Tag: Friendship

I Don’t Know, So I Don’t Know

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?

One of the things I’m pondering this week came from a Twitter thread on habits…. that neurodivergents don’t have them, and that’s what neurotypical people can’t understand. Neurotypical people can make things happen automatically by repetition, and for neurodivergents, every task takes the same amount of energy as it did the first time, because every routine you have is a conscious decision. I have no executive function, nothing that makes me form a habit in the same way someone who doesn’t have ADHD would.

If you have no ability to create habits, life is exhausting. You are spending so much energy remembering what it takes to get out the door and you’ve been doing it since childhood. When your brain is unmanaged attention-wise, other thoughts invade while you’re trying to make a memory. That’s why I, a Virgo, am classically great at creating systems of organization that don’t last very long. Every “Back to School” was so much hope.

I am deeply in discernment about what my definition of having it all means, because it has shifted in quite a few ways. It’s great because my sister and I are having some of the same epiphanies, and it’s great being able to share. I saw her for lunch the other day, and she looks great. I was going to go with her to a thing where she was speaking, and I backed out because I couldn’t find an outfit. It was impossible. I’d lost so much in the fire by having to evacuate my room and I haven’t had time or need to replace anything until now.

Part of having it all for me is nice clothes, which is why I have a black belt in Goodwill. I can take a thousand dollar outfit and have it for $40, because it probably cost $20 and needs hemming.

In terms of clothes, I dress like every tech nerd in America, I just have sensory perception issues and would rather have an old shirt that was made to last two generations than fast fashion because it feels better. It’s the difference between a Target button down and Brooks Brothers.

I already have it all in one area of my life- this web site. I’ve made friends from it all over the globe, and it’s tremendously validating that I got here just by being myself. I didn’t set out to teach anyone but me, and ended up connecting with everyone else. To be honest, I post an entry frequently because I’ve come to visit this web site and it is now boring. That blogger sucks. Then I remember it’s me and get back to work.

I’m sorry that in some ways, entries seem repetitive if you show up every day, but to me it feels like I’m workshopping an idea. Clarifying. That’s what I mean by teaching myself. Reading myself closely and seeing how I come across to the outside world informs what I do next, and that feels right, because none of my ideas are coming from external validation and I am not trying to please an audience. I can see structure over time where I am woodshedding, purposefully running selected measures over and over until the tempo is right…. when I feel my inner Aaron Sorkin kick in. A phrase rises from being able to hear it in your own cadence to being able to hear it in mine.

Having it all is knowing I create reactions in you when you read, and you’re not shy about letting me know how you feel. Even when you disagree, I know I’ve made you feel something, which is so much better than nothing. It’s been such a rewarding relationship over the years, the one between you and me. I strongly believe it’s the only one that will last the rest of my life because I’ll still be able to write even if everything else goes away. In fact, I need it more when things go sideways. That’s how I teach those things not to hurt. I don’t approach every relationship thinking it’s going to end, I just know that I’ll be all right if it does.

Having it all is being open to the possibility of having kids in my life, which is to say that Cora already is, but it would be different living with her or any of the kids I would come to love. I’m also at an age where many of the people I meet have grandkids, because either they had kids early or they’re a few years older than me. That’s exciting to think about as well. I wonder all the time how it would change me, because I’ve had to think about it before and it all made me smile. I’d even be up for pregnancy and childbirth as long as it wasn’t mine.

I would be the greatest dad ever. I am already an old grandpa on the Internet. I already make terrible jokes, and I’m not offended by dating someone younger if they’re aiming for kids or already have them, because in that case they’re already better at adulting than I am, so why worry? I am not aiming for a young trophy wife, I’m just saying that I can’t know what circumstances people are in until I talk to them. Who knows what my next love will bring to the table? Whether they’re older or younger, childless or have many, none of that matters. I want someone who has an exciting mind and doesn’t care that I’m a bit of a homebody who needs to sit alone for long periods of time if they can’t sit quietly. That’s how to be a writer. To have everyone understand that they know where to find you in an emergency, but please don’t interrupt. In exchange, when I am not writing, I am completely and totally available. This gets easier when the other person is really busy.

It would help if my next partner had as big a worldview as Zac, because it gets me out of my own head to talk about things that affect countries and not me personally. I often need to be dragged out of thinking about myself, because it informs where I’m going on this blog. It’s developing ideas on what to say so that I’m not threatened by a blank page. It’s having more to talk about than just me.

I also feel like I’m the authority on me, but I don’t want to presume I’m an expert on anything else. Some of my assumptions are flat out wrong, because I don’t have all the information. When I do, my opinion changes and I write about that, too. I process emotionally pretty fast, which leads people to believe I am up and down mentally. In reality, I just let go of what I think quickly because new shit has come to light.

My mind moves fast, and it’s hard to keep up. Sometimes I’m proud of that, because it gives me self confidence to an enormous degree. I am literally not carrying around anything, because I talk about it here and then I’m done. Everything else I do to prepare just feels like writing a letter into the void, hoping that someone a hundred years from now will find it interesting. Knowing for sure that people who have crossed my path will live forever because I think that highly of them. That our story goes up and down because life can’t do anything else. I embrace change now in a way that I haven’t before, because I have a repository that tells me how strong and resilient I’ve become. That I have a place to fall that makes good stories out of bad situations. Future generations will read it like a novel, or a collection of letters in great grandma’s trunk.

Lately, happiness has written white for me, the ink not dark enough to be memorable. Having it all has been adjusting my expectations so that they’re much smaller. Noticing how good a cup of coffee tastes, even the day after with ice. Having the world’s most comfortable bed, surrounded by friends I never would have made had I not moved here. When Mother’s Day manipulation is not raining down on me, more of my funny moments with my mom shine through, because there were so many. It’s just that when shit goes down, you’re not always thinking of the sunniest thoughts, and that’s okay. My dad said something in a sermon once that’s stuck with me to this day, which has to be almost 30 years by now. He said, “death is 50% anesthesia to the living.” That when people die, we tend to saint them and not talk about what they were really like.

My mother and I are both full characters. We laughed, loved, lost and found each other. None of that can be contained with mere words. I accept all her love and genuine homophobia (she was never a bigot, just uneducated and afraid). Those things are not mutually exclusive. They are both true, and always will be.

I hope that with all of my entries, you can see that I hold the same opinion of all people. I accept that people do things that make them come across like an asshole, and so do I. They also do things that make them come across like an angel, and so do I. Sometimes I’m so focused on trying to resolve my issues that I forget to acknowledge how blessed I truly am, the only words I also love and hate. I want to talk about Christianity, but with the same foul-mouthed academia you’ve come to know and love, not Christianese.

I like that when I’m angry, I can still count on Jesus to have had a similar experience in which things also sounded better in his head.

This is another way of having it all, and it comes from the blessing of one person in particular. Love me or hate me, I was this way before Nadia Bolz-Weber, and then I got worse. 😛 Finally, someone who preached in my style because she used to do stand-up. Her sermons could make you roll in the aisle with laughter, which came as a relief because you were sobbing a second ago. It opened me up to hear that being human was a viable option. She didn’t inspire me to follow in her footsteps, only that being a regular person with a full range of emotions didn’t make me a less serious academic when it came to research and the humor I attached to it. Seriously, it was like Moses whispered in my ear that he killed a guy. A blog didn’t render me less worthy to talk about God. But it was a much bigger sin, just to be clear.

Note taken.

Several

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever broken a bone?

My nose got broken when I was a kid. I am sure I walked straight into something, because if it had been a fight, I would have remembered. What I do know is that my nose is still feels weird about its “new” configuration.

My foot got broken when Lindsay decided that I could learn to skateboard in the living room, and it didn’t go all that well. It was just a hairline fracture until I worked an entire shift at a restaurant waiting tables without realizing that the pain was because of a broken bone, ensuring that it went from a nuisance to a big damn deal.

I went to the ER when I got home, after a concerned girlfriend said I should probably get an X-ray and everyone else was asleep. I think she must have driven 45 minutes to an hour to make sure I went to the doctor instead of just telling her I would. Incredibly sweet on her part, because like as not it would still be broken and me scratching my head as to why had she not been persuasive.

I broke my wrist in front of a Starbucks, because I tripped on the sidewalk going towards the door. That’s the most painful and irritating thing I’ve ever been through. My cast was a hot mess. Luckily, everything healed correctly and no lingering pain. The funniest was not being able to make it to my appointment to get my cast off, so my girlfriend’s dad took it off with his Dremel.

Speaking of which, my girlfriend’s dad was a good time, because he was conservative as shit, but made me laugh on a regular basis…. This is because he was funny both when he knew it and when he didn’t. He also lived in Corpus Christi, which is why I was away from my doctor in he first place. Katharin and I had driven to Corpus for a visit. Corpus is one of my favorite places now, because I’ve spent enough time there to get to know it. The beaches are just amazing, and I didn’t think I could love a beach more than the ones where I lived on Galveston.

Since then, which was probably 2015, I haven’t broken anything. The worst thing that’s happened is falling downtown and hurting myself, which by now has happened too many times to count, not all of them memorable. The ones that are stick out. The ones that don’t leave bruises, so I know something happened, but not when and where. Having cerebral palsy makes you off balance all the time, and not having depth perception on top of it makes me a bit of a comedian to the outside world. I run into doorjambs the most, because I can’t calculate the distance of my shoulder from it, nor can I pay attention to both sides of the jamb at once. I overcorrect left and right, so my shoulders look like I box.

Maybe I should box. I could work out and go an entire sparring session without being able to hit anything. 😉 I can just picture trying to punch in the right direction and missing the target by half an inch…. And that would happen more than once, every instance funny in its own way.

Breaking my wrist was awful because it was my right. I can’t write for shit, especially with my left hand. I couldn’t really type one-handed, either, but I managed that easier than a pen. I remember long, rambling phone conversations with Dana in which I was trying not to let on that I was in pain while she chatted about the latest goings on in Portland and the entire plot of the M*A*S*H* episode she was currently watching.

There’s a story there, and it fits in well with the theme of Katharin being good for me and not. Katharin was funny and engaging in public, and behind closed doors was a very unhappy person. I couldn’t do anything about that. There were several red flags surrounding this one, but this one crushed me. I spent time and money running around getting her flowers and an enormous cake for her birthday, and I got no thank you for it. I got a treatise on how sad it made her that I didn’t get her a card. I didn’t do it intentionally, I was just excited about the cake because it was themed especially for her. She told me once that she loved white cake, because it reminded her of special occasions, like birthdays and weddings.

Not only did I get her a white cake because of it, I remember that quote so fondly that white is my favorite cake now, too. I love weddings and birthday parties, or the idea of them, anyway. It’s like the first few minutes of “Love Actually” when you see people greeting each other at Heathrow.

I wrote her what I thought was a beautiful essay about how much I was grateful she was born, and it still took her several days to get over a slight I hadn’t intended and thought she was making a mountain out of a molehill.

In fact, what drove me away was her treatment of Dana.

She didn’t have the right to be concerned when Dana was in Oregon and I was in Texas, because I wasn’t giving off those kind of vibes. In fact, it didn’t occur to me just how stupid I’d been until Dana saw how Katharin treated me and read me the riot act over it, that it was painful to watch. This is because Katharin knew that Dana lived in SE Portland and forbid me to see Dana at all, so she’d check my bank account and see if any of my charges were in SE. Just everything she could do to spy on me to make sure I was keeping up my part of the bargain….. one I did not make. She didn’t have the street credibility to ask something like that of me, because I’d never been in love with Dana and I didn’t see it happening until I realized how much it touched me for Dana to hurt for me. That she was the kind of person I needed to be with rather than the one who set to tear me down instead of build me up.

This is because I’d won an internship with the Human Rights Campaign to write Sunday School curriculum for churches all over the nation. I would have been amazing at it, but Katharin didn’t want me to go and my friends said that it was a big deal for her, because who manages the house for three months, etc? My opinion was that Katharin and I hadn’t been together long enough for me to worry about her on that level…. It had only been a few months, not a few years. And even then, what spouse actively throws a fit over their partner getting the job of their dreams?

I threw away an amazing opportunity with the reward of continuing to get beat up emotionally all the time. That’s when Meagan and Deah came to visit, and when they wanted to spend a night with me, I said “of course!” Then, the day before they got to my house, Katharin was so mad at me for letting an ex spend the night (with her wife and child in the guest room, hello…… we’ve been friends since high school……) that she punched a hole in the wall. Luckily, it was fixed and painted before company arrived.

Katharin also had very specific ideas about what would make me less of a flake, which she phrased in just that way. I couldn’t stop the behaviors that made me feel bad, and I had such hope for the future. We were going to move to Portland together, and she started flaking on whether she was coming or not. She must have told me she wasn’t coming twice before I broke up with her for good, but that didn’t stop her from going nuclear when I did, because she needed to believe that I left. Realizing that she’d put on a show of saying she was excited about moving, then going to Corpus for the summer and getting settled in was her own choice, because it made it harder to leave when she was so integrated back into her first family. By this time, I knew I wanted to be with Dana, but it wasn’t the only reason I broke up with Katharin. I would have broken up with Katharin because of Dana’s opinion regardless. If my best friend is saying “I don’t like how she treats you” and she has known me longer than you, guess what?

I didn’t need Dana to tell me what to do. I knew what to do. She just confirmed that it was as bad as I thought it was. These things weren’t normal, particularly going through my bank transactions to see if I was even in the same quadrant of Portland as her. You would just have to know how many of my friends live in SE to know how laughable this really is. I don’t think I have any friends anywhere else in the city because those neighborhoods are too normal for us.

The love affair with Dana started in earnest when she drove with me to move my stuff into my new apartment, but it was just a whisper. Nothing happened on that trip at all, it just opened my eyes to the fact that when Dana’s plane took off, my entire world was going to go with it. I let her go, because I didn’t have any plans to return to Portland and wanted to move on with my life. Then, Houston got in my way. I just wasn’t happy because I wasn’t the same person in that context and I liked Portland Leslie better.

So, being with Dana never would have happened had I not gone back. It wasn’t that I didn’t see it, it’s that I couldn’t indulge it.

I think Dana felt the same way, that it would have been a great story.

When I moved back to Portland, we realized that we were both settling for fine and wanted to reach out for fabulous. And we were, but we weren’t the same people Houston, either. It seemed like such an incredible opportunity, and it was wasted.

I don’t regret ending my relationship with Dana when it got bad, I regret not keeping it amazing. When it was time to be there, it was necessary. When it was clear that we were turning on each other instead of towards, the signs were clear that starting over was going to be easier than going straight through.

But I’ll never forget being in so much pain in the ER, my wrist limp beside me and the pain meds struggling to keep up. Katharin said, “who’s Mama’s brave little soldier” She was actually imitating her mother, I think, because it made me crack up.

And laughter is the best medicine.

Headaches

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I do not have a very good relationship with headaches. They love me, and I don’t feel the same way. Yet, we don’t break up. Headaches just plague me constantly. I am certain that some of them are caused by emotional pain, but these are too severe for that to be the whole diagnosis. I can tell they are migraines, because both Sudafed and caffeine help stop the pulsing sensation that makes me close my eyes and the brilliant colors start dancing behind my lids. It is genetic. I spent parts of my childhood waiting for my mother to emerge from a dark room where she was sleeping off these monstrosities with narcotics because in those days, that was about the limit of what you could do after Tylenol, Sudafed, and a cup of coffee didn’t do anything.

The headaches aren’t NOT connected to my bipolar disorder, either, because when I feel bad physically, the pain compounds mentally. I feel worthless because I have even less to contribute to the conversation besides sitting in the room and unable to focus on other people because I can barely see five feet in front of my face.

As of right this moment, I feel like I have ants under my skull and I can’t scratch them out…. But not in a destructive way. Just in that way that it feels good to scratch my head like I’m washing my hair. I am not feeling crazy in a way that would have blood dripping down my neck and me saying, “did I get them?” That’s too dark even for me.

It’s just easy to pick up on dark humor when you feel this bad. It’s been all day, every day, since about Thursday. I have been going about my regular business while feeling absolute shit. It’s not my favorite set of emotions ever. I don’t like the guilt of feeling sick, that I am falling down on the job of taking care of other people and realistic about taking care of myself. I am sorry to all of the people who have sent me something and I haven’t replied. Being sick isn’t an excuse, but I hope it’s context. It is a sign that I am feeling marginally better that I was able to reach out a couple of times this morning even though my head is pounding, anyway. My need to isolate when I am sick is absolute when I am sick, because I do not want to be seen, heard, or touched. If I lived with a partner or I just happened to be with Zac during something like that, I might cave on the being touched part. I wouldn’t talk about it. That’s because there’s too much evidence it’s not psychosomatic, and too much evidence that it really, really is. I have a feeling I talked my way into this mess, so I don’t want to talk my way out.

That’s generally how I get into emotional messes. People think I’m too much. Full stop. I’ve been told I’m too much by too many people for it not to be universally true. So, I don’t talk about it and my brain sets up pain loops that eventually turn physical if I struggle mentally long enough. Depression and anxiety create stress responses that wear down your immunity and resistance to injury. In my case, that means something hurting far longer than it should when I fall. Depression makes me lose timing and balance, because they get worse when I’m tired. Depression is chronic fatigue, so I live for hypomania. Because I’m medicated, it doesn’t mean a whole lot except for my energy being high enough to handle more of other people’s emotions because I’m not concentrating on my own.

My closest allies talk about their problems and it helps me to focus more on them so that depression doesn’t dog me as bad. Changing my perspective is key. When I spiral out, my trauma reflexes kick in and the rage I’ve been holding in because I’ve been keeping so many secrets from an age where I should have been allowed to be young creeps in. Except I can’t get mad at her directly, it comes out in my writing style and people don’t realize that I’m hurting. They see it as being mean to them on purpose. I am working on changing that perception, but it’s hard when I’m struggling so hard to contain my emotions. I am combustible, and the first step is acknowledging it.

In the particular case of the Internet relationship, her life was bigger than mine, and she had a lot more to focus on than me. That was completely fine until my issues were never addressed and it was clear they were never going to be important enough for things to change. Then it was deciding whether I could live with that or not… that the level she was willing to pay attention wasn’t going to ever change and I needed to get with the program.

It wasn’t her fault, but our problems were too unique for me to process, and heavy enough that I needed to resolve them or move on with my life. That superficial interaction wasn’t enough for me because the feelings I’ve been carrying are too large for me to talk about on my own. And it’s not fair for that information to go to anyone else, anyway, because if I have something to say about her, it’s something she should know rather than me talking about her to other people. It’s what friends should do for each other no matter what the circumstance might be.

It caused no small amount of wanting to resolve everything and come to a peace about it so that dropping in on each other’s lives would have been possible. Not having that peace bothered me too much not to get closure on my own. That’s because her behavior came across as “you’re in pain and I don’t care” whether she meant it or not. Healing me meant giving me the peace of mind about what she was thinking and feeling, and because she didn’t give that, the relationship got more and more off kilter as I needed her to engage and she was stonewalling me every chance she got. She had every right to do so, but not with me. It was too much, but not too fast. It had been almost ten years. I was very supportive of everything she was going through, and frustration at not hearing that it was causing me more pain not to hear her anymore than I could reasonably be expected to carry. If she wanted me, I needed her to open up, because it was devastating that I was no longer hers, not that I never was.

Everything she did to stonewall me looked bigger than the occasional incredibly sweet things we did for each other, because it wasn’t my love language. She wouldn’t come my way no matter how I felt about it, which was to hurt deeply. It wasn’t fair for me to live with that level of pain and pretend it was okay anymore. That our relationship was nourishing me instead of draining me. In effect, we’d get frustrated that though we were both speaking clearly in her love language, she forgot how to use that skill and was extraordinarily frustrated that I cared so much more than she did because she wasn’t feeling the same pain as me. Working out problems didn’t make her feel more loved. Having a surface level friendship didn’t make me feel loved, either. It was a win-win situation in some ways, and devastating in others. I couldn’t afford that lack of self esteem anymore, because it was incongruent with being told that I was extraordinarily smart and impressive. In the beginning, I felt incredibly needed and extraordinarily honored, but because she stopped being vulnerable, I felt discarded. That’s not on her because she needed to distance herself. It was on me to decide a plan of action… what I needed to do to stop feeling unloved all the time because it was something that contributed to my physical health because I hadn’t learned to think about her. I’d imprinted on her and began to feel her.

Not resolving an issue completely presented physically, because she apologized for her behavior, but bringing it back up when I was processing what happened when something in my head referred to it was wrong. That I wasn’t bringing it back up to shame her, but defining a pattern. Recognizing a bad pattern and addressing it was the way to move forward and relieve the pain tape. Changing my pain to my empathy and focusing on what she was feeling was relief. I couldn’t get it from her, but I could get it from me.

Processing a thunderstorm takes a lot out of me, so that’s how I know it’s all in my head and also serious as a heart attack, because psychobiology tells me it’s true. But thinking about what she must have been going through brings me peace because it’s not offensive to think those things without her, when it hurt her to hear them and respond as if I was actively trying to hurt her instead of trying to change my own reactions to her. It was essential to resolving my feeling wanted and needed, because it made me emote in a way that made me feel equally hurt. Getting my needs addressed didn’t come across to me as actively trying to hurt her. It was solving the problem of being close in the future without knowing if there was a future or not. No matter what, we are part of each other’s brains because there’s nothing that will ever stop it. But there’s no building anything, either, when we constantly hurt each other because one wants to get closer and the other doesn’t set boundaries at all.

When she did, finally, it hurt too much to hear. It was never going to change. I could spill my guts any time I wanted, but if I hit a nerve, she was always going to keep it to herself unless it made her angry enough to explode. To have more negative reinforcement than positive was too much, because I then felt like I was intruding on her life rather than adding to it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want the relationship at all. It was that we didn’t want the same things. She was making clear what hadn’t been before, and it was devastating to an enormous degree because I’d put in so much work to rectify past mistakes so that she could trust me, and it felt like those letters were trying to prove my trustworthiness and being taken as attacks…. And that’s what made nothing move forward. I tried different ways to address a problem and none of them would work. I was lecturing her, not inviting her into my world. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t move on, either. It was that when a huge callback came up, she would take it as rejection and not trying to get closer, or not wanting it and not willing to be able to say it until now. It had to be one or the other, because in order to feel impressive, I needed to know why. Which changes have impressed you, because you only seem angry with me when you write? Why does a sitrep make you feel horrible instead of you lumping all my emails together as if they all say the same thing?

In my head, I thought she was a miracle, and she thought I was annoying. I am usually impressed by being the most annoying person people know, but she was my safe space, my lock box. It makes me feel so much light and love to feel needed in the same way, and my heart couldn’t take all the changes I’d made in negative ways, and it took a long time to understand that my illness had gotten out of hand and I needed to give myself a break because I’d done everything I possibly could to make sure I was consistent in my behavior so that our connection was as rock solid as ever, that scar tissue was stronger than new. She was safe from me. She’d have to know how long the stereotype of the aggressive lesbian has existed to know how deeply I’d shamed myself into believing I was a worthless piece of shit. How deeply it cut into me when she thought I was being overbearing when I was making light of something that had happened eons ago. The fact that she wasn’t there yet destroyed me. If she couldn’t laugh about it, she was holding onto pain and just not addressing it.

To give her an opening to do so was wrong and didn’t change anything. I just reinforced the idea that I wasn’t safe, when humor is how I move on. Therefore, when a clapback triggers something major, she can’t hear it with empathy, it’s a threat. Something I meant to be innocuous triggers abandonment feelings because I know that straight girls have been taught that homosexuality is wrong, or they just feel it. To tap into those feelings is not the same as a guy saying those things, because it makes them wonder what it is about them that gives off those vibes when there’s nothing in that thought process at all. When you love someone and start to feel those butterfly feelings, does it matter what their sexual orientation might be if yours is bisexual and theirs isn’t? There’s nothing about them that gives off a “vibe.” I’m not looking for feelers, because there are none. There is only direct communication and the deeply ingrained cultural acceptance of queer feelings being somehow wrong.

So, to be intrusive of that cultural norm is a bad thing, and I am separating out what happened before I got sick. Why do straight people automatically reject the fact that even if they can’t return those feelings and it’s okay, we’ll get over it, the thought is somehow offensive, as if we should have been able to tell you weren’t bisexual at first glance? That it is somehow in and of itself offensive?

I was never concerned about her reaction, because I knew it was a dead end, that these feelings were my responsibility to get rid of and they didn’t resolve until I absolutely spiraled out after isolating her because the pain of rejection was causing all kinds of hell, especially since I’d pushed buttons that were out of bounds in my haste to make her angry enough to reject me altogether, because I needed time. I would have gotten all the time in the world if I hadn’t picked myself up and apologized, but because nothing about our relationship was solid except for checking in once in a while, I floundered. No one loves you like someone who has wanted you and taken the time to get over it so that particular rejection doesn’t cause pain. Then, to have it resolved and to want to welcome someone into your life so badly and to have that deep love rejected is a unique torture, which you bring on yourself if you feel as deeply as I do about things.

Lesbians move on in this particular way easier than most, making an ex a part of their family because they trust people who have felt that deeply about them. Straight girls don’t, and I’m sure that’s because there’s a whole litany of tapes that run inside them when it happens. It irrevocably changes something, because it doesn’t feel like the natural order to them. It wigs them out, and why that is a thing is blatant.

What bothers me about this is that straight women have no problem telling each other that they love them to that degree, and say that they’d marry them. No, they won’t. Why? Are lesbians treated differently in this country or something? It’s fine to say it when it could never happen. Joking is fine, real is not.

Pushing is not fine, either, but that’s a separate issue and built on the fact that mental illness sucks. I have to believe that entitled behavior always comes from mental illness, because to make that level of a bad decision takes dedication.

To say that you’ll never do it again is empty, always…. Even if you take the appropriate steps psychiatrically and psychologically to prove it. She was very impressed and afraid at a fundamental level, and I couldn’t resolve that issue for her, I could only talk about it and see if it did any good.

I got exactly what I needed in every way but one, and that one overshadowed everything else, because it wasn’t being received as color commentary. It wasn’t received as letting her into my thought process. It was trying to inflict pain, and being seen like that wore me down over time. Feeling this deeply about someone when they couldn’t or wouldn’t speak in my love language when I realized I needed to make major changes in my life and keep them consistent in order to keep our relationship strong made me feel terrible. Believe me, I was fired for cause, but I couldn’t make things better for me, either. I could only make things better for her, which I was glad to do in any way that I could. But not hearing about her life made me feel unworthy, and it cost me a lot. Then, when she finally did open up, I thought we were set. It was just unfortunate that she hit a trigger. It was not her fault that she hit it. It was her response being irate and asking me not to put something on her, when I wasn’t. I explained what happened and she threatened not to communicate with me ever again, when she’d dismissed a basic need. I was trying to express my own fear, and it came across as irritating her for the fun of it. I’m sorry, what?

It was then that I thought we were done, because I thought it should have been enough to end us. But she and Daniel had so much in common that I really thought they needed to meet each other, because they would have been friends whether I was involved or not. They could have leaned on each other in a different way than they could have leaned on me. I bargained with myself that it was worth going through pain if I could make this connection, so I did.

Here was what I think was the fatal mistake. She told me that she would have to respond to my other e-mails at some point, so I asked her about it a month later, figuring that was enough time to get back to me and I was really interested in what she had to say. She didn’t know what I was talking about, and explaining it didn’t ring a bell. Knowing I was that low a priority was necessary. I needed to be on the bottom rung, being supportive and waiting for a response. But over time it wore me down because I felt unworthy of being a higher priority.

Therefore, it cannot be said that any of this is her fault. It’s my reaction, because she was right to do everything she did, and so was I.

But one recent moment that sticks with me is asking her to take a contact photo of herself for my phone… “it’s just to match a name to a face, don’t make it weird.” She legit just turned the camera around and hit the button, and it was one of the most gorgeous photographs I’ve ever seen in my life. This is because her eyes were focused on the lens, which made them come across as deeply intimate in a beautiful way, like she was staring into me, and it is just for me. She knew she was looking at me, and she saw me in return.

It’s a beauty that would undo anyone, and it’s not even close to what goes on behind those eyes. She is truly a world class brain, and here’s the biggest thing of all. She made me believe I have her smarts, too, when I actually use them. Her belief made me stronger, and made me love who I am. She continues to believe that, and I want it so much because it makes me like who I am when I’m with her. But feeling the pain underneath is a rough gig, because I couldn’t forgive myself. I’d be reminded of something bad, and chastised when I talked about it in hopes of letting it go. I let the joy multiply, it’s just that pain compounded faster. I was paying so much interest I couldn’t attack the principle.

That’s all on me, but what became clear is that resolving my own feelings had to come from me if we weren’t working on it together. I was in too much pain from feeling like I was a problem that needed to be solved. I couldn’t rectify not being able to build from a foundation that was once rock and had disintegrated at my own hand. As in, I wanted to move forward together, and didn’t want to do it alone until I had no choice.

Surely everyone is familiar with the pain of it all? That you’ve done something that can’t be truly forgiven because neither party is willing to communicate because one wants something more and one wants something less and both are afraid? The feeling of not wanting to rock the boat and hurting inside? Wanting to feed relationships so that they develop roots and brilliant flowers? The disappointment of knowing it can’t be done. Choosing whether the eventual buildup causes redemption or rejection, knowing that rejection will win when communication isn’t clear?

If we’d set up new boundaries where we were comfortable so that I didn’t build up a hope that should never have grown, I would have been fine. Asking for clarification took eight years. She danced around the subject because she knew I wanted more than she could give, and felt guilty about the pain it caused me because she didn’t want to tell me about hers and never would.

When she opened up about her family, I was thrilled. I don’t think I made it where it was clear that I was both overjoyed and felt left out at the same time. I was thrilled to hear that the relationship had been successful, loved the idea that she’d found a life mate, and announced it to all her friends except me. What does a lockbox friend want to hear except the things that make you love more? It meant I felt the pain of being excluded for so many years while also feeling the joy of being included now, wanting to build on it and not knowing if I should. If I tried and it failed, I’d be opening myself up to more rejection and pain. I did, and it did. Nothing went the way I wanted, and everything sounded better in my head, because her perceptions were so far off from my intentions. It caused a lot of anger that went unresolved, because what friend likes to hear on a consistent basis that someone feels like I need to attack them instead of “will you work on something with me?” Again, I think she is the most beautiful human known to God and man, and I am nowhere near alone in this opinion. The fact that she felt rejected by my words and they made her respond more than the accolades I gave her made my self esteem plummet. I was trying to speak for myself without speaking for her. She thought I was creating the narrative that I was a victim, when I didn’t think that at all. I was trying to get her to speak to what was bothering her by laying out my fears, hopes, and dreams first. Being strong by asking instead of telling.

To think that I was not thinking of her feelings is untrue. It wasn’t my job to write about her as if I already knew what she was thinking. It was telling her what her words did to me on an emotional level and needed to hear her reaction. When it began to always be pain, that I was goading and provoking her, I knew we were never going to see eye to eye on this, so we couldn’t give each other what they needed. There was something bigger than me at work. I was trying to build something strong and comfortable for the future, where the idea of having a conversation in person didn’t seem weird. When she said she’d think about it, I began to write in that way. I don’t know whether I wasn’t a priority because the prospect felt scary or because she literally didn’t want a future even when I talked about a time in our lives where she didn’t have as many commitments. It would have solidified in my mind that there was going to be change later on, even if there couldn’t be right now. She finally said enough to convince me that I was too much of a burden for her to spend any more time, and suggested she’d only been nice to me because I’m a writer.

There were a couple of other things that made her think that I was trying to hurt her, none of them true and scared the hell out of me. But none of that stopped the hope that we’d resolve our mutual issues with each other because she’d said she’d think about it and I couldn’t press. There was nothing to calm the fear we had in each other, even when I was vulnerable first. We both lead from the back, and I wanted to show her that I wasn’t willing to do anything for her that she didn’t do the way she’d saved me first. She just didn’t trust it. Didn’t mean I didn’t understand why and felt like a victim. I wanted our behavior patterns to change because this was costing me so much energy without being refilled because we were focused on different ways of being there for each other. My pain was all my bag, but hearing hers would have lifted it. I wasn’t trying to make her feel anything, I was curious as to how she felt and didn’t want to speak for her except in explaining how her behavior came across to me and wanting to know the reasoning behind it because it was so uncomfortable to be in the dark all the time.

I am sure the intensity of all my feelings came across as gigantic, and pushed her away to an enormous degree. Trying to prove that though they were large, they were all pointed in the right direction was futile, because she couldn’t just let me be me anymore. She was exhausted by it, and I was exhausted at her always thinking I was trying to attack her and trying to find different ways to resolve things so that she could hear just how much she meant to me without it seeming somehow manipulative or offensive when neither of those things were in any way true. I feel the same way about Bryn, and it makes us able to talk about anything and everything. She accepts all that gigantic love and returns it in a way that feels consistently loving to both of us, because neither of us feel like one is feeling deeper than the other.

We both feel deeply in every quadrant of emotion on the z axis, and don’t deny each other access, because being able to process is important to both of us. Neither of us see the other feeling something about a thing is an attack. It’s telling each other the story we’re telling ourselves and checking to make sure it’s true. Neither of us are a victim of anything because we’d never phrase anything in the form of “you made me” because we can’t. No one makes you do anything, you can only describe your own feelings and hope someone responds in a way that enlightens your assumptions rather than them feeling rejected. My uncertainty about the future led me to react quickly, because I never knew when something I said was offensive or not because she lumped everything together in one unit and said everything was negative.

I knew that wasn’t true, because she respected my opinion and would yield to it in the beginning. She’d talk about my perception and tell her story. To have something that vital and ephemeral was painful in a way that I’d never experienced. It was her right to withdraw, certainly, but also my decision on how long to be wrecked by it. How long to hope someday was real. To crave consistency and not be able to put it into language where it was heard in the manner it was meant to be received, which was not able to be changed because there was nothing to put us in the proper context, the only think able to break patterns. To meet might have made us repel each other for a while to let the cognitive dissonance set in, because the difference in writing voice and speaking would create sensory overload on both sides.

Maybe meeting in person would have been the end of us, anyway, because we both would have realized quickly that nothing could be fixed. But what I was aiming for was trying to make it comfortable enough to do that so it wouldn’t seem like a big deal because it wouldn’t seem out of left field.

Writing about it is helping me stop the rumination that comes with being so close and yet so far. I never could tell what I was saying that came across as an attack, just that there had been one. Therefore, I couldn’t stop “attacking her.” Being blind isn’t my fault. But I get to decide how long I’m willing to put up with not being received with positivity.

I felt like I had to ask her permission to go, because I needed to know whether I was valuable to her as an asset and not a liability…….. and deal with it on my own if I wasn’t because the not knowing was just as painful as letting all of that hope float and bursting it later, once it had grown. “We were just an empty dream too big for hope alone to fill.”

She did teach me a lot which I couldn’t have learned any other way. I am in no way mistaking the part for the whole. She made me glow from the inside at such a rapid pace. I can’t thank her enough, which makes my negative feelings all the more painful. I wish in a lot of ways that I could have relaxed and enjoyed not knowing, just going with the flow. But the problem was that I couldn’t, for a million different reasons.

Mostly that I didn’t like who I was when I was with her anymore, because receiving the impression that I was always trying to attack her made me feel terrible. I am not that person, and don’t want to be. I want both of us to work on the issue so that the other doesn’t feel like they’re being emotionally vampired. I want them to tell me when I have a good point and when my perception is off. I also want you to believe me when I tell you how your communication is making me feel. I pop off in anger because my trauma reflexes work fast when I should have thought more before I said something. This generally comes from being exhausted at being misunderstood for such a long time that first I’m talking about what I’m feeling and over time, my fuse at not being heard gets shorter….. it just takes a very, very long time….. or it used to. I’m trying to be better about communicating what I need, but if I’m not hearing your story because you refuse to tell it, I am not calculating my responses on it. I am telling you the feelings of rejection it has created for you to leave me out of your story.

I thought she needed me to be a part of her support system, which is why I worked too hard on trying to get this relationship to thrive and miserable when I couldn’t do it. I could feel around for her anger, and see how she responded to my feelings. Whether we were building something or tearing it down.

It all depends on your view. After ten years, it was causing headaches indirectly because rumination sets up physically when your energy turns toward it. It feels like weight you can’t get rid of, so you either have to fish or cut bait.

She made it clear that she was ready, and I made it clear that if she went, she couldn’t do things like thank me for something I’d written because it only jump started my heart in her direction, but in all the ways she would want when she was convinced that I was trying to hurt her. That’s why I was so firm on the fact that if she was going to show up next time, it had to be big. To acknowledge that I wasn’t a victim for opening up, that we were equally bruised by each other in different ways, and if our relationship were to get better, we needed to stop being so short with each other. Meeting physically wasn’t even on the table, only being vulnerable. I just became convinced over time that the only way to cure us from wrecking our friendship if she did drop in was to change all the perceptions we had of each other that weren’t true.

To think about how we would have been different and do it.

My work to do is to put down my trauma reflexes, because it makes me write differently than I would handle something in person and generally my impatient or fearful messages don’t come from anything but feeling uncertain. Knowing that communication is hard work, and I have to forgive myself when I fail and accept the consequences of my actions with everyone.

Being angry with people when I feel abandoned is valid, but the words I use to express it are too much, especially when I type faster than I think and rage is building with no way to control it because ADHD, anxiety, and depression.

To have no patience for it is the other person’s right and they shouldn’t be expected to stick around no matter what I say, because words have weight. I pay those taxes all day, every day. I also have the right to step back and post mortem a situation, because reading my thoughts here often fixes the problem of what to do next on both our parts. Sometimes, it lets people in closer. Sometimes, they feel rejected whether I wanted them to feel that or not, because people only understand others’ words and actions to the level they understand themselves.

I can only express my needs, and if it is too much to ask of someone, I am generally patient and loving until it’s been so long that my resentment is building. She thought I was trying to get her attention, and that part is true….. but never in the ways that she thought I was trying to get it. When I was being really thoughtful and vulnerable, I wanted her to think about what I said. That’s the kind of attention that I wanted, that she’d seen the full picture and wasn’t focusing on what she thought was negative, because my intention was never to hurt her. I couldn’t afford to lose her until I was very, very unhappy. Being known for all these negative things instead of all the things I said to build her up made me think of myself that way.

Those headaches were the worst.

Home

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want “home” to look like, because where I live now is literally it. I live in a huge house in a great neighborhood and I’ve been here long enough that I know all my neighbors and the family I rent from actually likes me (most of the time). Giving that up is a hell of a lot, and this room isn’t big enough to rent to a couple, nor do I want to add another person to this house at all.

I waffle between living in the middle of nowhere and over a bar in the city, but that’s not the important part. I need to think about how I function, because the common denominator in every relationship is me. Just because my beautiful girl paints the picture that I acted like a victim doesn’t mean it’s true. It means that she heard my story and I wanted her to write her own. In my story, I’m the protagonist. In your story, you are. I don’t get the story where you’re the protagonist unless you put it in my hands. That does not mean that I do not have speculations about my own behavior. I am harder on myself than I am on anyone else, so to actually hurt someone to the point it was painful to even talk about rebuilding was my worst nightmare. I mean, I talked plenty, but I never knew what she thought, felt, or wanted. Then I realized it was probably nothing. That she put up with me because she had to, in some sense. If that was wrong, it was her job to tell me I was wrong. She didn’t, so I don’t think I was.

Even the thoughts she had about me were none of my business, and that’s kind of where I draw the line.

I am not in the business of reading minds and trying to anticipate needs, because I have been a people pleaser my whole life. All of it built up so that I could not do it anymore. I would become a shell of a person if two of my friends needed different things and I could not do both at one time. This is because I am devoted to my friends, and disappointing anyone ruins my day to an absurd level. I now have two modes…. Going completely silent in a conversation so that I am making sure to take in everything you say…. And hiding from everyone because I do not want to tell you what my needs are and for them to be ignored. If I don’t have relationships, no one can be disappointed or hurt.

That’s just no way to live life, to stop interacting because you’re afraid. You cover up that fear in all sorts of ways, from isolating to covering it up with the mask you wear in public.

I don’t want to be moving mountains when you’re not even really sure you want to see me again.

I am really in a bad way because the relationship with my beautiful girl was so off it was crazy, and I went a very long time without even addressing it. When I did, I was putting out nastiness. Every flaw was mine because I wasn’t trying to shed light on something dark. I was trying to guilt her, hurt her, provoke her, whatever choice words she had for me that day. So problems would continue to fester and I’d suffer the weight of it because I’m the one who thought about it more.

It was just tiresome because I thought, “why do you think I’m trying to guilt you? I’m the one who hurt you. Even though we have problems, that doesn’t mean they’re all your fault and you’re a terrible person who can never do enough for me.” I just didn’t talk about her side of it because I wanted her to do it- to tell me her feelings so that both of us could write to each other without any of that crap. But the longer it went unresolved, the longer I was treated to “I’m not enough.” I had to break contact not because she actually wasn’t enough. Because she wouldn’t do the work to get through the dark part of the tunnel. She didn’t think that resolving anything was worth it, and that superficial was great. It just wasn’t what I signed up for, and would have been wonderful had we either always been that to each other or worked though enough that I was comfortable doing so…. Because the message I received so frequently was that I was just stirring up shit for no reason at all.

That’s because she didn’t have a problem. I did.

We told each other things that both changed and enriched our lives, and it would have been nice to have that be a lifelong gig. But our approach to conflict was completely different. I’d lay out thoughts and feelings, she’d respond with annoyance or anger. I’d respond in the same tone, and what I originally intended to be a heart to heart conversation where we both walked away feeling better turned into the biggest fights known to god and man. We’re both writers. We fucking play for keeps.

It was too much. I couldn’t handle the thought that I was hurting her, and I couldn’t find a way to write that wouldn’t. Instead of addressing our real issues, she’d pick me apart and push me away.

I got tired of this pattern always repeating instead of just having the damn conversation so we can move on. There was no moving on. There was constantly irritating each other because we weren’t really talking.

Things got dramatically better, then dramatically worse. When we hit the maybe, sixth time when I’d been accused of blowing up everything, I was done. Seriously, what does it even mean to blow up a relationship when it seems like only one of us is participating at all?

The biggest break to me was not telling me that the guy she was dating when we met that wasn’t serious was now her husband, because I felt like that was a very, very basic piece of information. It’s not a relationship when I don’t know the first thing about you anymore.

She quiet quit.

I was loud. I wouldn’t have been bent out of shape if she’d just told me she didn’t want that level of friendship anymore, that I’d been relegated. Then, I wouldn’t have put as much energy into writing to her at all. I’m not trying to communicate with anyone who doesn’t want to hear it. I lost all my remaining hope and confidence when she said that she wanted to throw all my e-mails away. Whether she meant it in the moment or it is still true, it felt like being put out with the trash.

What gift do I possibly have that would be worth anything but my words?

It just didn’t feel like home anymore.

I don’t want to fight against the tide. I don’t want to be foolish enough to think I can change anything. I don’t even want to emote. I’d rather get through grief on my own, because it’s a hell of a lot better than being told I’m just putting out nastiness. I don’t want to send you a letter telling you how I’m hurt, and for you to ignore it and say it’s all crap, it’s all designed to provoke you. It’s not provoking you, it’s getting my needs met, too.

I started realizing that nothing mattered. I’d never be able to regain lost trust capital, I’d never be able to relieve her guilt (still, about what?), I’d never be enough. I’d always be too much. It’s a lot, to be thought of as too much.

I wasn’t too much in the beginning, and no one told me what changed. I had to guess.

And what I guessed is that I was in too deep to ever be the kind where we just send a hello every once in a while. I wanted to be hers. Not in every way possible. Just that person you go to when you can’t go to anyone else. I knew that on some level, she’d never agree to that. I’d broken her trust in a major way.

I still hoped I was redeemable, though. I wasn’t. I was lost somewhere in the Dagoba system of my mind.

This is because for all the wonderful conversations we’ve had over the past few years, nothing has been more than orange juice glass deep. This is not because both of us don’t feel deeply. She felt how she felt without me. I feel lost now, and yet somehow found. I saw that something needed to change or I would continue to hide from everyone, thinking I was too much.

I didn’t want to read her mind. I wanted to read her words.

It felt like home.

What Do I Do Now?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

One of the things that happened during the relationship with my beautiful girl was a very skewed sense of self. This is because she would say things that were completely counter to what the rest of my friends said about me. This was a very good thing in some ways, because I needed an outsider’s perspective. It was therapeutic to be able to talk about everyone in my life with no strings back to her, because we existed out of each other’s time and space. The dark side of it was believing a lot about myself that wasn’t true, because she wasn’t there. She was commenting on “there.” It took me a long time to take in that difference. It made me wonder what we’d have been like as a part of a larger group, because it would have made her commentary on my behavior so much different (I think).

The thing that reads universal to me is the difference between how you present in person vs. online. Seeing someone in their context matters. Isolating so that you’re only seeing each other is a blind spot. Tone of voice matters. How I see you treat other people matters. It is a different feeling of inclusion, physically and virtually. I will always be this person, the one that prefers virtual to physical, and the one that shouldn’t doubt its power. I get caught up in my writer personality, which leads me to ignore meeting in person until long after I’ve needed it- absolutely starving for a hug.

I wouldn’t even have suggested to said Internet friend that we should meet if I hadn’t discovered every single way my writing personality could fuck something up first. I wanted to meet up because I was tired of being misunderstood, but wouldn’t have cared about meeting in person if it wasn’t affecting us negatively. Text can only impart so much, and comprehension is due to context clues. It’s freewheeling to disconnect from anything that provides them. This is why I use the phrase “the emotional equivalent of freebasing cocaine.” Everything is coming at you straight, no chaser.

What would it have been like to know her as a girlfriend and mom- not because she told me she had a boyfriend and a kid. Because I was there and I saw them interact? Neither of us were keeping those things out, they’re just impossible to add as attachments (at least with Gmail). I would have loved to see her wipe the floor with her husband, because if she’s as brilliant with conversation as she is with writing, I could have popped popcorn. What I can do virtually is love him as an idea, a concept. What I can’t do is look at him while he’s looking at her to make sure he knows he’s the luckiest bastard on earth.

I also know that anyone she didn’t like wouldn’t last long…. Except maybe for my own amusement. Hearing her get bent out of shape over my dating life led to some of my favorite quotes ever…. All of them unprintable. I wonder what it would have been like for her to see me as a wife and a friend, and how fiercely devoted I am to both roles. I could tell her about it, but so different than her observing everything.

I’d want her to tell me when my girlfriend wasn’t looking at me the way I wanted her husband to look to look at her. She’s an excellent judge of character, and I could make a meal out of watching her feral nature when it comes to the people who are allowed to date me. I laugh when I think about how different it would have been had we experienced her physically meeting these people. I double over picturing asking her “what do you think?”

I grieve for that image as well. I feel like a bad writer when I cannot capture exactly what I mean, and I am sure a lot of what I’ve written has made wanting to meet me impossible. She thought I was a loose cannon as often as I thought she was, because physical interaction wasn’t slowing anything down. Anonymity helped at first and was hard over time, and not because of anything illicit or bad. It’s that only so much of each other comes through when you are not physically sharing the same space.

It’s a weird feeling knowing that there is so much I would have said with my body language that was cut out entirely. For me, it is similar to having a conversation with someone in Spanish. If they only spoke to me in Spanish, they’d think I was an idiot because I can’t even speak in more than one tense. I don’t know how to tell you what happened or what will. I can only tell you what is happening right now…. And even that is garbled. They will have missed what I can do with language when I have it. Choosing to be only virtual pals was the equivalent of being limited to Spanish when we were both natural English speakers.

It informs how I proceed. I make an effort to see Zac and not just Facebook Messenger him all the time. I make the effort to video call Bryn (though right now she’s on vacation). I try not to write so much down, because it’s not exhausting to write, but it is to read and it’s too much to ask of people who are too polite to say anything. Part of my love language is hearing the emotions that come up for you when you’re reading, and I know that if I send too much at one time, it’s overwhelming. When I have physically spent time with someone, it lessens my need to write to them because we just talked. Not having that guardrail is also problematic, because the last thing I want is for people to think that I am just rambling on for attention. From my perspective, I am including you in my life by describing it. It comes across to others as too much homework. Therefore, I am reticent to begin relationships over the Internet when I know there’s not a chance we’ll meet. You can only be so vulnerable with me in a vacuum, because I might know things other people don’t know… and yet I don’t know anything they do, either. Everything I know about that person has been distilled into black and white, where their pictures are all in color.

Color in a black and white relationship blossoms in commentary. Connection is so easy on one level, complicated on another. You can’t get to know a person’s natural rhythms, even in speech. The tendency on the internet is to pick out the angry things and comment on them first, without seeing what kind of day the other has had in any real sense… over time, it just becomes your perception of what their life is like. Perceptions attach certain moods and behaviors that compound in the other’s mind without ever being founded in reality.

I don’t know whether I am foolish for thinking it was better not to have this friendship than it was to live with the disconnects, because the perks were great. She’s my favorite humorist because there is literally no topic on earth she doesn’t know about, so no matter what ball I’m lobbing, she’s there with the world’s best pithy comment…. And the best ones are unprintable.

At the same time, I was carrying a lot of pain knowing that in some ways, I’d made meeting me feel scary. It made me afraid of myself. Not knowing where I stood gave me more reason to doubt our relationship would ever be more well-rounded, and that there would be an end to feeling like I was hurting her all the time. I knew innately that if I could emotionally injure her, I could emotionally injure other people. So I absolutely fixated on trying to make things right because if I could be redeemed from this mistake, I might be capable of a relationship where no one got hurt.

I had these perfect pictures in my head, changing as she and I did. Funny moments teaching her how to cook, joking with her husband because we know we’re the roadies on a pretty great tour. If the fates had aligned differently, I know I would have been Paul Child, not Julia…. And that’s why I needed her in a nutshell.

I don’t want to be the Julia. I want to be the Paul. I want to be the one cheering people on to do what they do and be who they are. Being supportive of her fills my purpose in life, too. But in this case, I am not limiting Julia to my beautiful girl. I just know I was born to help other people be great. Not having been that for the one I love the most is an exercise in torturing myself and leads nowhere good. Now, I absolutely know what I want in order to avoid the same mistakes. It is learning to negotiate those desires with others so that they also feel heard where the sharpest pain lives, because now I am overly protective of myself. I don’t let people in the way I should, because I’m thinking constantly about what I have done versus what I will do.

Telling me what you think while looking at me has become important again where it wasn’t for a very long time. I was afraid to come out of my shell for fear of rejection, so I just wouldn’t. Asking my beautiful girl if she wanted to hang after she’d already witnessed the worst things about me mattered. However, it was not a moment I knew I could take. It had to be given. So, when she said she wasn’t ready, I didn’t bring it up for years. It didn’t seem important in the grand scheme of things.

It became important because of all the things being lost in translation. Particularly, not knowing if saying that someday you might be ready is real or is something you say when you don’t know what to say. It is impossible to glean from mere words.

I made a meal out of someday without really looking at the amount of time that went by, engaging in the same behavior patterns over and over. It wouldn’t resolve without one of us doing something. I couldn’t stop feeling these large feelings, but I could do something to discourage them. I could turn my attention. I was tired of all of it. All the self recrimination. All the guilt. I have learned that I am not a bad person, and I should stop treating myself like it. I was holding myself to my worst mistake, reliving it in a way that she never would have endorsed. She would have protected me from me if I’d let her.

Dear God, how she tried.

Knowing she loved me that much, to try and understand something that wasn’t tangible or explainable, made me ferocious in trying to understand everything about me that repelled her. This is what I mean when I say that she’s always been the most honorable part of me even when I couldn’t be that for myself. She was rock solid in all the areas I was blind. She taught me to me in a way that will never be duplicated, because I had a yardstick to measure my success. Not in terms of material things, but in terms of emotional strengths she had where I was weak and needed time to grow.

But if the other person isn’t learning and growing with you, the imbalance shows quickly. There are too many chances for things to go wrong when 93% of you is somewhere else.

EEAAO

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What makes you nervous?

Before we go any further, I need to correct myself on yesterday’s entry. I wrote “rejection sensitivity disorder,” and I meant “rejection sensitivity dysphoria.” This means that if I feel a tiny bit of rejection, my echo chamber turns it into “the sky is falling…. all is lost…. all is lost.” It’s like weighing 400 lbs, losing 250, and *insisting* you need to keep buying your old size. It is why I struggle with office politics. Everything I do wrong, no matter how tiny or insignificant, means automatic termination. The bosses I’ve had haven’t worked with people who aren’t neurotypical, or if they have, they’ve treated me with the same heavy hand. There is no reason at all I should know the logic behind anything. Do what I say and don’t talk back, even if I have more experience than you. People with ADHD and Autism are naturally curious about the whole world, and just because we want to know why something is the way it is doesn’t translate into behavior issues. Nine times out of ten, we just want to know the purpose of what we’re doing so that we can feel like we have one, too. We spend most of our lives feeling unneeded and unwanted because the system isn’t built for us, go sit in the corner.

We also get that we’re irritating as fuck because if there’s a time crunch, none of that matters and we don’t realize it. The only reason I had to cure myself of this is cooking. But with my friends, I have as much curiosity as I can. Also, I like to post-mortem things and only some people like to do that because it makes you closer. Others are so focused on being fast that they aren’t thorough. They don’t completely clean up their messes and realize that the argument won’t go away if they don’t, because self confidences thrives with people being truly forgiven. There are no callbacks because they understand each other and can completely move on. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria makes me freak out at the slightest indication of unhappiness, especially in long term relationships because I’m angry that I’ve taught you all my quirks and they’re not important enough to remember. You’d rather set me on fire, where passive annoyance becomes rage. For me, the last straw with my beautiful girl was making a joke about our past history and using a trigger word as a response. She said, “gross.” Which in any other circumstance would have been fine. I knew that she was correcting me on my behavior and not my queerness, but every time I’ve ever been called that was ringing in my ears despite it. When I told her it was a trigger word, she dismissed me entirely. Fuck that noise. By nine years and some odd months, I feel like I should be able to say what I mean and mean what I say.

She had the right to be grossed out if she wanted, but she didn’t have the right to go nuclear on me when I told her why I was telling her what was going on in my head. She automatically hates anything I write when it comes to our friendship, as if having a friend that’s bipolar is so much worse than actually being sick with it. It’s like being angry with a dialysis patient. Yes, I’m still sick. I’m so sorry it sucks, but I can’t help it and it makes me angry at my body. So please don’t do anything to irritate my mental health, and if you do because you don’t know, start asking questions. No one has any idea how they’re coming across to me, and when I say something hurts, most people aren’t bothered enough by my words to do anything about it. This is because those conversations are deep and exhausting for me, so they must be impossible for who doesn’t live on my Island of Misfit Toys. Here’s the kicker. Because they don’t want to go that deep, they miss out on the best part of what I can do for them. I can make them mentally healthy again. I can’t prescribe medication, but I can use my words to make you believe that you’re the most important person in the world, no matter how small our interaction. I try to recruit assets, but they have criteria because I don’t want to live a lifetime of frustration. I had to stop thinking that the whole world should have access to me because it doesn’t leave me enough energy to take care of myself. It also takes up too many threads because my chip only has so many cores…. and my graphics card is also fucked up. I’m a 720 in a 4K world.

I desperately want to be a different person, because even I can’t handle it. This is the only way I know how to get there, and it is pissing people off left and right, because their previous impressions of me allowed them to get everything they wanted because it was true. I wasn’t setting boundaries and allowing them to use me up because I needed to feel needed so bad. I flounder without purpose, and it leads nowhere good if someone becomes your focus and doesn’t want it. Too much energy coming at them, especially if they’re not emotionally intelligent and self-aware. The more you understand yourself, the more you can keep from doing damage to other people. I have done damage to people both by giving everything and being too angry to discuss the issue calmly. I feel like it’s a tradeoff, and miserable when it’s not….. to varying degrees, of course. Forgetting my birthday? No big deal, because I notice but don’t say anything so you’ll have more compassion for something else. What I’m trying to change is feeling like I don’t deserve you (plural) because in the end, I’m not worth it. I’m too much for everyone, and I’m afraid someday it will work.

So I do everything to fight that instinct because I’m not finished with life yet. I have books to get rejected. I need to stay alive at least long enough to see what would happen. I won’t be able to live with myself if I had a chance to anonymously pay off some houses. There are several people out there who think I’m really negative toward them because they don’t understand me. They don’t like it that I’m curious about everything, including them, because asking them deep questions is intrusive. I just think that in time, people should be able to talk to each other open and honestly. Getting your emotional needs met is the most important thing on earth, and people without mental health issues don’t know what it is to relate and don’t look it up.

Over time, it gets old fast. And that’s what makes me nervous. That I won’t find someone willing to put up with my quirks if I’m willing to put up with theirs. I often end up in bad situations because of it. I take their issues very seriously, and don’t even tell people what I need so that their energy sucks up everything in the room. Yes, we’re communicating, but it’s all about taking care of you. I haven’t given you a problem to work out with me because I don’t think you’ll do it. I’m not worth it. It would be so much more about the dysphoria if it hadn’t already happened my whole life. I get angry because you have an emotional maid and I don’t.

Most people can’t sit in conflict long enough when it’s the only thing that will help.

I Am…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe something you learned in high school.

Here’s the link to the audio. You might have to download it into your own media player or the Mega app. SoundCloud wants me to pay because I “upload a lot,” and I get it. I just didn’t know the space limit was so incredibly low. I’m searching around for options, and most of them rely on using my desktop, of which I am not a fan… mostly because I’m not really using SoudCloud to increase the popularity of my blog. The audio is just a convenience.

High school is divided up for me in two segments. The first is that I spent my freshman and sophomore years at High School for Performing and Visual Arts as a trumpet player. The second is that my junior and senior years, I didn’t. I went to a regular American high school. I was still in the music program, though. My junior year I was in varsity choir and varsity band at the same time, the first in the history of the school to do so. I learned how to be in a marching band. My symphonic band was better than the one at ‘PVA (no judgment, it’s just true).

Then, my counselor suggested that I drop one of my music classes because if I took Microcomputer Applications, I could get what was called an “Advanced Diploma.” The band was gearing up to go on all these trips my family couldn’t afford, and it was an easy out to drop band because I knew I couldn’t sell enough fertilizer to pay my own way. Yes. Really. They asked us to sell shit to people.

I dropped choir because I didn’t like the new director coming in, because I knew other people that had her and it wasn’t my bag. I was not a “show choir” person. I do not think that if you can sing, you should automatically be capable of dance as well. I liked great repertory, and pop music wasn’t it (for me). If that sounds persnickety for a teenager, remember that I was a classically trained singer from being in an adult church choir since I was 13.

I didn’t care about Britney Spears. I loved Bach and it showed.

For the record, I care about Britney as a listener. She’s great. I just wouldn’t sing her stuff unless I was doing it as a joke, because I couldn’t pull it off where people would take it seriously. It’s a totally different type of training.

I think I’ve said before that Beyoncé left HSPVA because she didn’t want to be classically trained, and that I continue to be devastated that it did not work out for her. But same vibe, we’re just opposite. She didn’t want to learn everything I’d been taught about being able to blend into a choir, breath control specific to that kind of music, etc. It’s a lot. By the same token, I didn’t want to learn the proper breath control to sing whatever it is the Star Spangled Banner is now in professional football. Whitney Houston doing it in four was the high point. ::looks pointedly at other pop stars:: No one will ever be her, and I knew that I’d only be a cheap imitation. I don’t want that for me, or anyone else. Do what you do and make it count.

Since my dad had left the church, I also got a job in hopes of getting my own spending money. I was 16, so no one thought anything of screwing me over to save themselves, like making me pay things back when I was short on the register when they’d been stealing from the drawer. I’m bad at math, so of course it was all my fault when the drawer was missing $50 at the end of the night. Of course it should come out of my paycheck. It’s what a teenager owes a national corporation, right?

I would never sue them over lost wages, but I would get a kick out of it if they sent me a product and swag box if someone is reading who thinks such a thing could happen at the company. I once proposed to Zyrtec on Twitter and told them they were paying. Then, they later kidded me about forgetting our anniversary and I said, “how do you think I feel? You didn’t get me anything.” The proposal rocked, though….. that I had 99 problems but a itch ain’t one.

I worked for SuperCuts, and in this instance I am not talking about the company. I am talking about the sleight of hand with my own team, not every employee who ever worked there. I mean, I was great at my job in retrospect. They had me, so you’re definitely safe in giving them as much money as you want. I still look back on my time as magical because things that are commonplace today were introduced while I was an employee, most notably, American Crew (for which I am grateful… white people pomade). I think the Paul Mitchell Tea Tree line came out then, too, a total game changer. It was also amazing learning the jargon of how to tell people I want my hair cut so that there’s less room for a mistake.

It doesn’t always work, but it helps.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had set myself up for life in terms of my opinions on everything that is still true about me today. The only thing that’s changed is that I call myself out as I am, bisexual, instead of telling the world I’m a lesbian while not thinking that way, because that label wasn’t something I gave myself. I just have to be louder about being bisexual in a heterosexual relationship than I would if I was actively partnered with a woman, because you can see it with every kiss.

The one thing I didn’t see coming that I didn’t know I needed was dating a bisexual man. That way, we still have all the same cultural references, though I’m older and have more insurance. He doesn’t care whether I look high femme or butch because in one outing, we’d look depressingly heterosexual and in another, it’s a whole bear/twink mood without all the lights, drum & bass, and Ecstasy.

To stop joking, we’ve both been bullied for being queer. That trauma for him is a different playing field, because mine is rooted in embarrassment. I’m either gross and wrong or a plaything given to men, because why wouldn’t women being with women be nothing but a male fantasy? Why would women have agency in this society? Straight women don’t even have it.

Men harass me by seeing me with my then-wife (Kat, in this example) and asking us to kiss in front of them, or come home with us, or any number of things that hurt way more than they would have if it was original. Those examples aren’t all Kat, when it was 2000, or even Meag, when it was 1996. It’s all picking at the same scar every day of my life, because I heard about it before I experienced it. Being an empath made me experience that trauma before it was direct. I felt it on my skin when it happened to my friends.

For men, it’s horrible that they want to be female, their tormentors’ perception and not reality….. but seriously…. As if being female was the worst thing that could happen to a person…… hello…. All connected. Except men don’t stop with horrible comments with other men. It often leads to outright violence and death. I only say this because it happens to men more frequently, but violence against lesbians exists.

It’s a shared understanding, a shared library of images that create empathy. To me, it is especially important because the one thing I really hated about dating Matthew had nothing to do with him at all. It was gaining heterosexual privilege for the first time and rebelling against it hardcore. I remember one instance we’d gone to meet some of his friends, and someone did that thing where they looked around before they told a gay joke, and I wasn’t the picture of volatility you see here.

I said nothing, and just felt all of it. I know now that I should have ripped the dude a new one, but I didn’t want to upset the apple cart when I was meeting my boy’s friends the very first time. I was also like, 24, maybe 25. I was older than Matt, but still a child in my eyes now. I didn’t know what to do, and I was scared.

So now I can look at that and say I’m in a better place because Zac has probably been there. He’s just as out and proud as me. On Wednesday, I noticed right off that his nails were painted teal and he was wearing flowy pants. He’s the head of the queer group at his intelligence agency. I don’t know how he sees himself, but I see him as George Smiley if he had grown up like us. (Smiley is the protagonist in John Le Carre’s most famous series about MI-6.) I showed up in a black t-shirt, jeans, and tie-dyed pattern Crocs. I later put on a navy hoodie and my CIA baseball cap- some of you will remember that was a gift from Zac because he has the badge that allows you into Langley, but not the capability to escort visitors. I wear it almost every day like I’m pitching the afternoon game. Now do you see how we’ve inverted the binary? From the outside, I’m the butch and he’s the femme…. And no one would ever guess that we were into each other unless we weren’t holding hands or being cute to the point of nausea (our MO most of the time).

Editor’s Note: I learned that it was important on the train Thursday, when a young girl at the Franconia Springfield Metro said, “I want to be CIA, too.” I told her that I wasn’t CIA, I just had cool friends, and to call me when she got there. 😛

“Grown up like us” is emotional shorthand for Zac and I having to deal with the perils of being queer from a very, very young age. Zac entered the military under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” At the same time, I’m not dating a gay man and he’s not dating a lesbian just for kicks. We’re not playing at anything, just being the most authentic versions of ourselves.

I have always been that in some capacity, but I have graduated. You don’t learn that you are brave and unique until someone tells you. In the moment, you’re just doing what you have to do to survive.

In high school, I learned that I would HAVE TO be unique.

My freshman year, I told one person I was gay and by the end of the day, everyone knew. In retrospect, it was the best decision I ever made, because any bullying that came my way was tiresome. They couldn’t blackmail me anymore, and they couldn’t get away with anything more original because they weren’t that clever.

Because I was moving out of the gay neighborhood in Houston to a suburb where everyone knew each other, I went back in the closet…. To save my father’s job according to my mother. My father didn’t care. He knew me. We’d met. But guess which message I heard?

Being in the closet for a school year was amazing and gave me the worst panic attack of my life. Both of those things were true. I would not have wanted to miss the chance of being in marching band, would not have traded my conductors (Mr. Matysiak and Mrs. Bueller [really]) for anything in the world. I would never have wanted to miss learning that I was not only a singer, I was damn good at it. I stood on the shoulders of giants, and my mother accompanied me through it all, literally.

She played the piano for my solos no matter what she was doing, and in seventh and eighth grade, she played for all my friends, too. This was not a small feat, as most piano accompaniments for solos are orchestra reductions. So, my mom hurt me a lot, and she also came through in equal measure. Not only was the piano our lighthouse when we were ships passing in the night, she left it to me in her will. She didn’t give me a setting. She gave me the main character.

In terms of hurting me, all of the panic I’d been feeling that year came to a head when my senior best friend asked me to come with him to his prom. He was literally on the way to pick me up, my hair and makeup done to perfection, when I melted down physically. It caused a monster reaction, a rash, shortness of breath, everything- so the doc came over and gave me a shot of Depomedrol and off we went.

That was the first time that I learned everything can be fixed before school, you’re going. It only backfired once. I had the flu, and Tamiflu was YEARS ahead in the making. If it had, I would have been going to school without spreading it. To be perfectly fair, I’d woken up feeling a little miserable and bloomed at school. It wasn’t a big deal right up until it was.

Actually, that leads to a really funny story. One of our parishioners while I was at HSPVA was a Republican judge, so I went to their convention in like, ‘92, before they were complete nut jobs. While I was there, I bought a button down that was made of real American flag material, and the colors were very dark. It looked sharp…. Or so I thought. I was really sick on my birthday, and nothing would have stopped me from going to school that day in my new threads. I get there and first period was band…. And if Jack Lucas had been there, he would have been SO PROUD OF HIS STUDENTS.

Editor’s Note: I also went to St. Martin’s Episcopal as a teen, where I was unimpressed with President George H.W. Bush….. and thrilled to meet a former Director of CIA (of course). Therefore, it always thrills me that Jonna Mendez managed to fool him, because of course now I know we have mutual friends…. And I am laughing so hard that I can’t even breathe right now.

Those motherfuckers broke out in four part harmony, because they were musicians. They could sing their parts blind. Then, they get to “free,” and Dan Kovaly hits the fucking *cymbals.* I was just as self-deprecating then as I am now, so I thought it was absolutely hilarious while still mortifying. Later, my mom and dad brought me my favorite food, cherry chicken from Ruggles. We got to eat lunch together in the commons, and it was sad that there wasn’t a Happening that day.

Happenings at HSPVA are code for what would now be called a flash mob, probably. You never knew when they were coming, and it was always unique no matter which art area was on showcase. It’s one of the core memories that made me who I am.

Back in high school.

The Yellow String

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe one positive change you have made in your life.

In my world, a connection to someone that’s romantic is a red string. A connection to someone that’s platonic, but every bit as intense as a romance is yellow. Right now, those people are Zac and Bryn. I made the decision to have Bryn as my emotional support because we’ve been tight since I was 19 (off and on until I was 23 and moved to PDX). That means we’ve been friends since Jesus gave me his beeper number. Being that close to someone and having that kind of emotional shorthand takes time to build, and for me, is too heavy to put on any relationship I can’t define.

It’s a whole different vibe, to feel like I have a ride or die who, if she could, would drop everything and run right over. We’re planning a visit where she comes here eventually, because last time it was my turn. 😛 It will be great to show her my version of DC, where the wings and mumbo sauce live.

I was kidding her about renting a hotel room for the express purpose of watching trash TV and eating cereal out of the box, which in my opinion, is a good time. My sister and I have done it, so I speak from experience…. Although I don’t think we had cereal. When she comes here, we tend to stuff ourselves at Zaytinya to the point we can’t move.

Here’s the important thing that’s come out of having Bryn as my top priority. Conversations like this, where I’ve said that being with Zac has stopped the tape in my head where I have to figure out everything from soup to nuts in five minutes:

Cheers to that. So much of my healing is learning to listen to myself and my body and frankly increase my selfishness to allow my selflessness to have actual meaning and not just be a trauma response. And it is amazing how much loving myself more allows others to feel I am loving them, when that wasn’t my goal at all lol but shhh dontell

I told her that I felt the same way, but that she put it better than I would have. I don’t want to increase my selfishness to an obscene amount. It’s that previously I wasn’t taking care of myself or setting boundaries at all.

With the ones who wouldn’t or couldn’t set them with me, I let them go because I was tired of living in gray area. I’d been running full steam ahead towards relationships that weren’t definitive in terms of who does what. Elizabeth Gilbert has said, and I’m phrasing, that she doesn’t believe there’s any story of self actualization that doesn’t begin with getting tired of your own bullshit. That’s where I am. Looking back over the wreckage I’ve done to myself by letting things remain so unclear.

I have a feeling that started when I was young. Keeping every option open all the time because I never knew when she was going to put me back in the sunshine. That’s all my own crap now. I’m an adult. I can decide if someone is worth waiting for or whether it’s costing me too much in self-esteem.

Here’s the thing that melted my heart with Zac this morning, our string turning burnt orange (because who doesn’t like burnt orange, hook ‘em amen?). He’s a fan. He knows how much my faith means to me, and he’s an Atheist. He proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that things that are important to me are important to him, something that friends should share. He gave me a button that says “God is in the details.” I told him that I loved it because theologian Pete Rollins says that a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.

I know that there have been horrible things done in the name of God. I deeply apologize for all of it, because I am not here to defend any of it. I’m here to tell you what I’m reading, written long before the Crusades, for example. Jesus is my perfect example of more power with than over.

There’s also a reason that my favorite friendship through reading and watching YouTube is Christopher Hitchens and Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and had to retype because I wrote Rowan Atkinson first. I coexist because of the same spectrum through which I see gender and sexual orientation. Specificity is in tiny degrees, and there are millions of permutations.

One of my favorite classes in College was Logic I. I was terrible at it, but fascinated by the subject. Using symbols to reflect arguments made sense to me, up and to a point. Then, my brain just scrambled.

The argument was God, for half the semester. Then, it was not God for the rest. I spent that class all up in my feelings, which is probably why I nearly flunked. I was thinking so hard about the emotional complications that I didn’t have room for stuff that was math adjacent.

It boggles my brain to hear people arguing about religion, just the easiest way to blow my hair back with excitement. I have a limit, though. I do not like atheists who proclaim their lack of religion as my moral failing, like if I didn’t believe in God I would be a better person, but I’m not.

Let me say for the record that it doesn’t matter whether there’s a God or not. I don’t pray hoping for answers. I pray and the process of laying out my thoughts gives me the answer. God is the voice I call my inner monologue, because that’s where I’m open to receiving spirituality. People do that in different ways, and it is not about “one is better than the other.” It’s about being able to access that part of yourself at all. Christianity is my way of doing it because it’s how I was made, my default setting. Plus, it’s a universal library of images which lets more people understand me than would’ve had I used something specific to the US.

When I access that part of me, I can talk to myself for hours in pro and con arguments, because I want to know and be prepared for anything and everything that could happen, amen.

I am the president of Overthinkers Anonymous, except there’s only me and a VP, so there’s only one chapter and it’s really only us…………… and we’re not friendly, Bob.

As I was telling Bryn, I can be more present in the moment with Zac because I don’t have any real heuristics on dating them. Patterns don’t emerge for me the way they would with a woman because I have no idea what in the hell I’m doing and for once, I’m okay with it.

For once, I can sit in cognitive dissonance and not be threatened by it. I know that no matter what, I am safe to say what I mean and mean what I say. This is because Bryn and Zac are both the kind of people that are hugely capable of knowing their opinions on how they feel. Thoughts and feelings working in concert. I am giving my energies to them in different ways. I’m a handful, and they’re capable.

It’s just that Bryn has a quarter century more blackmail material than Zac, and not for nothing, she doesn’t use it. I would be ripe for the pickings, I’m telling you. Not only that, she’s seen a lifetime of the real me, even when I didn’t know she was looking. Her teenage perspective to my twenties is so amazing, because she remembers things that I don’t and it makes our institutional memory stronger. She reminds me of everything good and everything bad about Portland, and I let her. That’s because she’s the person I can just say, “I feel horrible right now.” I never require her to agree with me about anything, but I know that she’ll hear it. I also am surprised by how many of our memories line up, to a degree in which it’s a bit frightening. That’s what I mean about my love for my friends being gigantic. That shared history means every bit as much to me as finding a partner.

The difference to me between my relationship with Bryn and in relationships I’ve had with women previously (save Dana, she was also driven by emotion), she doesn’t ever shut down. Not ever. She will say things like I can’t talk about it right now, but that’s so different than we’ll never talk about it ever. There is also no gray area in our relationship. It is for life. We will never leave each other. We commit to hashing it out. Every bit as important as my biological sister and my eventual partnership.

If you can’t be honest with someone you met when you were 19, you can’t be honest with anyone.

We get into things I won’t even publish, because only she is allowed access until I can bring it up without feeling the physical effects while I’m writing. In some ways, all that was ten years ago. Then someone will hit a trigger and I will flash back, and it literally takes my breath away. It doesn’t even have to be a someone. It could be a scent, like a certain mixture of fall air and leaves burning. It could be a perfume.

It’s intense and I can’t remember the good parts in that moment. I just feel used, because she didn’t set any limits with her words, it was all inference all the time. Therefore, I spent my entire life lost and confused until there was one moment when I was working out at a credit center in the suburbs of Portland, and I get a phone call. It’s the woman that emotionally abused me. She’d recently brutally dumped someone as her “pet person,” and she told me that I was a woman she’d like to get to know, but her tone was off. A bit seductive, but not romantic. Just going back into a more secretive bubble that felt illicit. And perhaps that was my perception of what happened given the trigger’s origin, and not the truth. I am telling you what I felt, and I did not take it well.

I thought, “she’s finally giving you all the attention you wanted and it feels all wrong. Why? What is wrong with you?” Now, I can tell you exactly what happened. I saw how she treated this person that she called her pet, and I wasn’t having it. For the first time in my life, I recognized a train wreck before it happened. I didn’t want to become an object of scorn to her partner, as if I wasn’t just an annoying dipshit to begin with. And dipshit is a direct quote.

So, when my beautiful girl wouldn’t set boundaries and would waffle between outright, overt, out loud protection and “you’re trying to provoke me,” I got tired. I wanted her to look at herself with the same fierce protection she saw my other friends. I wasn’t trying to create feelings of guilt, but change.

There was no change. Dreams of it, but none. I wanted a relationship with her that felt solid, and either I couldn’t feel it or it wasn’t there. I don’t know, and it’s not up to me to know. I feel like I have stated everything I needed a hundred times over, and she continues to shoot in the dark. It’s also frustrating when someone who used to be glad you’ve called them out on the carpet because they’re famous for walling off and moving past something starts using those walls with you……. And being furious that you’ve noticed. I could see that pattern coming from a mile off, and I still put so much energy into rearranging the dinner napkins on the Titanic.

She says that nothing was ever good enough for me, and her barometer was way, way off. She’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me, bar none. I am a better person for having loved her, and that part of me will never change. It’s why she is still welcome if she figures out what it is that she actually wants from me.

In the meantime, it’s good that I’m not spending my time waiting on something that may or may not ever come. Maybe she’ll keep reading, maybe it will be too painful. Who knows? I cannot predict when and if she’ll hear my meaning, but what I wanted to put a stop to was being able to drop in casually as if we had no history and keep it at that. I felt awful when she said that she hated it when I expected her to be the expert on our friendship at some times and that I was talking down to her when I explained the memory to which I was referring. I couldn’t win either way, because either I came off like a lecturer or someone trying to hurt her, and neither of those options were in any way true.

I was doing the work because I wanted to show up. The way I do for Bryn. The way I do for Lindsay.

Zac remains to be seen, but I am enjoying the moment, breathing and staying in one place. Changing my reactions and responses. Healing. Being able to talk through some issues that resolve my others.

Getting tired of myself is the best thing I’ve ever done, much less one positive thing. It’s all of them. ALL THE THINGS.

Morning Choices

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even though it is thousands of years old.

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

Music and Silence

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a SoundCloud link so you can listen rather than read.

One of my favorite pieces of music is “4’33” by John Cage. People think that it is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, and that’s minimizing its power. It probably doesn’t make sense on a recording, but live, it’s incredible. The piece is not written so that the silence is the point. No. The music is the environment of the room in which it’s being performed. Every time it’s programmed, it looks a little different.

It also puts classical music on its head. Other pieces require you to be quiet. You still shouldn’t talk, but the music is in movement- dropped pens, unwrapping a cough drop, patting a toddler on the back. I’m generally cold, so my contribution is generally rubbing my hands like it’s the start of Toto’s “Africa.” Admittedly, it is “cheating,” because I am the rhythm section of something that’s supposed to be completely random. I feel like the ringer in the crowd. Again, silence is not the point. I have had people tell me to stop. The problem is that I am not a ringer on purpose. I really am that cold. More than once have I been called “Leslie No-Blood.”

Cold, though, is relative.

I will take being physically cold a lot better than someone being emotionally cold to me. For instance, caring about your reaction to my feelings more than you care that what you’re doing is hurting me. At that point, I don’t care what anyone thinks. It isn’t right for me to keep saying I’ll go along with thinking that your feelings are more important than mine. Then, it’s not a relationship. Healthy ones mean that sometimes my problem is more important than yours, and sometimes your problem is more important than mine… but no matter, we’ll attack either and it’s easier when both minds are on it.

However, if one person puts the other in the position of “your feelings don’t matter,” the relationship doesn’t deserve to survive. Until now, I have been the person who already thinks her feelings don’t matter. I will never again let it be reinforced by another. I have let people (particularly women) emotionally vampire me for years. They use me as their dumping ground because I’m willing to listen. I seemingly have a jackass magnet on my forehead, because nearly everyone I’ve ever met has wanted to tell me their life story whether I was interested or not.

One of my friends told me that I should be CIA because I was good at gleaning information. I’m really not. I’m just empathetic to the point of losing myself and people naturally let it spill because they feel safe. I don’t create an environment to be The Little Gray Man. I’m just capable of saying “there, there.” I have a feeling that if I *was* CIA, it would be under Napoleon’s instructions: “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Why go out of my way to get information out of people when they’ll just give it to me?

20-30% of the time, it’s great. The rest of the time, people are quite invasive of my space and have no problem stealing my emotional energy without thinking I might want it back. People allow me to refill when I can talk to them in the same way. It’s just that most of the people who have talked to me (generally on the bus or train when I’m in public, anyway) have no idea that it’s been 20 minutes and I haven’t said a word. Not only that, they haven’t even taken a breath long enough to give me an opening. It’s “hello,” big emotional dump, walk away. I allowed it because that’s what I’ve always been taught. Being good was not needing anything. Taking up so little space was a bad thing.

Now, I feel like there have been some instances of overcorrection, but I have learned something important. Extremely important. The only people that will test you on needing anything are the people who have benefitted from your silence. If they were getting something out of you being a friend, yet never speaking up, they’ll be so mad. Let them be mad. They’ll either get over it or they won’t, and that’s not up to you.

Brene Brown says that vulnerability is showing up to a conversation without being able to control the outcome. I haven’t allowed many of those people in my life because I didn’t think I deserved them. It was natural for my feelings not to matter, so why wouldn’t I let people steamroll over me as if I don’t exist?

I “all of the sudden” seem very selfish for needing anything at all. It’s not that. It’s that when you ignore me, I’ll get louder because your ears are clogged. If you don’t listen even then, it’s time to pack up. I can only do what I can do. The one thing I have never been able to do before now is stop the bleeding. I would just let other people use up every emotional resource I needed to use for myself because obviously, they were more deserving of it.

I am not saying that I am always blameless for everything. It’s impossible. At times, I’m excellent at being the world’s biggest asshole with a God complex. My only point here is that I come by it honestly. If I tell you in plain voice how I’m feeling and it’s ignored, if you don’t mean anything to me, I’ll walk away. If you do, I will repeat what I said until you acknowledge. At this point, no matter how much I care about you, I’m out. If I am putting myself out there as someone who is taking care of you, I will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure we have equal airtime. If your idea of equal airtime is that we both spend the majority of the time thinking about you, I will call it early.

Before, I would just stuff everything down. I would spend years being unhappy because that’s what I thought I deserved. With the set of relationships I’ve been talking about in the last few entries, they are all people to whom I have spilled my guts. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a place to go with my feelings. The entire problem with all of them is that when I expressed the fact that there was a problem in our relationship, they wanted to minimize, move past it, or institute a monster avoidance policy.

It’s just not worth it to go into the minutiae of who did what to whom, but I will say that all of them benefitted from me listening to their problems, but when I spilled mine, there couldn’t be a discussion. All the time they spent talking about their problems was good and wanting them to talk about our problems was bad.

All of the music would get sucked out of the room, leaving me in absolute quiet. I could think about our problems on my own. Laying them out was also problematic. Most people are intimidated by the depths to which I feel emotion. Most people don’t know how they feel as easily as I do, and are not capable of putting it into words off the cuff. I have compassion for that, because INFJ personalities are only 9-15% of the world’s population. Very few people deal in emotions the way I do…. Meaning I am not arrogant enough to think that I am more emotionally intelligent than others. I can bring the receipts, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’re asking for them. People do think I’m arrogant, though, just for being me. I know how I feel and express it well. I am also female, which lends itself to my arrogant reputation whether it is true or not.

….because men are visionaries whether they have the letters to prove it or not. I just have resting bitch face. Best not interrupt a man who can’t tell shit from Shinola. He needs all the brainpower he can get.

Speaking of my arrogant reputation, it is non-existent to everyone except the people I’ve let have power over me and now want to be an equal…. Especially those who don’t feel there’s a balance of power issue at all. Why would there be? If you already have it all, why would you give it up? Why would you complain when there’s not a problem for you. Both of us love you to pieces.

Women taking back their power always looks like arrogance, even to other women, because they’ve all been programmed to think we shouldn’t need anything. Someone breaking out of that mold is not to be trusted. I think it’s a large part of the problem in female leadership. Men aren’t used to women demanding things, especially when their performance is poor. They’re not bad at their jobs, you are a threat. It’s amazing how often HR thinks the same way.

I think the reason women in lesbian relationships are less willing to play is that they don’t have to deal with men’s shit at home. They are all at once the problem and woefully unprepared to deal with it on two levels. The first is that they don’t understand why things are the way they are. The second is that they are powerless to do anything about it.

Even if I was the CEO, some of my male employees would think I was worthless at it because I got it through some type of nepotism, whether from my husband or the collection of men I had to sleep with to get the job. I like the second option better, because I’ve had so many relationships with women that the idea of “sleeping my way to the top” is just too ridiculous not to laugh. They don’t put enough women loving women in power for that to be an achievable goal whether I was interested or not (I’m not).

Speaking of women loving women, someone called me out on my straight girl crush when I said, “don’t think I don’t know what I lost” by saying, “she’s straight. You were never in the game.” I’m glad they called me out, because that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean that I lost a romantic relationship, because it was clear from the start that was never going to happen. I meant the complete idiocy it was to lay it out there in the first place, because then I was an untrusted entity and all the work we’d done previously was down the drain. You would have to know how important friendship is to me to know how seriously I mean that. My platonic relationships aren’t less important than my romantic ones. I feel deeply no matter what, which is why I only have two or three friends. I don’t have the emotional capacity to lay out that kind of energy for everyone, so I don’t.

What happens is, in effect, putting on a recording of 4’33 and grabbing onto the music in the room. It’s always there, humming, pulsating, rhythm on fire…. But fire is quiet when couched between music and silence. I have to find it, though. Else I’ll just rub my hands in the cold.

All the Things You Never Knew

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This is the most stereotypical thing you’ll ever read from the mind of women who love women. I mean, it is brutal. I will go into the lesbian falling in love with a straight woman HALL OF FAME. I just want to correct assumptions. I don’t need anything, I want it, and there’s a huge difference now that I don’t care if anyone likes me or not. I just don’t have enough time left to worry in terms of a second act. I will also not be recording this one because I can’t sit that long in this much pain, even though there’s glory, too. Maybe in a year.

You have trauma reflexes. So do I. I was taking everything you said as yelling at me and so were you. It devolved into madness and I was trying to stabilize. Future proof for both of us so that we could move the fuck on and love each other like we should’ve in the first place, when the connection was so explosive for both of us that it woke up everything within me. I paid attention closer, and I felt that was necessary because our story is a book series because I didn’t change all at once, like a magic wand. I changed because I did the homework and you sometimes would and sometimes wouldn’t, and that’s what hurt more than it helped…. and thank God I am not literally writing a book series on this. First of all, what a terrible idea.

You never seemed to realize that I was paying attention to you because I thought you could do no wrong, ever, as long as we were doing the homework as a group project, but we were just never in sync.

I’d say things like you and anyone you want to bring can be expats wherever Daniel and I are living, and you didn’t respond to it. I was always confused, and because I’d been in love with you, it caused me so much pain that I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not. I was scared to throw it out there, scared to say anyone you want, and I didn’t know how you felt about it.

I’ve always told you that I was just laying out my feelings, that I was writing like I was blogging. The way you reacted was frequently to feel like I was coming down on you instead of building our relationship, it had to be dead on brick by brick for a while. So that we could forgive each other and ourselves from some really deep shit and move on without those feelings constantly coming up to bite us, and I can’t think of a single problem we’ve ever had that didn’t escalate into thermonuclear war.

I loved you every day. All day. It will never go away, and I will love you until my last breath. Just because my trauma reflexes told me otherwise doesn’t mean that it was true. It was just true in that moment, that snapshot of my day. So many times I thought you lost your camera. Lost sight of the fact that it was for life because it had to be. There has never been an instance where I hashed out our problems in front of you and waited to see if I was correct. I wanted to know if I’d said something helpful or hurtful so that I could tell you what I meant if you had questions because you thought it was an attack and it wasn’t. That’s what I meant when I said that there were moments that shit had gone down at work and I was having a panic attack and neither one of us could handle the other’s emotions. We just turned on each other again… but never did we once go back to being ourselves, the ones that loved each other until we just couldn’t because we were the only people in each other’s lives where it was okay to go that deep because we’d been doing it so long we’d forgotten why small talk exists. It was intense and beautiful and fed me in all the right ways, but I never knew how you felt about it until I’d hit a trauma reflex and in the next few minutes whether it was verbal or in writing I’d feel like everything was gone. When I told you that, I was trying to goad you provoke you make you mad, whatever the story you were telling yourself and I told you that I’d done the homework. I fucking taught Microsoft Word to Brene Brown and I joked about it with you, but how in the hell could I have gotten this interested in resolving everything without her?

You didn’t seem to be curious when I was letting my feelings out about you when they were negative. You accused me of going into combat mode and stop hearing me and start fighting.

It was never me. It was someone else in the room, and I got that from a comment on my own marriage article. When we weren’t triggered, we each tried to bring light into the darkness and it always failed. I always had empathy for everything you were going through in terms of what you might feel about me laying out all my feelings, and you being so busy that you simply didn’t have time. I understood and waited in line. I’m still there. But if you choose me, know that love makes me as serious as a heart attack in a way I don’t want to be. I see how you’re struggling and I want to help you but I can’t if you don’t let me know what the problem is. Most of the tme, when you feel annoyed and angry, I’m just gardening. There are so many follow-up questions that you haven’t ever seemed to have time for… but again, I don’t sit in judgement of you. I lay out my feelings and you call me an asshole and before I can even take a breath I’m trying to find out why and when you’re doing it so that I can figure out which trigger I’ve hit and why. That way, I know not to do it anymore. When you don’t tell me what you were thinking and feeling about that, I get anxious because the only thing I want in the world is for us to enjoy each other and it seems like it is a thing that could happen and something it couldn’t and it’s confusing as fuck no matter whether I’d ever been in love with you or not when I have no idea what in the hell I’m doing to you when I write. Because then I could adjust, make it better, make it where you can lean on me again. But because you don’t see it, you see me casing and trashing the joint.

I couldn’t talk to you in a way where you felt loved and special because I couldn’t. My trauma reflexes would hunt me down and go for blood, and so would yours. But I didn’t want to be stuck in trauma reflex mode.

I wanted to return to the spectrum we’ve always had, which is that love wins. When I was teling you how I could love you and why, you ignored all of it and waited for your moment to gut me. There was too much pain and not enough teasing me.

I was trying to be funny when I talked about trading dick for a live-in chef and how you know you fucked up, but I was just flipping you shit. Your reaction was so hard core you are going to fuck up everything or that’s how I perceived it and spiraled out.

Do you really think that was about you? No, it was a trauma reflex kicking in. There was no apology phase except from me… the part where we hug each other and all is forgotten. I didn’t really think that was all you. I thought you were just having a bad day and I wasn’t the dog you needed to kick. They weren’t even there. It was the monster in your head and the ghost out to get you. I also know that I needed to be corrected, called out in love, but your way of doing it was to absolutely incinerate me when you know abandonment is my trigger.

I am choosing to resolve all of this shit if you are, but the longer you don’t speak the more it convinces me that you don’t want to do any emotional work with me when I told you there was no shortcut back to nice on this one and you showed up with such intensity that it made me lose my head for a little bit, dreaming about later in life when we’re all ancient, sitting on the back porch because you have nowhere to be and your kids are all grown and all that shit. It could be more if you were willing to move in my direction, but I don’t think it ever will be. I wasn’t focusing on you disappointing me, I was focusing on everything I needed to tell you before we were ancient, and I know that if you want to say it, you have to say it rightthefuck now because my mother went from having to wear a cast and being dead in the blink of an eye.

The reason I got so deep into our shit is because I love you, not because I hate you. It’s not a flirting, blushing love but day in, day out hard work. You live for the highs, not the lows. I gave you a letter that contained all the things about you that I love, and it was ignored. I don’t need you to take everything and throw it all away, because that’s what you did. I don’t think it was intentional, I think it was just my own trauma reflexes talking because I constantly think you don’t care when you only respond to me saying shit that makes you feel horrible. You don’t respond to me when I’m telling you I’ve been willing to be devoted in a way that couldn’t be duplicated, and again, I think it came across as goading and provoking, because my trauma reflexes aren’t smart enough to back down. So while I have things to say that are hard to digest, that doesn’t mean that I’m trying to load you up with guilt and shame. It means I love you enough to struggle until it’s right for both of us. It’s just not right for both of us, or at least right now. You seem to me to be happy this way, and I don’t even have to be angry about it because I know it’s just you responding to trauma and not burn the whole world down. I didn’t know you didn’t know that, so when you’d accuse me of throwing emotional bombs and trashing everything, I wasn’t asking for that. I was asking you to take it away and think about it while you need to be apart from me. Recognizing that your time is worth so much. Recognizing that In the Beginning I would have done anything for a walk and talk. And you know I’d do some shady shit if you needed me. If you needed me I wouldn’t stop for red lights.

Your story is important, more important than mine right now. Mine will come later, and I want you to fucking be there. I have been singing through the pain, and you should know me well enough to know what a big fucking deal that is. It’s my trigger, and I was leaning in. To have you not even respond was excruciating.

And if that feels like me goading you, it’s not. It’s recognizing that when you emote, I feel it deeply. You’re my friend and I have been in love with you in the past, so our issues on both sides are deeply seeded, seated for maximum root system. I have never, ever been saying that you are wrong and bad. I was saying “I think you are wrong about this.”

I have so much crap in my life that it was over the moment you said “you made me.” I don’t need people who think that way. But I can’t break the connection. It feels weird, but it’s correct on both sides. The thing is a direct quote from “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” “Just talk to her once and it won’t be weird anymore.” What I mean is about these topics. We only have to cover them one time and then we can move on… when our trauma reflexes aren’t constatly telling us that we’re disappointing each other. I am not you when I am with you and become you in some ways because some of your lines go through my head because you’re such an extroardinary writer that I can’t get over it.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to have feelings about it. I would do anything for and with you if you’d just tell me how you feel. I am an INFJ. I don’t see the world as what it is, but what it could be. I wanted to build something with you, and when I told you there was a monkey wrench in that plan, you were silent.

Just like you, nothing intentional, whether it was bad or not. That’s what love does. It is a series of vulnerablilities, not all sunshine. That’s when we have to find it for ourselves, going back to a discussion when there’s not a chance we could change it, but doing something about the present. Feeling better and stronger in self esteem, being other aware and communicating, and I am not asking for you to be this way all the time. I’m asking for a tiny bit more than you can give, and that’s okay with me. I know why. We both need a step back. I also told you that you were welcome until I took my last breath, and then my trauma reflexes kicked in and it came across to me as “it’s always going to be this way. I’m always going to feel confused and lost when something big comes up, because you don’t spend your days in all that touchy feely crap.

Because if one comes out, they all do. That’s when it’s hard as fuck, but then it passes and you become more integrated. But again, only seeing through my own lens and not yours because I don’t know if I’m welcome in your life or not, because we both tell each other to fuck off at the exact moment we start getting somewhere.

But like I told you before, I’m sure you could get in touch with me if you wanted, but I have no idea whether you will or not. I’m not carrying a flame for you. I haven’t seen enough evidence that you’re willing to speak with me in my love language if I am willing to speak to you in yours. When I was telling you who I was, it was through my jokes and humor because that’s how I deal with enormous pain. Just enormous. I am totally cool with it now, But don’t think I don’t know what I lost.

Thus the jokes that make you cringe and let me blow off a little steam, just like you. We are so much alike in so many ways that it boggles my mind. Having you say that I’m painting my feelings as fact was rough, because my truth is my truth. I’ve been doing it the entire time. You only blink when our problem is about us. It is suspicious or angry. It feels like our emotions are struggling to get out.

You said “I trusted you” in many, many different contexts. Sometimes, it was because you felt like I’d screwed you over and I hadn’t. Sometimes it was because you really did trust me and it was fantastic or terrible depending on which issue we were talking about.

You thought I was trying to irk you in the most serious way possible and it didn’t calm you down that I told you I was laying out my feelings, that nothing I ever did would have anything to do with you, that my actions were my responsibility, not my obligation. That I was offering you love so profound you couldn’t even wrap your arms around it and your response was nothing.

That’s why I always knew what trigger I’d hit and when. But only after I’d done the homework and learned you enough to see you clearly. I could respond that way when I laid out my feelings, but if I hit a trigger in you, you immediately stopped seeing love and started seeing an incredible amount of negative energy. Why would I ever raise my voice? When I’m writing, it’s just stream of consciousness and I throw it out there to see what sticks, and the cycle continues because once our reflexes have calmed the fuck down, what I saw is that we loved each other with intensity, not that I was always ragging on you. That I couldn’t be counted on for anything but constantly saying we were done and not done. I know that’s not true, and I also know that you know it.

This is because I never knew if I was welcome or not. We couldn’t futureproof if our lives depended on it, and yet we need each other in a million different ways. You see it differently than I do, and it hurts so much that I’m just as miserable now as I was after my divorce and my mother died. I loved you that much that I feel that much pain. But what was coming across was that I was trying not to poke the bear, and you didn’t see that I was doing it because the lens through which you were reading was that everything was bad and this would never go away and why was I still on this?

Because we can’t move on until we fix this thing, this toxic cycle because that’s the hand we’ve been dealt and we have to manage the downward spirals, not assume that the other is trying to hurt them when it escalates. I have never tried to hurt you, ever, unless we were both in escalation mode. When that happened, our trauma reflexes made both of us scared of each other, when if we’d talked it out in person it would have taken a few minutes, but we didn’t. We chose to hash it out with seven percent of what goes into communication instead of just saying “I can’t with your writer personality. Get your ass over here.”

I don’t know where your anger is, but I feel it. Whatever we’re both fighting, it should NOT be each other. I told you that you could cry on my shoulder if you needed a place to go with your feelings, but I never knew if I was welcome to tell you that….. but we’ve been friends since Jesus was a boy.

Because you say nothing and I don’t want to live like that. I want to embrace my true authentic self, and I swear to Christ you’re always welcome in my life. If you show up BIG, and accept the love I’m offering and recognizing that we are just enough alike and just enough different and we both need to bend and sway instead of letting the tree disease.

You have no idea. None at just how much hearing your voice changed me. I got the idea that my voice was a mask long ago, and the idea to actually put it out there from you. The other thing I realized is twofold. The first is that hearing each other’s voices while we talked it out would have solved the problem nearly immediately. Secondly, not knowing you had a partner was brutal on many levels. Not knowing that you’d deleted everything led to the change you see now, but a huge fight in the moment because trauma on both sides. I tried to tell you that every day for too long and you never responded to it. I let you go because I was exhausted. I couldn’t go any longer without you being willing to engage in resolution and resurrection, and you focused on all the wrong things.

So did I, beautiful girl. I got the idea to call you that because that’s what I call Cora. It wasn’t trying to dive into history or anything like it, because I am stable enough to love you absolutely for who you are. You are a Doctor Who is a very bad patient (I can work Doctor Who into goddamn anything, just roll with it). The absolute only thing I ever asked you about that show even though it’s the biggest fandom in my life, you never told me how you felt about it, or if you even clicked the link. I thought you would do it because you love me, not the show. It was about Vincent van Gogh, and how someone didn’t save his life because he changed it, it’s that sometimes you can’t change your story.

Apt.

And you thought I was being a drama queen. It’s not that at all, it’s that your response was a trigger. When I told you that, you dismissed me. I never wanted to talk to you again in my whole life. But I made an exception with Daniel because he is important too. The reason the email telling you about Daniel was begging and pleading is because I told you that I never wanted to speak to you again and then found out that I hadn’t sent it. I didn’t want to trigger you.

I wanted you to show up, and you couldn’t or didn’t. Whether I know it or not is up for grabs, but that depends on you. Because whether I thought love was romantic or platonic, it’s been such an extraordinary experience, but you kept thinking it was terrible because our trauma reflexes constantly rubbed up against each other. When I told you that my letters were going to be received as me being an asshole whether I meant it or not, you had no idea what idea I was focusing on, and the idea has been she’s the most beautiful, most interesting, most puts my mind in hyperdrive person in my life so do anything to keep that relationship strong and healthy for the future. I am speaking with such love and trauma here:

“The longer you go without speaking, the longer I don’t think you want to do any emotional work with me.”

Your response was to show up big, and then when I emoted about you, you shot me to shit. It just feels like you can’t handle large emotions anymore, when to me that is actually the most valuable part of our relationship. That’s why I don’t wanna pay attention anymore. It’s that I feel like I am Putting everything out there , and you’re not. I am not your personal content creator. You are not my therapist. Both of those things are well established. However, you are the friend that agreed to listen. So am I. Nothing was ever a half ass threat to trigger you. I am sorry that you feel that way. How it comes across is you not taking my mental health issues seriously. When I told you that, you stepped all over my ass. I forgive you. I haven’t forgotten. This is because in that moment, you decided that your trigger was more important than mine. I even said that there are certain words that you say that send me into a blind panic, but you never asked what they were. Now you know.

I’m sure my response was sharp to you, and I was triggered.

To me, it was our love story and how it changed over the years to accomodate both of us. It was recognizing that I had my own demons where you were concerned, that I wasn’t ever being flippant or trying to hurt you, goad you, provoke you. This is what I am talking about in terms of a toxic cycle.

It was so much bigger than that to me, both including you as family and showing up big, but I would have shown up so much bigger than that. If you look at my letters through that lens, you can see it so clearly that even I’m frightened by it. I don’t know how to manage it.

And as I’ve always said, this is not about you. This is about me. I couldn’t stand that we were both in each other’s heads and hearts, and we couldn’t make it any better. Those things are both true.

I was crying when I told you that I had become the Lord John Grey you could love and not the one that you couldn’t. You couldn’t listen to “can’t you see that I am screaming for empathy and not with anger.

I’m also saying that I escalated. I hurt you. Screwed you to the wall. But we both needed to be selfish. Maybe this is a time of interim, maybe it’s not. But here’s what I can control. I can stop actively letting you into my life if you won’t tell me how I can be a better friend. You keep saying that you’re tired of letters that try to guilt you and it makes you delay writing back or putting me on the back burner.

Putting me on the back burner turned out to be a huge fucking stove. I’m frustrated that your responses are short and never about us. I know, beautiful girl, that you can’t. Both because of time and trauma.

We’re getting to the age where we need each other, but we’re not moving in the same direction.

If you want to show up big, it means taking “you made me” out of the equation, taking lecturing you out of the equation, all that. The spectrum is large. I have now had every feeling that can be described about you by now, and I’m still showing up even though it was really fucking hard. But as I told my friends, it was worth it.

It wasn’t my obligation. I could have gone on hurting about it forever and kicking myself, or I could ask you to compromise. Asking you to compromise was not the tack I should have taken, for many, many reasons.

Because my trauma literally lines up with yours. We irritate the hell out of each other, but it doesn’t mean there’s not something here. It means it’s gone until we can both fucking chill.

But to my mind, you’ll always be the one who stole my heart, and returned it stronger than it had ever been. I couldn’t have become who I am if you hadn’t been you. That’s the real story, and I felt like you lost the plot because I never knew yours. I asked you what you were doing, and it was just another emotional bomb where I wasn’t upset at all. I was genuinely asking “where are you, and where do you want to go.” I probably could have worded it better, but that’s what I meant.

In most cases, I could have worded things better because there was no context. You weren’t sitting with me, watching me write, asking questions when you didn’t know something, and me getting to tell you what I was feeling in my own tone of voice, so you know I’m not throwing emotional bombs. It’s a prayer of relief in the legal sense in that I am telling you where I am and where I’m going, and asking for resolution on the few things that still need closure. None of this is predicated on my gender or sexual orientation. It’s what having a relationship where both people are open and vulnerable means.

But again, you don’t have time for that and it is really, really okay as long as you carve out a tiny, tiny bit of tme to help me be less confused. You have the funniest bullet points in the known universe and I’m here for it.

This is the relationship where I’m willing to drop the funny with you. You have no idea what that means to me. I wore a mask through my entire childhood, trying to be funnier than I am, more polite than I want to be because sometimes I just didn’t want to engage. I never had the strength to dictate terms, and I’m not going to be that anymore.

Wanting to be liked has cost me so much, and so has not. But what’s different about not is that I chose it. It is mine.

I chose you. If you choose me, it’s on like Donkey Kong. If not, “may the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.” I really do love you with that day in, day out kind off love. It gives me more strength than you can grasp, and I’m not sure that you ever have.

You are fuel for me, because once the fire was lit, I put it out. It may not have been the way you wanted or enough for you, but please know that I have always loved you as a complete person, not for your body. That’s shallow and inconsequential. I lit a glowing campfire. It keeps us all warm.

This has been all about consequences on both sides of the equation, where I could hear you say things like “I am furious with you right now.” Because I know you won’t be furious forever, and I will wait as long as it takes if you’re thinking that this is accurate and you want to reach out, but if you’re going to take it as more negativity than love, you might want to clean your glasses.

It’s your brain that turned me on. I think that should mean something, because I may be extraordinarily intelligent and paint my feelings as fact, but that’s because I got to it through you. That I could dictate terms, that I could stand up for myself, that I could say when there was a problem and do what needed to be done to fix it.

It’s a bigger ladder to get to me now that I’ve loved you, because I’ve learned to compartmentalize and focus on what’s happening right now. And what I’m doing right now is thinking about direction, and I always have been.

Sometimes I want you to return with something beautifully written, because I know that when I receive it, I’ve gotten a letter from the one I love the most, and no matter what it says, it’s valuable. Even the ones that drive me up the wall, because it’s a tapestry.

It has torn, but I have thread. I have stitched it up before, and I hope I will stitch it up again. I take nothing away from what I have and haven’t done. My reflexes are deeply intrinsic and have nothing to do with you.

I felt like I owed you the homework, not because it felt obligatory, but because there’s nothing more in the world that I want you to feel except Leslie loves me and we’re all good, it’s just that when issues come up, she will irritate and anger the living shit out of you because you don’t garden as a writer, and it’s a problem that I am… except that I have always been this way, a thinker in longhand. Neither one of us are the people we met, and we’ve never had a do-over.

If there is a God of the universe, I got them by writing to you. Every letter was a prayer in longhand. Every letter was how I process emotion from beginning to end. You do that with your mind, I do that with my heart. Maybe we can learn how to think and feel together. We are so different in some ways. Being empathic is a rough gig. I don’t mean that you are not empathetic, I mean feeling the whole world at once. It’s not that great. I am constantly emotionally laden. Writing is to deal with all that Because it is a comprehensive response to life.

There was never a chance that you were going to believe that I could call you out and love you for exactly who you are simultaneously, as if my feelings aren’t as crazy, wild as yours.

I never, ever want you to forget that, because even if it’s over I would do anything to prove that your sacrifices are not in vain. Just because I have to do a thing doesn’t mean I don’t get to feel about it.

We both do the things, just in different contexts. And you can see that so clearly when I lay out my relationships with other people. I seem to write beautifully about everyone but you.

When you’re the one I choose whether you ever choose me or not.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say you were ever in love with me, or that we weren’t taking in different realities. Our frames of reference were different because I had to get rid of the trigger that said I had to be with you to open up like this. I don’t. I just need to love you the way you were made. We both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s okay as long as we make the effort to speak in the other’s love language and not our own so that things are exactly are the way we are now, both of us butt hurt over what would be nothing if our trauma reflexes hadn’t kicked our asses. I asked you how we could move on, no response. But I swear on a six pack of Bibles it surprised the hell out of me that I got a response leaving me with a brand new asshole like two weeks later.

Do you see what I mean? Instead of asking about context, you went off. If it was a different day, it wouldn’t have been you. I have ripped you new assholes with as much dexterity as you. We are both so brilliant. I remember when I told you that you were the Hemingway of e-mail or some shit, that you write clearly and beautifully even when you’re angry and my response is “I’m not pleasing her,” but that’s not me. That’s my trauma reflex.

And if we’re really, really being dead honest, if we take sexual orientation out of the equation you could have written this about me.

And it would be better than mine.

Strength and Helsinki

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sunday Morning, Rain is Falling

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Show Tunes

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In Which the Sun Comes Out

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Part One in the “Stories from The Big Yellow House” Series

The yellow house is much yellower now, though in my memory it is not so bright because I’m not there. Neither is anyone else I know, but it was so precious while it existed in my world, and now in my memory. I am glad that The Big Yellow House is so entrenched in my core, because it will never fade.

Because when the Big Yellow House goes, so do my memories of a lot of other people. This entry is for them, and starts with a conversation between Bryn and me regarding our “shared childhood.” Now that we’re older, we both think of each other as children back then. I was 19, so I think that makes her 14 or 15 when we met. She would remember. I can remember everything but her age. 😛

Saying Bryn’s name out loud because she’s one of the, like, three people I would entrust with this conversation at all. Anyone who knew I was talking about it with someone and cared could easily guess all three. That’s because neither of us are the main characters. We were the ones that snuck off to be bad girls.

She wasn’t quite old enough to be bad properly, and I was a computer geek. We just sat and talked, and increasingly listened to jam sessions that were mildly interesting as background music and right now I can think of at least five people who are going to read that sentence and hate my guts. And two who will absolutely fall on the floor laughing and go, “she went there.”

I was never into the banjo. I hated it. Just for the record, but no one asked me… whereas I would say that anyone who learned to play the banjo in The Big Yellow House was clearly trying to isolate me. I am certain that was on purpose (one of the only jokes I will make about my time in The Big Yellow House, because it’s a shame that I can’t. Not right now. Even a decade later, it’s still Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

It’s because I have love for some of the people I met there and still have on my friends list, and some others that are a memory. Still alive, certainly, but with no need or want on either side to reconnect. Actually, that is a lie. I do not know for certain about them. I know for certain about me. I am not willing to do anything to help things along in terms of getting closer. I am reaching out to the people at that house when I was there. I feel that my ramblings might give the impression that I mistook the part for the whole and was trying to say that everything was bad.

This series is a way to say thank you for the things that they gave me while I was also in hell. I haven’t forgotten it, and I don’t want to focus on darkness. I want to bring this into the light, because that’s where they brought me. I cannot regret coming to Portland, because I wouldn’t have wanted a chance to meet Dana and then blown it by not coming back.

I definitely would have met some of these people one time, but they would not have raised me the way that they did. I’m kinder because of them. I’m a better person because of them, even though they knew nothing about me.

For the record, some people believe that I am a liar and I am just crazy. I don’t believe that, but they do. I believe that I can express what I’m feeling better than at least half the world, so my faith in my sanity is fairly sound. However, in my tribe, no one is perfect. It’s just that the more of us there are, the more it’s likely that one of us is all right.

The Big Yellow House will look at my experiences in Portland through the lens of one particular backyard… with two particular young girls… and three particular puppy dogs (Bunce, then Barley, then Maisie in score order). We’ll look at history, both personal and American, interestingly enough. We’ll go to church, where I was basically the youth group (what’s new?). We’ll walk up 36th to Division, then 37th up to Hawthorne so we can go to trivia.

We’ll listen to Outpost at the Block Party. We’ll go to Le Pigeon. We’ll invade the kitchen at Tapalaya and drink at Biddy McGraw’s. But we’ll start with a prayer for ablution. Water is washing over me and my tears are stinging my face. We’ll start with 1997, just a snippet of a memory.

Alex

Alex was one of the first people I met in Oreon, predating the yellow house by quite a few years. She had my heart from day one when there was a party at The Little Gray House, and men were bothering her. She asked if she could be my girlfriend for a second to get them away from her. To know how funny this actually was, you’d have to know Alex and me. She’s a diva, the amazing kind that makes you pray to the voice gods before an audition that you don’t have to follow her.  I’m short and I don’t like many people. Enough said about that except to say that “Odd Couple” moment made me think that maybe I had more than one friend in the neighborhood. Alex and her husband have blessed me many times over just by being them. I have told their story before, and was crying so hard in the middle of a Starbucks that my mother thought we should leave so I could calm down. I think she thought I needed Xanax, when in reality it was the best sermon I’ve ever heard, and I will put it up against anyone, anywhere, because the structure ENDS ME to this day. I am sobbing right now just thinking about it.

At Bridgeport, we divided the service up in to different duties. Instead of always having the pastor du jour (our word for having rotating preachers and an alarmingly deep bench- mostly brilliant lesbian preacher’s kids and ordained pastors kicked out of other churches,tbh… theological academician crack) do what we called “the offering pitch,” different people were asked (generally five minutes before… not planned, but useful because people will rarely say no if you don’t give them a chance to think about it).

Greg, Alex’s husband

I’m sorry. This is going to take a minute to get out because I know this story and you don’t. I cannot breathe all the way down, and this happened such a very long time ago. It’s a core memory that is one of my blue orbs hoping to find yellow and avoid red. My emotions are turning inside out.

I can remember about 10 years ago losing my everloving mind with grief as I relayed this story to my mother, where I wailed and she said we should leave Starbucks.

Greg walked to the front of the church and stood in front of the baptismal font. He pointed and he said, “this is where I was baptized.”

Then, he walked to the altar rail and looked toward the windows facing north, and he said, “And this is where I got married.”

This is the part where I am crying so hard I think my heart is going to break. I haven’t been back here in so long, and it was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened in our community. We will never get over it. We had to learn to live with it, our entire church life beginning back over at the Book of Acts, or as I call it, The Gospel of “Holy Shit, What Do We Do Now?”

Greg turned so he was standing behind the Communion table and he said, “this is where I buried my children.”

It was true. Greg and Alex lost their twins, Eleanor and Quinn, to a rare genetic disorder. They were only about two weeks old. 

We’d bought the layette.

Today I learned that grief makes you cry out louder than you thought you could.

He used the resurrection of the Christ to show us how we resurrected ourselves. That the loss of his and Alex’s twins didn’t go unnoticed because it bonded us. Love poured out for them and back into us.

It was a sermon. And I remember it all. I am absolutely sobbing and it was almost 20 years ago.

The people who visited The Big Yellow House were often more important than its residents.

Over time, the color never faded. It just got brighter, especially with the telling of it. “A little brighter than it used to be” was “it BURNS” by dinner.

I assure you, the people who have also been there share this opinion. In fact, it seemed to shine more every year. As we got older, it got smarter. It remembered our secrets and our lies, told to each other in the dark summer nights filled with beer and conversation. 

I was 19 when I met the church at the opera, 20 when I met the church that used to have green carpeting (and is still known that among my crowd… I’m 45), and 21 when I knew that these people were my life.

By 24, I was driving up I-5 feeling like I’d been punked. This had nothing to do with the Big Yellow House and everything to do with the fact that I’d only visited Oregon in the *summer.*

Stay tuned.