each other. We have created characters for each other that live in our heads, which may or may not be 100% accurate. Absolutely none of that stopped me from giving her access to everything. Just everything. She’s the only one to whom I’ve ever given editorial control of this blog, and the only one that knows the code that unlocks my phone. I have never done this for anyone else, ever, and I will never do it again.

I didn’t give her either of those things to impress her. I did it to make her feel comfortable. I did it so she would know I was listening.

As I listened, ink on the exhale traveled the spectrum, inventing colors as it soaked into the page. I am now strong enough to look at her e-mails now, and I saw something that jumped out at me. She said something about how I thought she’d wronged me, and she’d read it wrong. I said that I had wronged her. Another time, she got mad at me for “the lies you (plural) tell, and that’s not like you (personal) at all.” She thought I was calling her an actual liar, and I wasn’t. I thought she had told white lies about a few things to protect my feelings, and “the lies you tell” is a classic South Texas way to say it, but you’re not talking about a specific person. You are talking about a nebulous “you.” She lit into me, and I told her I was sorry I had attacked her with grammar. In my head, I was screaming. Why would a writer decide to emotionally roast me over the coals like this? What the fuck was wrong with her freshman comp? I thought I had made my point overly clear by being sure to note grammar on both kinds of “you.” I was wrong.

I never understood why she thought she wasn’t good enough for me. Not ever. I hated the way she treated herself in front of me, as if I was a dictator and she was hell bent on pleasing me and angry that she just couldn’t do it. I am certain that my actions facilitated this, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t want a different outcome. I tried to tell her that she was beautiful, perfect over and over, an ostinato to drown out her disbelief.

If she thought she disappointed me by not also being sexually fluid, it would have been helpful for her to say that. If she thought she disappointed me because my standards were so high, it would have helped to ask me what they were. I have never known feelings this intense, but in the way I’d feel if my sister was my first priority, not my wife. She has never disappointed me a day in our lives, and she never did until she felt like she was being picked on and didn’t have enough stamina to hear me out. She thinks I don’t have enough stamina to hear her out. I do. It’s just that what’s coming out of her mouth is total bullshit, and not because she’s a liar. It’s that she hasn’t dived into the wreck. She’s going to own herself the way I have here, and it’s going to be magnificent. You know you love someone when you can see them coming into themselves before they do, and fighting you so hardcore that you know you won’t be there at the finish line. For me, that moment became clear when I realized that I should be more concerned that she has lost me. I am not nothing.

I cannot know her feelings on the matter, yet I also cannot treat myself as if I’m so disposable no one will notice.

I’ve had enough of that, and it’s not sustainable.

Things I’ve Learned About Pain

June 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Part of me has never been in love before, and never will be without truly divine intervention. This is because for as much as I’m afraid of someone hurting me, I am also afraid of hurting them. I know I can make and keep healthy friendships. I have resolved enough in myself at least to do that, and I never have to worry about finding another friend in my life, because I only need one. The position has been filled.

I worry about everything, and overexplaining is a trauma response. When I absolutely shut down this thing we’ve managed over the years, I told her I’d realized that every fight was like this one. I’d say too much, she’d say too little, and on and on and on. Birthday present, Christmas present, fuck off, judgmental dickhead. There’s a problem and I won’t tell you, I just won’t speak to you for weeks or months.

The pattern was sick and twisted and I made it happen. Therefore, I needed to make it unhappen. She told me she didn’t know a damn thing about love in the very beginning, and when I decided to teach her, it was perfect. We were tracking together like white on rice. I just didn’t teach her to love me in the way I could hear it, but not for lack of trying. If anything, I was Mozart’s “too many notes.” I commissioned an SATB arrangement for every issue we had, and it was ridiculous. That was the quickest way to divorce for me, and she helped my marriage fail in her idiocy, not malice. She broke me, and she doesn’t know it. But that part of it wasn’t about me.

Learning to recognize where I was in my polyamorous haze of a head, where I was loved romantically and platonically- yet in my brain, there was no difference in priority. For instance, if your wife and your mother are hurt at the same time, you prioritize based on how serious the injury might be on your mother’s part, because your wife comes first. Always. You made that vow when you married her. At the same time, Dana couldn’t fault me for loving my beautiful girl intensely, either. She loved her family just as much and would have said exactly the same thing. Actually, she never did anything to prove to me that I was more important than her family. Nevermind. Bad analogy.

So, when Dana and I broke up, I had absolutely no need for a replacement. I’d been hit, and it took years until I fell in love again, and it is no fucking coincidence that he was the biggest motherfucker I could find trained to hit the nuts off a gnat with several different kinds of weapons. If you think dating men didn’t have anything to do with that fight, fuck off. I’ll be looking for that kind of protection forever. Why do you think Zac is so important? He’s not just interested in intelligence so we get along on that level. He will fuck you up if he thinks you’re going to mess with any of his friends. He just doesn’t because he wouldn’t start a fight, but he’d end it.

Trying to decide if that’s enough pain for today, because I am in it now. Just looking at everything painful and deciding how to let go of it. I feel like everyone is seeing me through the heuristic that I’ve been in love with a straight woman for ten years and that’s the only reason I haven’t gotten married again. That’s a double fuck you because most women who have been HIT BY MEN wait a long time to get married again, too. So what’s the real issue here?

I am terrified of women, and my beautiful girl is goddamn lucky I didn’t run from her as well. She’s as physically intimidating as Dana, just in a different way. Even more muscular, which should have turned me on and instead felt like a risk.

Because there was no chance in hell that we would actually be domestic partners, I could interact with a woman from hundreds of miles away. That’s fucking close enough. I think it is absolutely perfect that we’ve never met and yet I feel like a Doctor Who companion because we’ve “traveled together” long enough that she knows my original hair color……… and I know hers. That she doesn’t dye it, it has changed colors over time because women age like fine wine. Men just tell them they don’t.

I would do unspeakable things to Helen Mirren with the proper permission, preferably in writing and notarized. She is the perfect example of getting better with age, because she’s another person who doesn’t give a fuck what you think. She started out as a carny. You can’t scare her for love or money.

Where am I? What’s my name again?

I have to interrupt my pain signals and thinking of beautiful women is the easiest way to accomplish that goal. Therefore, when I’m writing, it often surfs up and down in my subconscious as I touch pain and back off….. again, overexplaining as a trauma response. I realized I could just roll with it because I am not focusing on the people who read every day, but making it feel lie you had to be there or you missed it. You have to read every post rather than dropping in once. I just have to be interesting enough not to lose the ones who are bored, and right now they can take a right. I’m going through a thing here, man. Back the fuck up.

I swear to Christ, falling in love with my beautiful girl is probably the first time I’ve ever really been in love before, and absolutely no disrespect to anyone I’ve ever dated. You didn’t do anything wrong, and I loved our time together. It’s that my perspective changed. I wasn’t in a narcissistic train wreck of a relationship that started years before I had a girlfriend, and I’d only been dating Ryan for a few months. It was the first time I really saw myself, and I fell in love with me…. the me in love with her.

When I realized that I couldn’t have that romantically, but she’d show up for me anyway, I was on board. I don’t care if my only job is to bring her a Diet Coke when she wants it. Seriously. Just hit the button, baby girl. I treat her like I treat my sister…. seeing her as both older and younger as well. She’s older in some ways, I am in others. Lindsay is a lobbyist, I’m a writer. She’s in front of people all day, I’d rather have dental surgery. The differences are striking, and they’re not the same as with Stifler’s mom over there (she has a son and I’m not stupid- though if she reads this I will have a black eye by morning………. “why would you say something so controversial, yet so bold?”). But just because they’re not the same doesn’t mean she and Lindsay aren’t the same archetype. Lindsay would definitely be Stifler’s mom if she had a kid. There’s no doubt in my mind.. I also know that she would be pleased to know she’s still that hot at 40 (we’re almost six years apart- my 46th is Sept. 10th).

It feels good to get back to the kind of humor we used to share instead of there being topics that are off limits. I could never have told that joke in front of her now, but when she sent me a recent picture, I did say “wtf? You wake up like this?” Like, fuck me. Just let me be the swamp witch in our relationship because all the other women are. Bet.

The fact that she thinks it means something now is ridiculous, so let her. If my other friends think I’m serious, I’ll remind them how I have spent months detailing why this relationship is deceased, pining for the fjords, met the choir invisible, fucking snuffed it. I feel like ten years is enough stories to keep me going. I don’t need more if they’re all going to be like our last few interactions. I don’t care if she thinks I’m the devil, because having a friend who is a writer and blogs all the time and you support them in every way possible until you don’t like what you see in the mirror? I get why she can’t be identified. I don’t get why she cares what people think. I just have to respect it.

I can quote chapter and verse why I shouldn’t write about her, and yet none of the things I said before I broke her trust mattered. She automatically assumed that once our relationship was over, I’d google tattoo her. No. I gave a google tattoo to a woman who abused me as a child. If we’d gotten into it as adults, equals, she would have deserved the same protection. It was the hard line of keeping her secrets and protecting other little girls. I chose the WRONG ANSWER for 23 years. So, anyone who thinks I gave that tattoo lightly can take a long walk on a short pier, but I hope you choke on your words first.

This relationship is different. For the first time, I knew what it felt like to love someone with wild abandon, not worried that our relationship was toxic. I am worried that we set up toxic patterns through the nature of the Internet, but never that we are toxic people. We have issues to work on, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Or, it didn’t until she said she had a problem, I handled it, I asked her to talk about her feelings, she dumped me. I went apeshit because her first reaction is to run always. I thought we were finished with that shit. I’ve told her abandonment is my trigger a hundred times, and not one goddamn one mattered. She did it twice in like a two month period. I wasn’t the only one who could accuse the other of being done and not done, bombing everything. Every accusation was a confession.

I wasn’t out because I couldn’t forgive her. I was out because I don’t respect her, and won’t until she uses some of that big dick energy to say she’s ready to work on the problem, because that’s what it’s going to take. Turning her words back around on her, “looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.” If she grows emotionally, she’s welcome. But I won’t stand for someone treating me like they wish the relationship never happened. She stomped all over my worthlessness loop every day for years, and I fucking aged. That’s because she made sure to tell me what a mistake she’d made in befriending me in the first place. I just kept thinking “well, that escalated quickly.” She always thought of herself as the protagonist. Never looking at her behavior from the outside in her writing made it look like she had never hurt me at all. I’d stood there and slapped my own face.

Surely she’s not that stupid. Surely she has a concept of her role in things from my view. Surely she’s taken in how I feel about things. Surely she’d spent time in her mind running over my questions.

I only ran away from her when I couldn’t read her handwriting.

Spirituality and Religion Are Not the Same

June 27, 2023June 27, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How important is spirituality in your life?

I put a moratorium on writing about my beautiful girl yesterday, and then I get a prompt like this. Whelp. Here we go. Hold on to your butts.

When I said before that there is a place in everyone that feels infantile and defenseless and I’d given mine to my friend, it was that in 20 minutes worth of talking together, I’d made her God in my mind. Do you remember the movie “Contact?” That when the aliens reach out, it’s to a little girl, so they project an image of her father to explain everything so she is not afraid. What I love about this scene is that it’s not frightening to her because she’s been told that it’s just an image to make her listen harder.

That’s who she was to me. The image of God that made me listen harder, not that I was putting her on a pedestal and thought she was more important than me. It’s true that if we hadn’t been so incredibly different, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We’d have developed a Venn diagram on friends that would have made us lose the stranger on a train feeling that made me crave her. I can’t even explain that part of it, only that our conversations were so full of emotion that at the time, my favorite song was “Your Love is My Drug.” I was the most complicated 808 percussion rhythm in existence. It was exactly like doing a concerto at Carnegie Hall, where people only expect the highest level of musicianship, or perhaps a music jury to keep your chair in a major orchestra. In the orchestral example, I was a soprano hanging off a ledge with a cadenza to rival Kathleen Battle. The music jury is realizing you’re last chair and learning to roll with it. You’re just happy you got in.

Plus, I’m an INFJ. I am built for people to trauma dump all over me. It makes me want to fix all the things and I will put lots o energy into it because they’re helping me find myself a day at a time. What she never knew that I did was how many hours I gave her while she wasn’t in the room. Therefore, I think she thought I was always winging it, when I was running things past her to correct the story I was telling myself.

She didn’t, and it made her say things to the effect that I never missed a chance to tell her how much her problems were a burden for me. If I’d thought about it, I would have replied that I think of her with every term of endearment that has ever existed, particularly “mulkvisti,” which comes from Suomi and means “one I hate less than the others.” What she couldn’t see is that I was pouring my heart out to her and telling her how much her words affected me. She thought I was rejecting her, when I was telling her that my empathy was so large I was hurting for her, and please recognize that I made sacrifices, too. If she only knew how much love I send through the chord that runs between us (in the geometric sense of the word, not a typo)………. sometimes I put Red Bull in it just in case she’s running a quart low. Those metaphysical images give me life, and I’m rebelling against the way I have seen her treat everyone else and how I am not in that group anymore.

She can tell other women that they’re beautiful, that she loves them, sign off with kisses and hugs. To me, that is what is keeping my mistakes over my head and making it drip on my face every day. That would mean we were getting back to normal, because it made me feel that she couldn’t tell me those things because she thought I’d overreact and think she’d been touched by an angel or some shit. She doesn’t know how much it means to me when she sends me heart emojis, even. To me, showing up is often hearing that I am beautiful and loved despite all my flaws and failures, too. Showing up big would be acknowledging all my love and care as much as she’s recognized my ire.

She doesn’t recognize that at times my love for her is fucking feral, and I know she feels the same way about me because she went apeshit when Sam dumped me. She doesn’t know that I allowed myself the absolute luxury of falling in love with Daniel and my queer as folk “boyfriend,” in quotes because I don’t know what the fuck to call him at this point, only to say that he’s my first thought in the morning and will be on a friendship level for life. This is because she gave me everything I needed in terms of girl power energy everywhere I looked. There is nothing hotter to me in this world than a woman with big dick energy.

Wow, it’s a good thing my feelings aren’t that intense.

So, it was no surprise to me that within days I was completely gone. I love her for everything she used to be, is, and will be. She has said it as no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. I really believed that until she didn’t tell me that the position of partner had been filled long ago, so I hoped too much that she was one of those women whose sexuality changed based on how much they felt demisexual/sapiosexual, not where they were on the Kinsey scale previously. It was a bad pattern to set up, because I’ve kicked myself over what I didn’t know for ten years, especially the part where my brain chemicals made backing down off that nerve scream in pain. I made myself a mixtape like a fucking child, and I will not apologize for going to that place, because acknowledging those feelings helped them go away faster, and I know it. It was easier to ask and move on than it was to pine for her, because I would have done it forever and I know this about myself. I’d be eighty years old without ever being vulnerable with anyone else. It’s not her, it’s the way my personality works.

I didn’t date for a long time, and the most vulnerable reason is that I didn’t want to make anyone else a priority over her. Sam would have been fucked, and now I know that. I couldn’t acknowledge it before, but my attention didn’t turn. I chose emotional intimacy over romance for years, which is why I felt starved of it after I fucked up everything. It came across as pouting that I’d been kicked out of the popular kids’ lunch table, because she was filtering it through her experience of dealing with younger people. Our age difference doesn’t show much, but that is where it pops up most in my humble experience. That feeling provoked comes from the heuristic that I’m so much younger, I’m using girlfriend tactics to goad and provoke her like she’s a senior jock and I’m a freshman.

I had that relationship when I was actually in high school.

I had enough emotional bandwidth to sit down at a table she prepared for me, at first filled with promise…. taking off the last silver cover to reveal absolute confusion……… when all I’ve ever wanted is to be her personal chef- for real, not a euphemism. I want to be a chef, and I wanted her to be my sous. I was working toward that goal by being emotionally vulnerable so that we both could heal and move on. But recognizing that we had issues didn’t come across as goading and provoking until she laid into me and I didn’t take the time not to respond with an absolutely proportional response because I was triggered too badly at being thought of as a nuisance…. and at the same time, it being held over my head that I wrote from a different perspective than what she was actually going through because I didn’t know what it was.

By the time she actually did it, she ended with being exhausted by everything. I thought, “no girl is worth this.” No girl is worth wrecking my life over, even if I do think she’s the face of God. If I left, I could use that without her. Through looking at her picture and telling it how beautiful she is, I could imagine her thinking the same thing even if she couldn’t say it out loud out of fear.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Bible, it’s “love people out loud.”

Poorly

June 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you practice self-care?

My favorite form of self-care used to be taking a bath, but our bathroom got remodeled and now I don’t have a bathtub. It’s not an easy feat to have smooth legs, a standup shower, and cerebral palsy. Most days, pick two. In fact, I have two bags of Epsom salt (one in lavender, one in eucalyptus) that have never been used because I didn’t know we were getting a shower when I bought them.

Self care changed a bit when Zac and I started dating, because then self care started leaning toward getting out and walking with Oliver, and taking the train to his house, etc. I’m not a social butterfly unless I have to be. Most people take care of themselves by staying in. I’ve got that covered. I need to go out.

I find comfort in my bedroom/office more than anywhere else. This is because my house is very, very large and I am a small person. I tend to hole up in favor of feeling safe. I avoid most people in real life because I don’t live with my family.

I am fairly certain that my housemate thinks that because I’m queer, if she touches anything after me, that thing will turn her queer as well. I’ve gone out of my way to assure her that it TOTALLY WORKS. Don’t you dare pick up this peanut butter lest you suddenly find yourself noticing my sweatpants do fit extra tight today, you’re welcome.

Self care is learning to see others’ idiocy, otherwise it would bother me more often than it does that my housemate thinks I can King Midas her into submission (OMG. EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES TURNS RAINBOW). First of all, ew.

I can also say with a healthy amount of confidence that she’s not smart enough for me.

Self care has been about creating boundaries, which I can’t say has gone all the right way, but has produced all the right results. Having a relationship that was all in my head changed my neural pathways, but there was almost always an air of flying too close to the sun.

The relationship ended my marriage, which I’ve said before; what I haven’t said outside it was all my fault is that we trauma dumped too much too fast and each made the other take on things that they wouldn’t have otherwise chosen. This in and of itself was a crack in my relationship with Dana, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t undo it for anything in the world.

How it worked out was how it was supposed to work out, because I can truly say that I did not choose one or the other. The situation unfolded over years and I retconned it so I could explain it to myself. It was too much to act and process at the same time, and I think that’s what’s happening now. I couldn’t act and process at the same time, so I ended the relationship when I realized what it would take to be on the same page and not having someone to work with on a shared goal, because no goal was set.

It was a roller coaster, when my idea of fun is more “sitting outside by the pool and/or fire.” But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the ride while I was on it, or would turn down another trip if the situation were actually right to do so. I just don’t feel like she’s willing to hammer it out, because instead of seeing questions, she saw entitlement. It wasn’t my intention, but what my words said to her. As if I had an agenda she was constantly failing when I actually saw her as the good kind of trouble. I would do anything for her, and if the situation actually required it, I might even call her on the telephone (no, I wouldn’t. I’m not even that dedicated to me).

If it seems like I’m ragging on her a lot, I would tell you everything I ever loved about her if it wouldn’t result in identifying her. She is just too fun and funny to miss. I would be her second in command at anything just to watch her go off script.

I realized that if I meant as much to her as she meant to me, there wouldn’t be any doubt in my mind as to where we were and where we are and where we’re going because she’d actually want me to know all those things. Now I think she’s just afraid that I value me more than I value her….. that anything truly personal we shared will end up splashed all over everywhere. I doubt it, as we have no mutual friends, but it’s possible if I’ve managed to leave enough breadcrumbs without realizing it because that’s not something I’d do intentionally. I value her privacy, but it’s more than that. Talking about what we’ve shared means sharing things about me that only belong to her. It’s taking that tiny virtual meeting space and opening it up to others, when the purpose of our friendship in the first place was to be the other’s safe space. I would never intentionally violate that. I don’t want to invite anyone else into our space any more than she would want me to do it.

Self care is knowing that I need to turn my attention inward, that I need to protect my energy. So much of it went to her at times that I lost track of me. Not always, but enough. There’s one thing I won’t do, though, and that’s stop praying for her. It’s the least intrusive thing I can do, and probably all I ever will. I am certain that I have said enough, that she is done…. mostly because I told her if she was going, she couldn’t come back unless it was big. That us being so nebulous was kicking my ass. I wasn’t entitled. I was clueless.

That’s because I’d already done the clawing back up part, and it wasn’t happening again without major buy-in. What I didn’t do that I should have was cure her of all her shitty assumptions, like assuming I wasn’t getting what I thought I should out of our relationship. The truth is that she prides herself on not needing anything, so why wouldn’t she think that me being emotional was a weakness? That I’m needy?

I wasn’t needy. I was uneducated. If you don’t tell me what you need and resent the hell out of me for feeling, I’m going to rely on self care.

Truly, I think a lot of our differences can be summed up in our four ages….. ours and our inner children and how those developmental milestones rubbed up against each other. She’s chronologically older, and yet I see her as so much younger than I am. I wanted to protect her because of it, and I failed.

Caring for myself is now harder, because since I failed to protect her, I don’t care as much about myself because I don’t think I’m worth it. I’ve already proven I don’t take care of other people well, why do I think I can help me? I know they’re just intrusive thoughts; most of them don’t even have basis in fact.

I thought of something from yesterday that made me feel amazing. Years ago, I sent her a pen for Christmas. So. Who knows? Maybe I live in her ink, too. 🙂 Moments like that remind me that thoughts of her are not the intrusive ones. My giggle box turns over every time I think of that thank you letter…. that the pen (a novelty) was the first thing that had made her laugh in a while. It helps to think of these things, because I know that I am not chaotic evil 24/7.

Self care is being a little chaotic evil, though. No true regimen would leave out mass quantities of carbs and chocolate at any time, much less right the fuck now (the cramps are starting and I feel my uterus getting ready to scream).

Ohhhhhh……. the cramps are starting…… that’s why I was such a hot mess yesterday. Sounds like I could use some self care.

Failures Past and Present

June 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I’m in the process of letting myself off the hook for “making” my closest ally feel bad by “bringing up bad feelings about the past.” Here’s what she missed.

I was devastated when she married her husband and I told her that, including why. That it wasn’t because she’d said yes to him and not me. I’m not wired that way. It was because someone I thought of as dear to me didn’t even tell me when her name changed. But it was water under the bridge and trying to tell her an important part of my process… including the fact that when I saw her husband through her eyes, it made my soul relax. She had someone to lean on in such a concrete way and it made me so happy rather than wondering if she was okay and not really feeling as if I could ask that question. I wasn’t focused on anything but wanting to know why she’d chosen to keep the information from me so I could stop thinking about it. I feel like I’d talk about an issue, she’d see me as trying to intentionally point out every flaw and failure she ever had, and I’d walk off like a kicked dog.

I was trying to tell her how much things had changed, that my perspective had grown as I did. That having a 50 foot view made me see how our patterns fit together and how far we’d come over time. I was trying to tell her how much I loved her and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. I thought it would mean a lot to her to hear that her light erasing my dark wasn’t dependent on whether she changed her sexual orientation. I don’t have that much power, and wouldn’t use it if I did.

When I was telling her that she could lean on me, she took it as psychoanalysis, which to be fair it was. But it wasn’t pointing out flaws and failures, and I didn’t write the letter like that. I wrote it with as much empathy as I could muster, saying that I knew she’d been through a lot and I wanted to help. What does anyone who’s ever loved you want more for you than having less pain? I knew that I could help her have less pain by taking it on and hurting for her, breathing through it with her so that we both smiled on the exhale. I wish I had been able to express it in a way that she could hear it, because she is perfect in all her flaws and failures. Just perfect. I feel the way about her that people feel about babies… that no matter what their lives will hold, you know you’d die to protect them. There’s a place in all of us that is that vulnerable, the one that feels defenseless, and I gave her mine.

She just took away my piece of her. Let’s be clear, though. It was my fault entirely. She doesn’t do shit for no reason, but that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to emotions about it.

I think she thinks I don’t know why she yanked my credentials…. That the victim part is in thinking I’ve never done anything wrong. Just because I don’t say I know I’m responsible doesn’t mean that I don’t know it. I’ve said it in as many ways as I possibly could, but that doesn’t mean she heard it. But the thing is, I sound like a victim because I’m only talking about my problem with you because I’m not reading your mind and looking for your problem with me. I can take a guess, but it will come across as psychoanalysis, or so I’ve been told. 😉

I show my empathy by telling people what I think of what they’re going through, and write with such care and attention most of the time. Sure, I have e-mails that just say “thanks,” but that’s not the majority. It happens more frequently now, because I’m scared of starting friendship that doesn’t have an anchor.

I’m processing all this to let go of the past, certainly, but also to understand what I didn’t want for next time. The only way I can do that is to understand what happened so I don’t do it again. If I make a mistake, the pendulum swings to the other extreme so that I don’t have another appearance of the same mistake.

It’s not about her anymore. It’s about knowing what to do if anything like this happens again. I don’t want to lean into the surreal. I want to touch you at least once in our friendship, even if it’s just you accidentally stepping on my heel. I need to prove that you are a solid mass as opposed to my conscience. 😉

It’s hard for people to accept that when they do something wrong, it doesn’t mean I’m taking love away. I’m not rejecting them. I’m trying to grow with them and not against them. If my beautiful girl is impressed by my enormous changes, it would stand to reason that we’d be better friends now than we were, because those impressive changes would have happened together. I am not offended that she feels goaded and provoked because I know by now that she sees my concerns as bombs because she’s not that deep. It’s not that she can’t. It’s that there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “cain’t.” I know this because she’s done it.

I’m tired of working out all our problems and it only changing me.

And if that seems harsh, so be it. I can’t think of anything I’ve said about her in recent memory that she hasn’t taken as something I said to intentionally hurt her without ever looking at the ways I was asking her to take care of me, and asking her what she needed to feel loved as well. Therefore, when she said that e-mails making her feel bad were becoming the norm rather than the exception, I had no idea what she was talking about and she wouldn’t elaborate. If I don’t know what hurts, I can’t stop doing it.

We also have issues in both being fixer/pleasers, butt hurt when we’re actively trying to fix and the other isn’t receptive… not out of malice, but idiocy. I was dialed into my emotions, she was cut off. It wasn’t personal all the way around. She’s like that all the time, and so am I. But conflict with each other didn’t help. I keep asking myself why I required that of her, and let myself off the hook when I realized that it wasn’t me being demanding, it was me realizing that I couldn’t hold back my emotions. I couldn’t wall her off. I walked around in her inner landscape more than I should have, because she gave me a lot to think about that was interesting, and I gravitated toward interesting.

It made my asshole chew crackers when she said she’d marry Brene Brown (I would, too. That’s not the point. 😛 ). I can say that to you. It didn’t help hearing that Hannah Waddingham is hot as shit, either. That’s because me saying I felt the same way about her wigged her out, and she told me that, too. So, sexuality is nonbinary when there’s not a chance in hell it’s real. I am glad that she never in a million years said she’d marry me, even in jest. She definitely didn’t do it when she knew it was my landmine, but I mean early on, when neither of us could ever have done anything wrong. That’s because I would have hurt about it long after I died.

I just don’t feel let down. I don’t feel disappointed that I just wasn’t it for her. I feel like she has the right to be completely who she is, and to wish I could change her is the height of entitlement. I hate those people. What I did wish for is integration, and not necessarily physically, as in a cup of coffee together. Just that sense of integrating our ideas so that we were both up to speed on what the other thought.

I didn’t like being thought of as an asshole, and I didn’t like that she wouldn’t tell me why. I can’t hear that I’m making you feel bad when I’ve just sent you an e-mail saying that we’re both miracles and perfect, not together (but I can see it), but in all the things that we bring to the world.

I just have no idea what she was talking about, because I can have empathy for the way you feel and also no idea how to fix your problem with me if you don’t give me a little more detail. What did I say that made you feel bad, because I am not going to go through every line and have my stomach hurt trying to read your mind.

I also didn’t think it was fair that I looked at every feeling she had about me, seeing her as a spectrum, not a binary. She had me pegged as a dickhead unless I called her out and then I was very impressive for a few minutes.

It would always go back, though, because she hated being judged and couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact that I’m not judgmental about people. I’m judgmental about situations, but not in a way that’s trying to hurt people. I mean like an ACTUAL judge. Someone who listens to all of the facts and collates what they think and feel. Judgment is a way of making decisions. How do you differentiate between signal and noise? Some people perceive, some people judge. One is not more or less than the other, they’re different.

I judge people and situations to be perfect all the time. My judgment not only sees problems and analyzes them, it also makes me an incredible gift giver because since I’ve actually spent time muddling through our issues, I remember more of what you say and little things stick. Your favorite charities. Your job. Your interests. Your teams. Just anything that will tell you that when you get a gift from me, I’ve been paying attention. For instance, if your job requires that you be absolutely wired at all times, I’ll send you SBUX to maximize where you can spend the money. If it is Galentine’s Day, I will make you waffles, or send you a gift certificate to buy them. If I find out you’ve been a fan of Arsenal since you were a kid, I’ll kit you out over the next five years.

It’s a little bit like Sherlock Holmes deducing information, because through logic, he has a more complete data set than people think he does. I have a similar example to Holmes knowing Watson fought in Afghanistan. Not that extreme, of course. It’s just that I’ve picked up things over the years because I’m reading everything she’s not saying as well. This isn’t it, but a universal example would be someone being lactose intolerant because they’ve never said that, yet when you ask them what they want from a coffee shop, it’s always vegan.

The heuristic is that it’s more likely that someone is lactose intolerant than they just don’t like milk if they’ve never indicated they eat vegan food.

But I don’t tell her any of that crap to make her feel bad. I tell her that stuff because what I think is going to make her feel noticed and appreciated makes her feel terrible. If I can’t fix that, I need to move on, because it hurts too much to hurt her.

I let her go because I loved her, not because I was being a toddler.

If I’m the only one that makes her feel bad, my reactions don’t feel amazing, either. I’m just willing to tell you why so that more information means less conflict. Or it should, anyway.

Besides, fuck marrying Brene, because obviously if she hadn’t learned Microsoft Word from me, she wouldn’t be Brene Brown. I am directly responsible for all of her success and I won’t believe anything else. 😛

Paw Paw

June 5, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music can say what you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Just Is

June 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?

When I know I need to go off the grid, it’s for one of two things. The first is that I’m trying hard not to get my crazy spatter on anyone else. The second is that I have something important to write and I don’t want that flow to be interrupted. Therefore, I am connected by an umbilical cord to my desktop/Fire HD, but not the Internet. Local files are a thing, people. Look into it. 😉

To me, unplugging means refocusing my attention on myself. It’s not that I’m actively trying to be selfish. It’s just that who should have the time to give me what I need when I am already actively spending time with me? I mean, there’s no commute.

When I shut down, I shut down completely. I’m sure it irritates the living hell out of people, but when I get like that, I don’t have the bandwidth to take on what other people are thinking and feeling. I recede into myself as my brain tells me that no one needs me, anyway. It’s not the truth. It’s the lie depression uses to get me where it wants me. My work to do is to raise my self esteem so that I’m not so needy, because no one likes to think of themselves that way, even if they have cerebral palsy, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and anxiety. I’m not needy in that I’m an emotional vampire. I’m needy because I genuinely have a harder time navigating the world. Because I don’t look like I have CP or bipolar, people treat me as if I have none of those things because perception is reality. In order to receive the kind of patience I need, it’s imperative for people to understand why I need them. Alternatively, I will be just as attentive to people who confide those things in me. It is not about me always needing things. It’s about both people finding someone who has their back. I am more dedicated to my friends than most people because I realize that if I need them, I need to appreciate them more as well.

I just navigate those relationships slowly, because I’m a lot and I know it. Even Sam was never truly on the inside, and not because I couldn’t see a future with her. It was that even though we were connected, it hadn’t been very long. I always trusted my friends more than I trusted her, because it would take time for all that to come out and we only lasted three weeks. What Sam did was devastating to me, because I had to come up with all the answers as to why on my own. All the answers I would have given her had she asked questions before busting my fairy tale. The resolution I received is that she was too pragmatic to take dreaming in stride. She seemed threatened by thinking bigger rather than excited. I believe the relationship lasted as long as it should’ve, and I’m glad it was easy to move on. It would have just been another relationship in which I’d say too much to fill the silence.

I always think there’s a combination of words that will unlock people. They won’t open up if they’re threatened by dreaming into the future or dealing with conflict. One always leads to the other if they’re threatened by both. I want to live bigger than this, despite my actions to the contrary. I had good reasons for disappearing from everything, because I needed so much and wouldn’t tell anyone about it. I wrote everything down, self-soothing to the extent that I’m able. One of the tapes I have that needs destroying is “why do you think everyone else needs to save you?” One answer is that I don’t have shame about asking for help, because I know how far I’d go for the people I love when I’m at full strength. I have an extraordinarily long track record in terms of absolutely going out of my mind when my friends are in trouble. They have to talk me down from the ceiling and they do, unless I can tell that they’re in such bad shape that they’re unable to run on their own power. In that case, I just do things without asking. I will clean someone’s house even when they’re yelling at me to stop because I can see that depression has gotten the better of them and I can’t let them die from bacteria, despite the fact that depressed people often kill themselves slowly, because they have no ownership of their future. All they can see is a lifetime of too much emotional pain. Death is not a gunshot to the head, but seriously not caring about your health because of death’s relief.

It’s the monster on your back and the ghost in your head, your diseased brain trying to protect you by emotional torture so you’ll isolate in protection of yourself and others. They think you’re too needy, anyway. I don’t feel needy, I feel fair. You give me a hand up, and both of mine are yours.

I also internalize that when I ask for help, people think that it’s not mutual because obviously their issues are too much for me. If I am projecting that, it’s not you. It’s the weight of the world. It’s not your problem that’s weighing me down, but the mass I take on just walking through a mall. Therefore, it makes me write differently, because I write to illustrate an idea, and it makes it seem more dramatic than it really is because I’m trying to craft a page. Trying to make up for the lack of being able to see your eyes, so that you see how deeply I’m feeling whether you’re in front of me or not. I am not actively trying to be more dramatic, I’m trying to make sure you get it. The more granular with detail I can be, because you’re not seeing body language or tone of voice. Even the way I talked about a problem would be different in person than in writing, because I have trouble processing emotion in front of people and need the safety of a delete key, even though I’m a dumbass and don’t use it as frequently as I have needed.

I retreated into myself, having fewer and fewer conversations in person, because it was far too easy to reveal myself in my letters than a cup of coffee relaxing on the couch. That way, I could have more emotional bravery than I’d ever have sitting down together, because I am not processing your emotions at the same time I’m processing mine. I don’t have to handle watching you cry or yell, because it will rip me to pieces and I avoid that at all costs. When I am reading your words, I am imagining your world. Imagining you telling your story as I tell you mine. I think it makes meeting in person easier, because if you’ve already written out what’s driving you up the wall about the other, time together can be all laughs. Writing is how I get to the bottom of some deep, dark shit. That way, you already know how I feel when we meet, and if the issue is not resolved, it’s easier to respond with empathy because you’ve already digested how I feel, sort of like being prepared for a test. If we have a conflict, I’m not blindsiding you and expecting you to have all the answers, because you already know what I think the problem is and talking is for answers.

I have a habit of popping off without making it clear how angry I am about an action and how much I love the person with whom I’m fighting. Harry Windsor talks extensively about this in “Spare,” how he often went into a blind rage everyone called “Red Mist.” It’s something that many people with PTSD feel, and you can’t tell me he doesn’t have it. We both have been through the shit, except his trauma isn’t even on the same playing field. To be perfectly blunt, we both have PTSD, but I don’t have a kill count. This is not to say that I think Harry did anything wrong. He is a precious gift from God and I hope he recognizes that though he’s been treated like crap by his family, other people are ready and willing to take their place. I think that’s part of the queer in me. We know intimately what it’s like to live with chosen family and not because we want to…… although it’s funny, I have never seen funnier conversations between old queers and young, that we are irritated by straight people accepting us because now it means we do get invited to things. We do get pressured to have kids. We now have to put up with all kinds of bullshit that’s new to us- how to act like we belong when we haven’t the first clue as to how. That’s because deep down, we don’t know whether your homophobia is overt or uneducated. It’s not that there’s never homophobia, it’s that deep down, white people have been told that being white is better with a horrifying history of trying to prove it, and straight people have been told that homosexuality is a sin that deserves jail and death. Those messages don’t fade overnight. We know that because we feel the same way as everyone else. It’s one thing to work through believing that homosexuality is a sin. It’s another to work through people treating you as if you are one.

So, even allies with the best of intentions make mistakes on two levels. The first is due to the deeply ingrained message that homosexuality is wrong, and the second is not knowing how to communicate with a gay person, because they’re enmeshed in a system they don’t see and don’t wonder what it is we’re rebelling against. We’re not different, we’re threatening. Straight people who are fully accepting of their gay friends/relatives still work through their own biases, and gay people with straight friends/relatives work through those prejudices from the opposite vantage point. We aren’t responsible for your education, and yet we are because we don’t want to live in this society where our lives are threatened because of our sins in the Bible; they have no bearing on the law and people shouldn’t make them exclusive……. but somehow have.

Dealing with everyone’s homophobia, including the fear we have of ourselves, is everyone’s problem. It’s not dissimilar from eradicating racism, including the kind that’s internalized because of the messages we receive every day. Our lives depend on whether straight, white, and cis people are threatened by us to varying degrees. We are making progress in the US, sliding backward…. while people in other countries have no such luxury. Being gay in the US is a much smaller deal than being gay in Uganda.

We find more ways to separate than connect. Women are still dependent on the level of men’s misogyny. Children are still dependent on their parents and rightfully so, but experience a large range of situations from their parents’ ideas on whether they are a being or a possession.

Unplugging and protecting myself from feeling all of that is sometimes necessary, because I stop talking when I feel like if I ask for help it will count as a black mark against me. If I don’t have help, I need more space. I need to write longer. It’s what helps me rely on myself, but often leads to the pendulum swinging too far and not wanting to say anything about anything, ever.

If I have a problem with you and I take the time to lay it out, you’re important to me. That’s because it takes an enormous amount of emotional fortitude to say what I really feel and not fear a response. To not torture myself once a letter leaves my hands. To know that I will deal with what comes, instead of focusing on all the bad things that could happen if you know how I feel and don’t agree with it. If you don’t tell me how you feel, I will free up that time and energy to be able to give it to someone else.

When my mother died, I lost someone who would help me if she was able, so she’s the part of my life where I feel the most vulnerable. It freed up a lot of my time and bandwidth, just love with nowhere to go because I wasn’t trying to replace her. I was only trying to fill up the hole in the most practical ways I could, like turning my attention in the hours I used to spend with her on the phone. I can’t replace her personality, but I can reorient how I spend my time. I can purposefully make friends with moms both older and younger so I feel that energy without having it myself. It’s a huge mountain to climb when you realize you don’t have a mother anymore. I do not mean in a practical sense. I mean that you are not in the active process of being the child born to her, and grief kills those parts of you so that your personality doesn’t resemble who you were before. There are just dead spots, searching for something to fill them.

The one thing I didn’t do was zone out, seeking pleasures like being drunk or high to avoid processing. I can be very proud of the fact that those things didn’t lure me away from myself. Most people can’t imagine doing that whole thing straight edge, because I never put anything in my body that would make me feel disconnected from reality. Now that I’m several years out, I’ll have a beer once in a while. It’s a treat like a Snickers, not something I do all the time. What I found is that alcohol makes my depression worse, so I can’t treat it the same as soda. I didn’t quit drinking because I needed to stop, I only quit drinking most of the time because it made me feel better. It gave me more bandwidth to deal because I wasn’t putting off until tomorrow what could be grieved today. Nothing compounded because I wasn’t kicking the can down the road. I sat in agony daily, just waiting it out because there’s nothing you can do but let time work. You never get over it, but you do see that you’re allowed to have happiness again eventually.

This is because when my mother died, I was single. It caused so much pain that she’d never know how my life turned out. I could say I’m grateful for that because I’ve made so many mistakes, but I’m not. The idea that Sam was my girl made me so happy, and crushed that my mother would never meet her or her stepkids had we moved in that direction. My favorite and most heartbreaking moments were dreaming about my mother and Sam having so much in common, and being so different. I got the best of what I loved about my mother professionally without the things about her personality that I didn’t like. Therefore, Sam actually reminded me a lot of Texas musicians, and my mom was one. An amalgam of everything I loved about Texas without the baggage of being from there. It was difficult dealing with being in the best music program in the country (TMEA, not local schools), and the homophobia within. I went to a performing arts high school in the middle of gay Disneyland and I still got bullied by kids in church choir.

Thinking about my mother not meeting anyone else I might date is devastating, because I don’t have that “bringing someone home to meet my parents” feeling yet…. and when it happens, there will be a deep place of sorrow inside me. I think about my future wife being pregnant and I just crumble at the thought. I think of my sister getting pregnant as well in the same way, even though we’re both childless and like it. It’s not the thought of Lindsay being a mom that drives me, but the part of my mom that would live in the kid. Neither of us want to have kids, and yet it would have been interesting to have seen what those kids would have been like. When I was thinking about getting pregnant, I was excited about all the ways I’d see my family in them. Getting pregnant was only about genetics, because I didn’t think of that until after my mother died. Lindsay and I both thought the same thing, we just didn’t have passion or drive about the idea. It jut exists.

You can acknowledge that a story would have been great without writing it. However, in my case, I have no idea who I want to commit to, so my dreams are based on what my partner will bring to the table and not what I want. I am not looking for a person in a certain set of circumstances, just being open to the fact that I won’t know anything up front and just be open. Women are naturally driven to have kids, and sexual orientation doesn’t play into it. Some just have more maternal drives than others and I need to be ready for it. If the person I want feeds me intellectually, they could probably ask me to dive off the Empire State building while singing “The Star Spangled Banner” and I’d at least think about it.

I can hit the high B flat when I unplug.