Tag: Friendships

Google Maps

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What gives you direction in life?

I cannot use the daily prompt tag very often because I did 99% of them last year. Please follow me if you’d like to read more. You can also keep up with me on Facebook, where you can interact with me, other readers of the blog, and great authors I’ve come to know in my time as a Facebook creator.

I have had both Android-based and Apple phones. Either way, I use Google Maps because I find it superior. I don’t know why. I just like the interface better than Apple Maps, and Google maps does the same thing on my watch that Apple Maps does, which is to buzz my watch when it’s time to turn. If I have my headphones in, there’s no need for it because the turn by turn navigation is in my ear, but when I don’t the haptic feedback on my watch is actually better than an audio alert.

I started out with my literal answer because the prompt reminded me of something Kathleen told me, the story of her college interview. Now, Kathleen (like every person I’ve ever dated) was incredibly smart. She was a business major at University of Houston, and ended up accepting a position at ExxonMobil in Global Information Systems. That’s how I moved to DC in the first place. Basically, the last person you’d ever think did something like this, which only made it funnier.

Kathleen was trying to get into Simmons, which is a women’s college in Boston on The Fenway. They are known for library science, I believe, but it wasn’t her interest. She wanted to live in Boston on The Fenway. I would like to point out that she DID get in after this, she just didn’t graduate there.

The interviewer asked her what she would bring to the college, and she said, “the blanket my grandma gave me, probably my pot-bellied bear (stuffed animal)……….” I was CRYING, shaking with laughter and so was she because of course she laughed about it in retrospect.

I don’t know everything she did end up taking with her to Boston, but she did take me (later on). She was supposed to graduate in the class of 2000, which she did, just in Houston. But her best friend was still graduating from Simmons that year, so I got the grand tour. The school’s address is literally 500 The Fenway, so we had access to everything right in our backyards. I loved Boston and wished I could have stayed longer.

I remember one souvenir I got that trip- a Harvard medical school sweatshirt for my dad. I didn’t go to a class at Harvard, but I did sit in on one at MIT. I think it was a math class, but I’ve slept since then. Whatever it was, I did not understand it. I don’t remember it because there are no “good lines” to connect me to it. My brain works through echologia. If there’s not a valuable thought or idea attached to a memory, it fades because I don’t repeat it in my head. In my head, good writing runs like a tape.

I can remember snippets of my dad’s sermons and it has been 29 years since he’s done a single service (not counting weddings or funerals). He will do those if someone asks him. As in, when you leave the church you stop doing active ministry, but they don’t take away your ordination. He can still sign legal documents as the officiant, etc. He left the church the summer before my 17th birthday, and went into medicine as a second career until he “retired.” In quotes because his philanthropy work takes up a lot of time. I tend to confuse people when I say I’m a preacher’s kid, because they don’t know my dad as a Rev. Meanwhile, I only had one grade school year in which he wasn’t a pastor.

“Can we cuss now?” -Lindsay L. Lanagan, 1995

I cannot say it was a different direction for my life as well, because like I said, I was almost 17. Not enough time for things to change drastically in terms of what I would do once high school was over, etc. I think those things would have played out the same, because being ADHD/autistic of course I didn’t plan anything in advance. I just took the basic entrance exams for junior college in Fort Bend, then transferred to UH. I’ve never even taken the SAT.

It just occurred to me to say out loud that I tend to have a delayed response to stress, thinking I’m fine until I break apart into a million pieces. It puts my behavior over the last 10 years in stark relief, that I’m fine right up until I’m not. That I will not explode because I am intentionally trying to hurt someone. I don’t realize that I’m overwhelmed, overstimulated, and at my breaking point.

In high school, that presented as a migraine that wouldn’t go away and landed me in the hospital for four days. The only reason I was mad about it is that I had to take my finals, because I had a good enough average to be excused and then I had too many absences. It wasn’t bad, though, just an annoyance at having to go to school longer than my peers. I was freaked out because I wanted to be at home with Meagan, because she’d gotten into University of New Brunswick and was leaving soon….. Another reason I had a full blown migraine. I was melting down due to stress and grief.

Dating a Canadian was really hard, because there was something so FINAL about her going to school in a different country. I knew she was never coming back, and I was right. She has never moved back to the US. Although what I can say is that researching immigration wasn’t wrong, and that I would have been happy if I’d done it even if the relationship had still failed. I have spent enough time in Ottawa with Meag to know I would have liked living there. But honestly, the more I researched immigration, the more final everything became because an autistic 18 year old cannot handle the logistics of an international move. I was overwhelmed by details from the beginning.

In terms of direction, what I knew is that if I wanted to go to UNB as well, I had to like the school on its own merit because people break up. So, I sent for an information packet and got an interactive CD-ROM that included a tour of the campus and some games to get you familiar with living there, like a scavenger hunt. It’s the most clever and creative recruitment tool I’ve ever seen anyone do, and WAY ahead of its time because it was basically the precursor to things like interactive web sites. I didn’t get anything like it from any of the other schools to which I applied, but does it surprise you that UNB got me by giving me something I didn’t have for my computer?

Do I regret not following Meag back to Canada? My perspective has changed. It’s a mixed bag, right? My answer today is very different than it was before the 2016 election, but even as a teenager I agreed with Canada’s socialist policies. People who say “socialist” like it’s a bad word because conservatives have convinced them it is. Meanwhile, Alberta has a thriving oil economy just like Texas and yet the people of Alberta still have nationalized health care and Texas has a lot more money. There is still income disparity, but no one is left to die on the streets. You can have capitalism and socialism.

Ask Deadpool.

Knowing what I know now, I would be horrified to change a thing that would have altered the course of my life away from eventually coming back to DC. The way it happened is just too oddly specific to recreate, and while my life would have been great as a Canadian, I would have kicked the shit out of myself for not going to Portland. If I hadn’t given up on immigration, I wouldn’t have met Dana.

Meeting Dana altered the direction of my life the most, because I’ve lived in Portland twice. I had to move back because I missed her too much; my girlfriend was way too jealous and possessive for me to have any friends. I mean it. She was emotionally abusive, and though she never punched me, she punched through a wall in my apartment (NOT HERS) when I told her that Meag was coming to stay with me……. Even when I didn’t say “Meag is coming to stay with me and we’re going to be alone in my apartment digging up old memories.” It wasn’t some sort of game. I said, “Meag, her partner, and their little girl are coming to stay with me.” She was still apoplectic and told me that it was inappropriate and I should have asked her if they could spend the night.

We didn’t live together.

We’d been dating three months.

And on some level I still thought I was an asshole and she was right. She said something to me that I’ve forgiven, but I’ve never forgotten.

She said something about not feeling secure in our relationship, that I was really committed, and then said “you look like such a flake when you haven’t finished your degree.” She was a middle school counselor, and it was like she’d never seen anyone with ADHD before……… And she’d never pulled that card before, it was just politically convenient and she knew it would hurt.

It hurt because she knew I was brilliant. She knew I’d turned down an internship with the Human Rights Campaign writing national Sunday school curriculum because she didn’t want me to go. She, like me, thought there was something so FINAL about going away, as if three months was enough that I’d just say “I live here now.” It might have been, but it wouldn’t have been “I want to move back to DC without you.” I felt secure in the relationship, not in Texas. For her, those two things were one and the same. I have several friends who are engineers and manage to have great marriages despite being asked to travel for work, often longer than three months. If that little time apart destroys a relationship, then it wasn’t a real relationship in the first place.

It changed the direction of my life, the giving up of that internship to kowtow to my girlfriend’s fears. Dana put the kibosh on that real quick. She was the one who put the puzzle pieces together and saw how I was being manipulated before I did. Dana’s former partner was an alcoholic, and so was my girlfriend. She could tell a lot without me having to say anything.

I don’t have a problem with alcoholics and addicts. I have a problem with alcoholics not admitting that even though they don’t drink, they’re still dry drunks. As in, the problems that made them drink haven’t gone away and they still exhibit the behaviors of someone who drinks, like manipulation, isolation, etc. I am not saying that if you have problems with alcohol, then you are emotionally abusive. I am saying that I do not have time for alcoholics and addicts who think alcohol is the entire problem. That the only thing they need to do is stop drinking. They don’t have to have therapy, they don’t have to go to meetings, they don’t have to do anything besides not drink.

So, you have a sober person who, for the first time in literal years is feeling real emotions again, and they don’t know what to do with them. Whatever drove them to drink or use is still the monkey on their backs and the ghost out to get them. They’re actively running away from their emotions because they’re not used to them. If you have an addictive personality, you have an addictive personality. That’s why so many former drug and alcohol users start smoking half a pack a day, drinking coffee as a water substitute, and/or you’ll never find something sugary that they don’t like. They cannot be addicted to the things they were in the past, so they find new ones.

But please know that I am not speaking from personal experience in an arena where it’s all about personal experience. I am not trying to speak for an alcoholic or addict, these are just observations I’ve learned from being a coworker in the kitchen and having had friends go through the recovery process. Having an addict living in your house gives you a front-row seat to how that brain works, and it is not so dissimilar from ADHD. If you were neurotypical before you started drinking, there’s a possibility your thought processes will go back to normal. Unfortunately, neurodivergence may be your new normal because the alcohol gave you so much dopamine that your brain cannot possibly keep up. It cannot produce more dopamine than what you used to get from the alcohol, so your brain just sits there and screams. It is possible that you have accidentally induced bipolar disorder, or that you were self-medicating to manage bipolar disorder you didn’t know you had.

Chicken and egg debate on bipolar vs. addict. We’ll never know, but it’s extraordinarily common.

From my perspective, an alcoholic and a bipolar person are perfect for each other because they present so similarly. However, that’s dependent on a lot of factors….. The biggest one is that half of the couple realizes they’re bipolar and what it does to you, and the other realizes they’re an addict and what that does to you. You have to speak from a vulnerable place and know you are capable of being wrong. Red flags are only problematic if you’re managing someone else’s. Knowing you have red flags and saying “I’m working on it” is completely different than trying to hide them and hope no one notices.

Your life becomes more manageable when you realize that you’ve been acting egocentric, and find something to get it out of the way. When you are no longer the center of your own universe, things look very different. “Egocentric,” however, cannot be equated to “selfish.” Plenty of people are egocentric because they feel that asking for things is putting someone else out. Being that shut down is egocentric because you have stopped participating in a give and take, making people guess your needs….. Often, when angry, blaming another person for everything you failed to tell them. In no example of any behavior that I’ve given on this Web site am I immune to being part of the universal “you.” The only behavior I don’t have is drinking too much on a consistent basis. If I feel any amount of hung over, I pull back more. For instance, if I had four drinks over the course of an evening with friends and I felt hung over the next morning, the next time I’d drink three. What I’ve discovered is that the best answer is not to drink at all unless it’s a once in a while treat. Because I’m a blogger/diarist, I absolutely hate losing control. I can tell I’m feeling tipsy when this monologue slows down, and that’s not a good thing. I need every bit of creative juice I’ve got.

I have learned that you do not want alcohol to numb your inner monologue unless the play is shit.

The play is the thing.

Singing a Brand New Tune

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Ass I often do, I surfed Facebook for a few minutes. I was looking for a prompt to give me a jumping off point, because today’s prompt was “are there any quotes you live by?” Last year, the title was “many, most of them mine.” I was not saying that I’m the expert, only that I’m the author I read the most because I go back over what I’ve written to see what’s next. Therefore, my own words are more likely to stick with me because these essays are ABOUT ME, which is the topic I know the most about (on most days).

The thing I saw on Facebook is that “worrying is worshipping the problem.” It is every bit as meaningful as something I heard in “I’m a Christian now. That worked.” It’s a group for atheists and I lurk to see what they’re saying, because I am often jogged theologically by the things they say, like “Jesus wasn’t the only person claiming to be The Messiah at the time. His was just the story that stuck.”

Like today, I had to sit down.

His was the story that stuck, which is to my mind one of the greatest theological phrases ever uttered in the history of ANYTHING…..  BY AN ATHEIST and I am FURIOUS I didn’t think of that line before they did. 😉

Except for perhaps a line tied with it (being the best and furious I didn’t think of it)  “a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” I am not talking about the overwhelming guilt and shame the church is quite capable of handing you….. Wrapped in bread and wine, no less. I am talking about Christopher Hitchens debating Rowan Williams on YouTube and learning they were good friends. Zac and I were actually talking about this the other day because he’s an atheist. I told him that I loved Hitch, but I didn’t love Richard Dawkins because he may be smart but he’s also an asshole.

He seems to me to be a not religious evangelical, and his schtick is making Christians look like they’re stupid even when they’re only out for self improvement and not world domination. Social justice Christianity is left out of the conversation because it’s not as easy to make fun of us. We question everything, including the idea that all Christians are stupid.

In effect, Dawkins is worshipping the problem. He’s so fanatical in his beliefs that he’s trying to change people through force and anger, not ever present loving kindness, which all atheists I’ve met have. Luckily, I have never run across an atheist who espoused Dawkins-like views, and I have to say that it’s partly due to my interaction with them- because I don’t try to change them, I don’t tell them they’re wrong because they’re not (religion is a spectrum and belief in God is ontological…. Essentially, God exists as much as you believe God does. Evangelicals get in the weeds with The Great Commission and think that Jesus thought you were personally responsible for recruiting people. They take it a little too seriously and often become right judgmental bastards because of it. You won’t convert, so they’re angry and fearful ALL THE TIME because their getting into heaven is DEPENDENT on your yes. Otherwise, in their churches, they just aren’t working hard enough.

Meanwhile, I am out there saying that atheists I’ve met, for the most part, left church because they were hurt, angry, afraid, and exhausted. You fucking Evangelicals are cancer, especially walking into a church where it explicitly says they won’t marry you if you are A) not a member of the church II) marrying a Jew. I will not tell you where I saw it because it’s not worth it to have you show up and protest. It wasn’t Joel Osteen, but definitely Joel-adjacent.

Now, non-denominational Christianity looks like rock concerts with homophobia that looks beautiful because it’s Biblical.

Meanwhile, your houses are built on sand.

Peter, the rock of the Catholic church, has probably met way more gay people than you. We just didn’t have words for it until Victorian England. A lot of the preachers after Jesus died would have traveled to ancient Greece and Rome. When you think about history lining up that way, homophobia is INSANE.

Homophobia. I do not think it means what you think it means. The Old Testament was not calling homosexuality an abomination. They were railing against the ancient Canaanite practice of young boys becoming prostitutes at the high temple. They were protesting pedophilia and disrespect for a holy place, not the sexual acts inherent to being queer in the first place.

Jesus did not say a word about homosexuality, “therefore, it [justification for treating queer people as lesser than] cannot be essential to his teaching” (Jim Rigby, Presbyterian Church USA). JESUS DOES NOT CARE IF YOU HAVE MATCHING TOWELS, GLASSES, AND SMALL DOGS.

Evangelicals are cracked when everything I know about Jesus can be summed up in one Disney show tune…… “God Bless the Outcasts.” You are JOKING if you believe Jesus sat with sinners all day long and wouldn’t have been on the side of the queer community, because now we’re the ones being persecuted instead of him, his land occupied by Rome. The “Holy Roman Empire” has a lot of fucking nerve, I’ll tell you that much. Crucifixion was your practice and you killed Jews for sport. Then, a Jew’s story becomes well-known and you somehow take it as “permission” to take over the whole world.

This is not the religion you’re looking for.

They’re worshipping the problem.

They’re creating ways to put obstacles in people’s way based on bullshit Jesus never said.

OCCUPIED BY ROME. RENDER UNTO CAESAR, PEOPLE.

Jesus has met a fuckin’ queer, all right?

Stop worshipping the problem, because it was never even there. You made it up. Stop wrecking people’s relationship with Christ because they don’t think they deserve it.

Jesus said to “walk in the light while you have it.” I hate that so many “church people” continue to live in darkness while the light is right above their heads. All they have to do is stand up, but the church keeps them on the kneeling rails.

It wrecks relationships with friends and partners as a result, because you’re not right……. But you’re certain.

You do you, but okay.

Business

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s one of my favorite Eminem tracks, and I have done it at karaoke (POORLY). But today I get to say that I had a win, because it made me feel good. I was going to post this in the article about productivity, but I’m neurodivergent. My brain diverged and I forgot. I said that I locked down my personal Facebook page and redirected everyone to my professional author’s page. What I did not say is that I started thinking like an entity and not a person, because now that’s true. Bryn also has an account on this blog, and has the capability to create entries independently of me. She doesn’t always post, yet I have to be prepared for the possibility that she could. I also would have offered one to Supergrover (after I’d added Bryn- it didn’t occur to me before) if I thought she wanted it…. For two reasons. The first is that she’s a wonderful writer. The second is that I would be very surprised if I didn’t give her an account, just access to mine, and you could tell the difference. It would be my voice, just on crack. You’d think I’d gotten better in a hurry, but you wouldn’t have thought I changed style and structure except a quarter of never.

That’s because Supergrover writes fantasy and I don’t.  I am so cerebral that the only fairy tale I’ve ever liked in my life is the one she handed me. I think that she thinks I get lost in thinking of her as the evil stepmother when I’m trying to reach “happily ever after.” Every story deserves an “HEA.” I can already see it, feel it on my skin. It just looks different than hers, and I have to be at peace with it. I am.

So, I started thinking of my blog as the beginning of Lanagan Media Group when I added Bryn and became open to the possibility of adding others; I felt an amazing amount of business savvy in locking down my personal profile. People don’t need to become friends with Leslie, they need to become friends with Lanagan Media Group. I am not a person anymore- because I have another author, I’m a brand.

But that brand is not Bryn pedaling my voice and views. It’s being able to talk about those things and discuss boundaries. We just don’t have to discuss much because we agree on most everything politically and neither one of us has a conniption fit when we write about the other. If we had a fight and she wrote I was a bitch that day, good for her. I probably needed to hear it. That’s because I know that when we have an intimate moment that strengthens our relationship, she’d reflect that, too. She’s not out to get anyone when she writes about herself, she’s digging deep and letting the right people go with her….. Because they like her for who she is and not who they think she is.

Sometimes, people don’t notice that it’s not me, so I started asking Bryn to introduce herself at the beginning of every entry she writes. I love it when she posts because she is naturally so much funnier than I am. My entries are not as full of laughter, because when I write, I am focusing on myself. How many of you when you sit alone and think are consciously trying to make yourself laugh? I am, and that’s the only reason there are jokes in here at all. However, no one does it all the time. Bryn just likes making herself laugh more than I do, and it shows.

Bryn is also neurodivergent, which is why we don’t have a problem in communication most of the time. Everything the other says is #relatable. Therefore, I am stereotypically #blessed.

I’m talking about her so much because she gets here tomorrow and I haven’t seen her since way before the pandemic, so the right amount of time to be over the top excited and can’t think about anything else.

I’m also excited to meet Dave, her boyfriend, and get to know him in the flesh as opposed to “this is Dave” occasionally as he walks by the video call. 😉 It’s necessary to get in good with your best friend’s partner, because we both need a person to talk to about her, because we both love her. We want to support her. I am not offering either of them more than that, just that when push comes to shove, I’m Bryn’s friend and not Dave’s. I am not ANTI-Dave. 😉 I am only anti-Dave if Bryn becomes anti-Dave. Just like Bryn would never in a million years be anti-Zac unless I became anti-Zac, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I have both freedom and security. It’s a lot easier to deal with life’s ups and downs when you know you always have someone in your corner no matter what. And both Zac and Dave are Navy, so obviously we both know what we’re doing in terms of picking men. Navy, you are a different breed and we’re here for it.

Zac and I have similar stories- he joined the military because he didn’t know what he wanted to do after high school, but he wasn’t interested in school. I tried to join the Air Force for the same reason, because at the time music classes were the only ones I liked and I wanted to try to get into “Airmen of Note.” I just wasn’t medically eligible and Zac was.

At the time, being in the military and also in the jazz band seemed like the easiest way to work as a musician every single day and not worrying about chair tests, ever, because even if I got last they wouldn’t kick me out altogether. No matter what happened, I could work as a musician, even if I turned out to be a crappy one and did something else for my day job. As it turned out, what I did not like was grade school.

I had a great college experience because that’s the first time academics are on a level playing field with neurotypicls and neurodivergents alike. That’s because in college, they don’t do “daily work.” You are perfectly free to inhale all the reading in one night if that is the way your brain works (and mine does). I couldn’t see the forest for the trees in grade school, but I kicked the shit out of college unless it was something I didn’t understand, anyway, like Logic or Trig.

It’s not school I objected to- it was the system of education. So, if you’re a neurodivergent who struggles in grade school, don’t worry about college because it’s a choose your own adventure. Study every day, or study for 27 hours in a row before a test. Your choice. You do you. Don’t be afraid that you’re not smart enough for college, because “smart” and the way your brain works are two completely different things.

I did a lot better in school when I wasn’t micromanaged and my brain could just be my brain. That I wasn’t set up to fail by not having papers in my bag that day. I was excellent even in classes with the Socratic method, because I would inhale the reading and be able to talk about it, and in classes where reading wasn’t mandatory (as in, we didn’t discuss it), I wasn’t punished for saving up the reading til later because I knew it would be on the test….. So I had to read it at some point and did. Class and the reading were often disjointed when they didn’t reflect each other, because both we as students and the professor would get off on tangents, especially in International Relations (we were obsessed with the war in Kosovo at the time).

So, for all you ADHD/autistic kids it’s okay to stop worrying about what you’re going to do in college because you might find when you get there that college jives more with the way you think than high school did, anyway. No matter how you do it, it’s right.

Just like now, I would have a problem with being required to write long essays every day on a given topic, but I write them to myself because I think they’re important. I am lucky that they have become important enough to other people that the reason I allowed other authors was to increase my reach while I was asleep, because I’m on Eastern time and Bryn is on Pacific. It was a very Pacific strategy.

I am capable of synthesizing and adapting ideas. I got that one from ITIL, which is the Bible on how to run a helpdesk- “follow the sun.” Maybe one day I will make friends close enough to add in New Zealand and Australia rather than requiring one of us to move there. 😉

I worked for Alert Logic, and we had a “follow the sun” approach, which led to one of the greatest victories of my career. The vice president of the company in the UK took a support call and transferred it to me without hanging up the phone. He was absolutely blown away that it was 0300 and I was chatting to him like it was just a normal workday…. Asking who his Doctor was (I asked all British customers that just to calm their asses down before addressing the issue at hand. If they’re calling to say something doesn’t work, they want to fight. Don’t let them. A cappuccino machine in a dress is the one true way). This vice president said that if everyone was like me, they’d have a better company. Unfortunately, my manager did not also think this.

That’s because I thrive on my own structure, which I had a lot of at night, especially when I transferred my business phone to my cell phone so I could answer calls in my pajamas in my home office, which I did when I was the one following the sun, handling international customers from midnight til 9 AM.

It was so intimate to be the only voice in the dark on my end with the busy chatter of their offices in the background. I often got to know people quite well because you have to do something to pass the time when files are transferring, etc. because it’s not enough time to put someone on hold. So, we’d chat to each other. I also got to know my British coworkers in Cardiff better than most because I was the one on the American end who was handing things over.

In fact, I once met a “Davies” that looked very much like Greg, and in retrospect I wish I’d asked if they were related. He’s one of my favorite comedians of all time, and on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” Greg finds out that he’s Welsh. I also had a fascination with Cardiff and “The Doctor Who Experience,” but I did not get to go before it closed. I’m sure that if I’d stayed at Alert Logic, I would have gotten a rotation in Cardiff at some point, but they were not the best with autistic employees who didn’t know they were autistic. Hindsight is 20/20 on agreeing that why I got fired was unfair, and yet it wasn’t their fault, either. I cannot hold them responsible for something they did not know, I can only lament that I did not know to tell them and move forward in a different direction.

Which reminds me- I get so much attention from the daily prompt tag that the next time I get to use it, I will say it again. If you want to read me, you’ll have to follow me, because I don’t appear in #dailyprompt every day anymore. That’s because even if I use it, I don’t have the specific tag for that day to put me into that feed. So many people have gotten used to reading me on that tag alone, because of the number of people that showed up every day back then vs. now. It’s not that I don’t do well in other categories, that’s just a big one for exposure. I got a year of it, so I should be grateful, and I am. What would be more helpful is another year of prompts rather than reusing the same ones.

I suppose I could create another author tag and use THAT account, but I’ve been theantileslie for so long that I don’t think of myself as anyone else, except for possibly “Rev. Argo,” because that’s how Bryn used to address my mail (I did her wedding years ago, am ordained by the church of the Latter Day Dude, and Argo is my favorite movie). If I had thought of it on Dec. 31st, I probably would have done it. It’s too late now. But maybe next year if there are no new writing prompts to be had.

Writing prompts make it easier to blog, just like sometimes Alzheimer’s patients come into lucidity about the past if you prompt them. Details come up for both of us that wouldn’t have come up otherwise. I find that especially the way I write, no writing prompts is ever going to be the same from beginning to end, because it’s going to bring up different aspects of an experience depending on how I view it that day.

I don’t think the same thing about every situation all the time. I make peace within myself by seeing things in a hundred different ways, because there are a hundred different ways to explain what happens when I’m around other people, or two hundred stories total because my 100 won’t match theirs. A lot of it is that autistic thought processes don’t seem “correct” to neurotypical people. Because our pathways are different, they are wrong.

Sometimes, I have to get used to the fact that I’m wrong whether I am or not, because I cannot get people to see that my thought processes are not “crazy.” They’re DIFFERENT, because I cannot even begin to think like someone else and in a neurotypical world, difference is bad. Very bad. They googled it, and they do not like it.

I have known this for a long time because I am not officially diagnosed as autistic, I am in the process of waiting for a diagnosis and doing all the research/online tests I can do until that appointment. However, I have been diagnosed as ADHD, and had I known more about ADHD when I was at Alert Logic and why it’s like autism, I could have been more specific in my demands for accommodation. Very few of the things I need in a working environment are specific to Autism or ADHD. Both accommodations are nearly identical. If I had known that I take in information through sight and that’s why I have trouble talking on the phone and writing at the same time, I might have gotten accommodation for it. I cannot process what one person is saying and process a response and write down my experience while it is happening, i.e. documentation. There are ways around a problem if you know you have it. I could not help myself.

That’s what all this autism talk is about. It’s not trying to “prove” I’m autistic because there’s no real way to do that. We all look different, we all have different ways of presenting. I especially know that you’ve met autistic women your whole life without knowing it because most women don’t know whether they’re autistic or not. It never would have occurred to their parents to get them tested because classic presentation is young boys. That means there are millions of undiagnosed women in the work force and we all struggle a fuck you amount. That’s because they’re caught in a system not built for them, but never taught that it’s not built for them. They’re just angry and frustrated because obviously, it’s not the system. They’re just failures.

Up to 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given moment, and for women, this is mostly expressed in not being able to handle life like a “normal woman.” We are taught that we are failing when we cannot handle being a partner, mother, and coworker/employee all at the same time. However, the more and more roles we take on, the more we’re spread thin without realizing it. The potential for constant meltdown/burnout cycles gets larger, which makes us look like we’re shirking our responsibilities because all wives and mothers are built to handle a million details and you’re just defective. I am so glad that I’m queer, because I have no doubt that if I’d bought into what being a wife and mother really was to a man and married someone to have that life, I would be dead by now. This is not saying that my husband would have killed me, but it is not unfathomable that he would be enraged by my lack. No, I’m talking about not having gender roles in a relationship kept me from feeling like I was failing as a partner all the time.

Life is relentless as an autistic person in an allistic world, because you cannot convince someone that you really didn’t know/understand something. “Everyone” knows. I would like to punch this mythical “everyone” in the face. They’re setting me up for failure, like commercials that try to convince people with no money that they need extravagant cars.

I thrive in my own system, and so do many autistic people. I just don’t think that many women have the language for it. I hope I’m giving it to them straight, because autism is probably a diagnosis they never would have thought they had because no one ever told them it was possible. There’s a woman I hold in my mind when I say this, and I hope she knows it’s her. It’s a face with many, many names when I follow the sun.

That’s because I’m not a brand, I’m an archetype. There are millions of women out there just like me, and I’m trying to find them. It helps not to feel so alone. I am already friends with lots of autistic guys due to the nature of always being online and having been on the Internet since it was born. I already indulge my autistic male side because men are more likely to know they’re autistic.

I have said that I’m enby and I mean it. I have just already met my quota in autistic men and want to get to know other autistic women, because it affects us differently in terms of the role we play in society. There is no room for an autistic woman to be herself unless she ignores a MASSIVE amount of American culture.

I get called “difficult” a lot when I don’t understand. It also doesn’t take much for a woman to be difficult in my society, so I am guessing that whether or not I am difficult depends on your perspective. I have definitely had to turn a negative into a positive, going even further against the grains of what female means in order to understand myself. I am not all of anything. I am a little bit of a whole bunch of things. I contain multitudes, and I’m not a good enough writer to have thought of that first but it doesn’t make it less true.

So, you should follow me because I am not going to be the same person tomorrow. You will perceive a different aspect of my personality then, because Bryn will be here…… And also because I’m a different person every time my outlook changes, because what I present depends on what I pick up.

Therefore, I would also like you to pick me up.

You know what I mean. Get your mind out of the gutter. 😉

Fourth of July

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?

I did do this prompt last year, but it’s still in my “Drafts” folder. Therefore, I actually get to answer today’s prompt like it’s a real writing prompt day. And yet, I have the same answer- Fourth of July is my favorite holiday because all I like to do on holidays is sit around with beer and talk to people. It doesn’t matter what kind of beer. Right now, I have two favorites. Hare Chaser Grapefruit IPA by Flying Dog and Chelada Nada by Athletic.

Athletic is an N/A beer company, so all of their brews have the same amount of calories as a Coke or less…. and they go hard. You cannot imagine that lime, black pepper, and tomato will perfectly replace the acidic burn of alcohol and then it happens.It’s perfect. I love Athletic because I am more interested in flavors than alcohol. I do not have to feel bad about wanting to try nine of them. I am not the only person in Zac’s house that likes Athletic, so he’s always well-stocked. He also has every single N/A spirit one can find, and my favorite joke right now is that when we were watching “Slow Horses,” I drank a GLASS of whiskey. 😉 I can’t remember what else was in it, I just remember being delighted that I did not have to be judicious with the pour. It’s a mixologists’ wonderland, these N/A spirits, because then I can spend all night experimenting and wake up with no ill-effects from the night before. It’s also good to know that I can make ANYONE an amazing cocktail regardless of their background with alcohol. That’s because I can do just as much with juice, soda water, and citrus garnish. If the person does not have a zero tolerance on alcohol, that opens up being able to use bitters, which make fruit juice and soda water grow up in a major way. I am sure, though, that many companies make nonalcoholic bitters just for this purpose. I need to get some, but right now I’m in love with Angostura, as it makes ginger ale taste like root beer, and Sprite/7-Up taste like ginger ale. If you go to a restaurant that does not have ginger ale and you order a cocktail that has ginger ale in it, it’s a reproduction behind the scenes.

Which reminds me. I have never made a Moscow Mule out of Reed’s Extra Hot, so I should get on that at some point.

This is the kind of conversation I’d be having at a Fourth of July Party before we go to the river. And it’s a propos that Fourth of July has come up today, because I cannot remember a Fourth of July in Portland without her. It’s not that it hasn’t happened. It’s that Fourth of July without Bryn is not memorable in any way.

Bryn, like the rest of my close friends, isn’t a person. She’s an event. When I see her, I don’t just see what is happening now, but all the iterations of her person that have come before this one. I see Bryn at every age, from little kid til now. What I also have to remember is that I would look like a little kid to myself at that age, too. I was 19, which is five years older than Bryn, but at 46 we both look like infants.

That’s because we had a mutual friend that held a Fourth of July Party every year, so we’d either meet up at their house or she’d eventually wander over to my apartment with Dana, which was across the highway (26) from said mutual friend. Or, as I joked with them, “you live on the side of Powell with the Starbucks and without the strip club. I live on the side of Powell without the Starbucks and with the strip club.” Who got the better deal is anyone’s guess, because I got to go to a bar and walk home at night. In the morning, she got to walk to Starbucks in her pajamas and beg them for milk. It all worked out.

My apartment became the Introvert Recharging Station, and said mutual friend was not very gracious about it. She did not like that people came to my house to get away from all the stimulation, and there was a lot of it. Conversation, live music, all of it. It was a lot, and it never occurred to me that she would be jealous. It’s not something we would have discussed, just a rumor I heard over the years from the people that came to my house.

In my own mind, it was not that way at all. I did the same thing when I was young at my grandparents’ house. They didn’t live very far from each other, so when I got bored at one house, I went to the other. Neither grandmother worried about me because they knew I’d be back. To me, everyone wandered in and out as they were comfortable, even me. It was never a divide and conquer, but that’s how she took it.

I am not manipulative by nature and do not realize when a game is afoot. Therefore, if there was any kind of game, I won by not realizing it was going on. People did not come to my house and stay for the whole evening. When things got boring at my house, they wandered back over to hers. I didn’t “steal” any of her friends, I took care of her introverts while they were overwhelmed and overstimulated. But, she was mad, because they were HER introverts.

Never mind that I was also one of her introverts, supposedly.

Besides, when she was having a party, I did not also, in turn, decide that I was having a party. If someone wanted to recharge at our house, it didn’t matter what we feed them or what we drank. The only time I remember Dana and I breaking this rule was a private conversation between us that we had with our eyes. One of her friends told us that he was HIV positive, and we looked at each other. All of the sudden, Dana’s most valuable bottle of wine meant shit and I knew that’s exactly what she was saying to me and I was saying, “you’re right. Get it out here.”

Thank you to Lynn, Jane, and Michael for introducing “Open That Bottle of Wine Day,” on “The Splendid Table,” or else it would not have occurred to either of us that these kinds of days are just what Jane and Michael meant. The announcement of HIV was a reminder to DO IT NOW.

It’s probably 15-20 years since that happened, and I remember it like it was yesterday, so it was worth it.

But that’s just one memorable fourth of July out of 14 or 15 that I celebrated in Portland. Most of what I remember is shivering next to the river watching the fireworks…… Which I do like sitting by the river in DC, because it’s not as cold in the summer. Portland has great weather for fireworks, usually, because the rain clears up. You must still need blankets to keep warm.

It’s best that you go with people you really like, because as it gets colder you won’t want so much personal space. It’s about shivering in groups.

What makes it my favorite holiday is that everyone is relaxed and no one has an expectation of getting a gift. It’s a stone soup holiday, where everything that everyone brings makes it better. Each person has a different type of hot dog/sausage/veggie patty, etc. Each person has that side that makes them comfortable (and I will search out the person that made deviled eggs). We all like ice lollies in red, white, and blue.

My favorite is where the white and blue meet- raspberry lemon. For my overseas readers, it’s called a “bomb pop,” and is stacked with red, white, and blue. The red is generally cherry, and I’ve mentioned that lemon is white. However, in other countries, raspberry would be a darker red, and in the US “blue raspberry” is dominant because we are crazy about artificial coloring and the rest of the world is not….. Mostly because their governments are smart and have outlawed them.

I have found energy drinks that are clear with that same raspberry lemon flavor and they’re just as good as the ice lolly. C4 makes the best, but I can’t remember what they call it. If it were me, it would be something cheesy having to do with freedom, because of the drink’s origin.

Plus, nothing was funnier back in the day to me than “Freedom Fries.”

Why wouldn’t it be? Fourth of July is my favorite holiday.

I’ve Been Laughing About Today’s Prompt for a Year

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Because I answered it last year, I can’t answer the daily prompt again…. but that didn’t stop me from laughing about it. The prompt is “have you ever been camping?”Leslie Goes Camping is one of my favorite stories in life, and it is years and years old.

The setup is that Dana (ex-wife, but we were best friends for years before we got married), her then-partner, and I went on a camping trip for our church. It was great, because we were able to have worship on top of Mt. St. Helen’s, and a few other things we could do when “Jesus has left the building.” Dana and I had met the Easter before, when I’d been brutally dumped (not really, but it felt that way at the time) and needed to make a whole new friend set…… arguably worse than being dumped, but neither made me feel so hot.

It was the start of The Separation, and Dana and I didn’t even know it. However, she would have been relieved, and I know this. She watched me struggle every fucking day for years. I wasn’t a very good wife on most days, but I had my moments. I just have to hope that Dana remembers them, too, and I don’t have to continue to feel bad that I completely wrecked her life as well.

I do not think this is because we were bad for each other (at that time). I think I didn’t know I was autistic, so I got called a judgmental dickhead a lot. In fact, I can’t remember a better day in Dana’s life than when my beautiful girl called me a judgmental dickhead to my face. At that particular date and time, I did indeed deserve it. She was not always wrong, she was just not always right, either.

To me, there is a huge difference between saying “your actions have hurt me” and “you are a bad person.” Both women saw me as saying the latter, and they’re both invaluable, both bright diamonds. I just don’t think that either one of them could follow me very well, and that’s not due to anything they did or didn’t do. It’s the way I communicate now that I’m aware of my shortcomings, and the way people interact with me based on the label because they’re already aware that, girl. I got issues.

But I was thinking of exactly none of that when it was time to go to bed. On the mountain. In the dark. Where the temperature drops precipitously. My friend Kari lent me a fabulous sleeping bag that was rated for -20F weather. However, I could not generate enough body heat to keep the bag warm. About 0430, I opened my suitcase and put on every piece of clothing I brought at once, then went back to sleep.

By the time I came home, I knew that I loved camping, just not in that cold a temperature….. so maybe not on top of a mountain next time, eh? I also knew that I loved Dana in a best friend sort of way. We were inseparable after that, and not because we were actively trying to have an affair. Dana’s partner was a construction worker, so we gravitated toward each other when her partner was on the road for six weeks at a time. Neither one of us needed a girlfriend- Dana was already ridiculously happy and since I’d just been dumped, I was not in any shape to feel romantic towards anyone.

What I didn’t realize is that I wasn’t dating other people because showing up for each other made it where I didn’t need or want to hang out with anyone else. I was satisfied with the love of a good friend. That’s why we were best friends for three and a half years before anything happened. I would rather have emotional and intellectual stimulation, so if the choice was going to a restaurant to meet someone new that felt like a job interview, or playing “Drunken Trivial Pursuit” with my best friend, guess what’s going to win every single fucking time?

Dana and I did not gravitate towards each other because of anything shady. We just came to rely on each other more than anyone else, and it pulled the romance trigger in both of us. It was completely organic, but I do know it started on that trip. That’s because I honestly didn’t have any other friends at all. They’d dumped me because they didn’t see the bullshit through the notes, just inhaling all the music as is- leaving little brown spots on their noses……………

When your emotional abuser is a wonderful musician and locally a big deal, you can count on exactly zero people thinking that you’re telling the truth unless they sit down with your friends when you were 14 and she was 25. That’s the thing that would have blown their performance fleece back, but they didn’t have time to look critically at anything.

So I moved halfway across the country TWICE to try and get rid of that feeling. I wasn’t running FROM Portland so much as TO The District. I already had friends here in addition to Supergrover, so my moving here was never dependent on her. Because our relationship was virtual and planes exist, I have a feeling we would have been equally happy in different cities all these years because physical proximity has never mattered.

It hurts that I’m not laying on her couch right now instead of mine, because if I think about what could have happened, I delve into what actually did. It’s not pretty, even now. I just wish it was.

But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I know it’s my fault, and I don’t blame her. I just wish I could convince her that’s what I really think. I want peace for her just as much as I want peace for me. That just because I’m talking all this out doesn’t mean that I want to be shitty to anyone.

As I have learned through a Facebook meme, it is time to stop dividing myself into smaller, more manageable bites; in order to reach my full potential, I’m going to have to let some of you choke. The people who are left are my people. I am tired of making myself smaller.

Even though I felt as small as I ever have next to the beauty of Mt. St. Helen’s. It is not lost on me that I didn’t stay warm because of lack of blankets. I didn’t stay warm because I wasn’t generating my own heat.

If the last 15-20 years have taught me nothing, it’s that I should be.

This Needs Attention

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There needs to be an overhaul of #dailyprompt on WordPress, because not being able to use it cuts you off from the WordPress community. I got more exposure from #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x than I have from tagging anything else. That’s because you’re more likely to appear in people’s feeds because they have it- people have to go looking for things like “friendships,” “relationships,” and “CIA.” And now I’m really laughing hard because to a new reader, this must look horribly confusing and I think it’s better to just leave it.

If you only have dailyprompt-x for so many days, and then you just start reusing them, eventually, you can’t answer them anymore. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s an old prompt. I am never starting from the same place on a different day, especially with 365 days in between. It also reinforces using the Jetpack app, which I have noticed they like reminding you to use it a lot…… So make it easier, Matt (Mullenweg, owner of Automattic). It creates a habit, and literally the only habit I have. Now, I’m feeling a bit weird at committing to write every day and I somehow have to think of it myself? Like I’m a creative writer? This is bullshit.

I hope I’m kidding…………..

I have gotten so used to rolling over, picking up my tablet, and seeing what the prompt is- then taking a few minutes to think about it while I get myself together- and writing everything in one shot.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever gotten is that the prompt came out at midnight and by 12:30 AM I had a fully functioning essay ripping Evangelicals a new one; a reader said, “whoa. You are good at this.” How did he know I was good at it? Daily prompt tag.

I write a lot faster when I feel passionately about something, and a writing prompt doesn’t have to be followed strictly. You receive the idea, and whatever comes up, comes up. If the prompt is about a time in my life when I felt embarrassed and it was on a fishing trip so my ADHD brain jumps to everything I know about fish, it’s still valid because I was still prompted.

Today’s is “topics I’d like to discuss.”

And I’m all like, “this web site is always about me. What about them?”

I will talk to anyone about anything, but I like listening to subject matter experts. That’s why living in Washington is so important to me. One of the best nights I’ve ever had socializing in Silver Spring was stopping into a restaurant on a whim (All Set for some Sriracha Cheddar biscuits. If Red Lobster closes, Silver Spring is going to be okay). I started talking to the man next to me and he was president of the National Black Journalism Association. So, I got to hear about what he does and how he does it. Those are the conversations I treasure because I am all about self-improvement and learning from people who are better than me at what they do. I think that people think I’m obsessed with fame, but they don’t see Tim Ferris that way.

There’s a difference between wanting fame and wanting success.

Not only that, I’m not impressed by anyone, ever. I find that if I get impressed, I won’t speak at all. The inverse is also true. The more that you treat people like you’re impressed, the less they want to get to know you because you’re somehow weirdly obsessed with them. I got my own taste of that when I realized that I did not want to date a fan. Since I have mentioned that Supergrover started as a fan, I feel like I have to specifically say I’m not referring to her.

I went on a date with a woman who’d read me and she grilled me over the coals. It felt like one would feel when they show up to a party and get served because of the bait and switch. I will give you a for-instance. If I said on my blog that I was married three years ago, then why am I not married now? Fair. But it just kept getting deeper and deeper, like she was trying to catch me in a lie and there was some kind of “gotcha” somewhere. She didn’t do anything specifically wrong, per se. I’ll just never forget the feeling of being on the witness stand and not being able to give any right answers. If they didn’t match up exactly to what I’d written months ago, then I was a liar……. When time had gone by and I was in a different mindset and god knows what I was thinking while I was writing that day…….. You get my drift.

Blog entries are just a snapshot of my day, and you can see it in my feelings between entries, because some entries are diametrically opposed. To me it is a way of saying to the world “yes, she can be taught.” I don’t feel like I am now lying, I feel like someone is holding me to the past. My blog is helpful to me because I can see where I need to grow and adjust. It is not useful to have people around me that do not see it as a living document. Everything is being amended to reflect progress.

It’s also about accountability. I can’t go back and cover up my past, but I can read it to change my future. It’s scary to go back and look at what you’ve said in light of what it did and didn’t do for you, and that’s what happens when I go back and read an entry from even last year or the year before. It doesn’t take five years for things to change. It doesn’t even take one. The blog changes every single day not because I’m making things up, but because I make it my business to think about how I can improve my relationships and get clarity on my life.

However, I made a decision to paint myself as an unreliable narrator because I am. I have given you everything you need to know about why I am an unreliable narrator, and that mostly has to do with the fact that narration is unreliable in and of itself. It’s harder to take seriously when that person is documented as having mental health issues.

I am not trying to be anything I’m not. Interesting, yes. But an expert? No. I’m also still laughing about “who peer reviews you?” Because if there was a peer review for bloggers back in the day, it was all of us commenting on each other’s posts. People don’t comment now. They acknowledge. It’s the difference between Facebook and Reddit. Both have ways of one-tap recognition, but redittors are not known for being terse. Reading people’s writing on Reddit is sometimes better than reading a novel…… As long as you don’t mind looking through a lot of spam and porn to find actual intelligence. Reddit is the best of us because it’s the worst of us….. Just like we loved “The Real World” when it stopped being polite, and started getting real.

For instance, I posted on r/washingtondc about the beauty of Washington and how you should stop and take a look because it’s worth it, etc. Basically using lines I’ve used with you guys about DC before. All of the sudden, I had almost 300 upvotes along with a cacophony of where’s hiking? Where’s biking? What are you talking about?” People came out of the woodwork saying “here’s where to rent a boat,” here’s where to hike/bike, here’s the good lakes, etc.

And when you’re in r/washingtondc, you do not dare mention Virginia or Maryland. There are places to do all of these things inside the city if you are not expecting the Columbia River Gorge dumped into a major metropolitan area, which is what most of the people from Seattle seemed to be so fucking mad about. Like “Rock Creek Park is not hiking…. When I was a hiker…. :::dramatic flare:::

Sit your jack ass down.

I realize that this is not The Gorge, but Rock Creek Park does have good hiking, and I think that Great Falls is just as beautiful as anything I’ve seen on the West Coast. Just because it’s a little different doesn’t make it less divine. Sailing on the Chesapeake is just as spiritually satisfying as driving out The Gorge.

I’m blessed that I’ve gotten to live on all three coasts in the US, because I’ve lived in Houston/Galveston as well. I also know that I am an Oregonian, not a Californian. I am not that kind of “West Coast.” Portland is full of old white lesbians that nine times out of ten look something like Paul McCartney. I fit right in.

Oregonians and Californians have a tense relationship, because basically when California started becoming expensive, Portland became the new hot place to live. Oregonians are gatekeepers, most of whom think should have closed when they came in. I am guilty of a little bit of that because it made rent skyrocket dramatically. I lived in Portland when it was the right time for someone my age to do that, but I’m glad I left. It’s not just that I’m a different person, it’s that Portland is a different city. If I moved back, Portland would remind me of DC and not the other way around in terms of the way the city is more focused on business and industry, less on being the place where “young people go to retire.”

Maryland’s suburbs do not remind me of Oregon, but Virginia’s do. There are lots of pockets that look like Lake Oswego, Beaverton, etc. On the Maryland side, the population is too dense to spread out like that. Zac’s neighborhood is a perfect example of what we don’t do here in MD, because it’s a townhome community backed up to a nature preserve. It looks very much like many of the houses I visited in Oregon. It’s not a beauty contest to me. Both cities have a lot to offer, I just think Washington has more because of the transit infrastructure (I would be broke trying to get around Portland or Houston). I don’t wake up every day and think, “God, The District is gorgeous, but it’s not Oregon.”

I’m not always on Reddit.

Here’s my favorite quote so far:

That morning was when I began to invent my own personal version of shorthand, which I would continue to use throughout my career. It was so secure and so covert that even I couldn’t make out its meaning sometimes.

I gravitated toward her style in some ways because it’s reminiscent of mine. Or mine is reminiscent of hers, but I started writing before I started reading her books. So, chicken and egg debate on who sounds like whom. I know I sound like her when I write about intelligence because she’s my touchstone on how to do that. But as a general rule, both she and Tony write like me because their books and my blog are both memoirs. Mine is just written paragraphs at a time.

Memoirs are one-sided, always. People get very angry about them. Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Harry Wales are the three recent memoirs that have caused the most scandal, but all memoirs are written with one person’s story in mind- the writer’s. I keep memoirists in my head all day long because I only have a few people giving me blowback at any given time, not a nation or a kingdom.

I don’t think I could cause an international incident with my blog, but give it time……. Eyeroll.

If I could pick a writer that I would like to spend a day with, learning their secrets, it would be Vladimir Zelenskyy. I’ve thought he was brilliant since I saw “Servant of the People” on Netflix, so I know that we are kindred spirits. This is because he’s also interested in writing, comedy, political affairs, satire, etc. I believe I would need a translator, but if I were to meet Zelenskyy at all, I would FIND a translator. There’s got to be a Yellow Pages in this house somewhere, damn.

The other thing I learned this week that I’m going to have to tease Jonna about the next time I see her is that I’ve already found a typo. She called it “Silver Springs.” I kidded her that one day I’d write something as good as hers and she said, “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that.” Every time I hear her say it in my head, I fall over laughing. It was the right way to tease a writer…. Because I like talking to subject matter experts. It means a lot to me that we can joke about craft, and more importantly, I know that Jonna has lived in my little town.

The funniest gag in the first episode of “SOTP” for me was the newly elected president saying he needed to stop by the mall for a CD for his niece on the way to work because it’s her birthday. His staff offers to do it for him so he can get to work. He agrees and the scene ends.

Later, the secret service show up with the band, because as they explained, they could not find the CD.

And on that note, it’s time to go and make coffee…….. Because I just heard the pipes.

Gratitude Journaling

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just caught a dog rifling through my trash can, so I am not feeling particularly good about myself right now. I didn’t know that the dog was smart enough to open the trash can himself. I shouldn’t have doubted it, and I can’t get him to clean up the trash, either. So, I cleaned it up…. by myself…. again.

I’m not bagging on David, my housemate. I am bagging on Jack, who is a useless housekeeper. My coworker needs a visit with HR for a performance improvement plan. I don’t know how to keep a dog out of the trash except getting a different trash can or keeping the door closed all the time. I’d rather just train the dog, but again, Jack is very smart. You have to get right up in his face before he will even begin to think you have half a brain. So, we’ve been working on “sit,” “heel,” and “bring Mama a Diet Coke.” That last one was a joke that Heather Armstrong (Dooce) wrote about her dog, Chuck, the former Congressman.

I’m trying to keep Heather’s name alive because she’s a part of the zeitgeist, but no one has influenced the direction of this web site, because Supergrover and I both loved her once upon a time. It was the same for me- I fell out with reading her when she got on the influencer bandwagon, because like my beautiful girl I thought it lost something when Dooce stopped getting so real. There was no more Dooce (a typo she used to make while typing Dude), no more Asian Database Administrator (probably good she took that one out), no more dry humping and Sprite.

Sometimes I feel like Dooce is gone and I got the best of the best and you just got me. I keep trying, though. I’ve just realized that what I thought was Texas old guy is actually Utah blogger, apparently, and I know her writing well enough that she would be pleased by this. Unfortunately, I never got to meet her. We just ran in the same circles. If I had an hour with her, I’d ask her about blowback.

I’ll ask her about the friends she lost, and the friends who came to take their places. It’s something for which I’ll always be grateful, and I’m glad she came up in my mind while I was trying to say “I’m not in a very good mood, so I need to find things for which to be thankful.” I count blessings, every single one. It keeps me from thinking that I am failing all the time, because I recognize when I have a win.

I continue to be thankful for my house, and even Jack. He continues to be “my dog,” and he’s as lovable as every dog ever. If he’s ever missing, I know he’s in my bed as far under the covers as he can go. He’s shaved almost to the skin right now; when the wind is blowing in from the windows he shivers. It’s how I like it, because it’ll be 55F outside, but I’ve got a sheet, a blanket, and two comforters on top. I think I’ll be okay.

At the same time, when I take sleeping pills my body temperature goes way up, and having the windows open keeps me from sweating because of them. There have been a few days, though, where I woke up and thought I lost three pounds because I’d shake the blankets off, it would be too cold, then I’d pull them all back…. All night. It was glorious, let me tell you.

I’m grateful for a comfortable place to sleep, and a room with so many new possibilities. Neither my lamp nor my shelf with a light came with light bulbs, so I ordered some retro LEDs. They look like they’re from the early 1900s. I have a floor lamp without a shade, which is why I thought it would be nice with the bulb exposed to go decorative. I am hoping that I will have enough light, because each bulb is 60w. I wanted higher than that, but I couldn’t find any yellow bulbs that came in 75w or 100. I do not like the bulbs where they take all the yellow out and it leaves a slightly blue glow on everything. I do use 100w white bulbs in my bathroom because I want to get dressed in the most unflattering light possible. That way, when I get myself fixed up, I will look better when I leave the house. It’s good to have goals, anyway. 😉

I’m grateful I have a bathtub again. Hayat replaced our bathtub with a stand up shower long ago, so it’s nice to be able to sit and relax when I want. I liked the stand-up shower, too. I’m not knocking it. I just had trouble shaving because I am terrible at balance. It’s not that one was bad, it’s just that with a bathtub I can also sit in lavender and eucalyptus salts.

I’m grateful to still have a garden. David is the gardener, I’m just the enjoyer. I’m going to have to put some lavender out for me, because I’ve talked many times about talking to the bees. It’s real. I don’t mean that they can hear me, necessarily, but that it does make you feel better to talk to them.

I’m grateful for DC. There are limitless possibilities for beauty here. There’s kayaking, biking, hiking, sailing- basically everything I could do in Portland is also right here. The two cities mirror each other in lots of ways when it comes to layout. That’s because people in DC do not think of Arlington as the same city, but if you look at it from the sky, it looks the same as Portland being divided by the river north to south and Burnside east to west. We are a bridge city, and I can’t wait for Bryn to see it from the air. The only real difference is that when you land at National, there’s not a long airstrip parallel to the river. If the pilots at National can’t stop in time, they’ll fall into the Potomac.

Seem to remember something about that in the news when I was a child.

Zac says he has never met a person that loves this area as much as I do. Zac has never left and come back for any real length of time. I wonder how it would look different to him if he’d lived here in his early 20’s and then traveled all over. I missed the Potomac because the Willamette is always cold. Always. I cannot remember a 4th of July in which I was not absolutely freezing my ass off. I once drove with a housemate up to Mt. Hood for lunch (we weren’t skiing that day) and it started as we were driving home. It was June 27th. DC is the beauty of a city with a river running through it that is also not 54F and raining 280 days a year. I love Portland a whole lot, and I would move back if I had to do so. It’s just not my first choice for a number of reasons, and the weather is at the top.

The only pro here would be getting to live in the same city as my best friend, because the position has been filled- end of story. That being said, occasional video calls and visits are fine. I do not have a need for Bryn to move here or me to move there. If so, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I just can’t think of a good reason all our time needs to be in person.

There are moments, of course. You don’t move to your partner’s or your best friend’s city because something is happening. You move there to be available if it does. That’s because even now when something is going on with Bryn, I can’t help but want to jump on a plane. Therefore, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more surprised than when she said she was jumping on a plane to get to me. It’s getting so exciting thinking about her visit, and it’s already the 25th. So, not many more sleeps. I’m grateful.

I’m grateful that both Bryn and Dave want to see SPY so it doesn’t feel like I’m strong-arming them into going there on my account. I live here. I can go any time I want (and do). We haven’t decided what we’re going to do all days, and I know they’ll probably also want time to themselves. We just need to talk about dates so that I can send Zac an invitation. I live and die by Google Calendar.

Zac’s acceptance is not mandatory, I just want him to know he’s included in the fun and he’s said that he does want to meet Bryn. So, now Zac will have met one friend I met in high school and one I met my freshman year of college. I’m glad I can bridge those gaps in time, and it makes me happy that Zac is going to learn just so many “Borum-isms.”

I am grateful for “Borum-isms.” It’s a specific cadence, and I will pick it up instantly because it’s not based on accent but rhythm. Bryn’s dad said something so incredibly profound that I’ve remembered it for over 20 years…. “the hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.”

Bryn also reminds me of Arya Stark, and I don’t have to squint. But by that I mean she is take charge alpha dog all the time, which means that she is strong and firm, but also the most loving person in the room because the alpha’s job is to manage the whole pack by seeing their needs and helping them……. serving, not owning……. as opposed to whatever the fucktard morons think it is this week.

In some ways, I’m grateful for guys like that because it reminds me of Roy Wood, Jr. who said that he appreciated businesses with the confederate flag outside because then at least you had a tip it wasn’t going to go well for you. If someone is advertising on the internet that they want a “tradwife,” they probably mean that they want someone who will take all their bullying all the time and call it Biblical. Therefore, there’s no confederate flag, but there’s a big waving red one.

I’m grateful for the ability to see red flags and work on them. I see them in myself by rereading my work. Throwing words on a page and seeing what they look like once they’re outside you gives you enough separation to say “ok, that’s good…. but that’s bad.” Not the writing, the way I behaved.

I am working to find peace within myself, so don’t think I don’t notice when I’m angry and figure out a way to resolve it in myself. I think I have. My tone is completely different than it was a year ago. A lot of it has to do with Supergrover finally telling me what she really wanted. She wants peace and rest, I assume for both of us. Maybe one day our paths will cross again, but I doubt it. I require something she does not have, which created the initial attraction to each other in terms of energy. This is because she has something I don’t, which is pragmatism and logic. In some ways, our personalities are exactly alike. In others, they are diametrically opposed.

But leaning in through all of that made me who I am today, and I’m more confident in myself as a result, and grateful I ever got to meet her at all. I am so angry that what she chooses to highlight in our relationship is all the negativity and not our incredible potential for joy. Maybe she already has these things with everyone else but me, and it’s because I’m a shitty friend that I don’t have these things with her and I’m whistling Dixie because no one else ever has a problem……. I would tell her the same thing I told her when she said she was giving up Diet Coke. “Yeah. Uh huh. Keep talkin,’ sweetheart.” No, wait. It wasn’t about Diet Coke. That was another day. And now I’m laughing my ass off, but that joke is above your pay grade.

I think the thing that makes her spit nails is that I’m right. What I realized through my mistakes is that I didn’t have to sit in them just because I’d made a long time making them. That my history with her meant a lot, but not at the expense of my own health and happiness. It’s not because I wouldn’t have done it. It’s because I expected her to pull her weight. I would have done anything for her, but I realized that she didn’t feel that way about me, and it was stupid to think that, in retrospect. I did not feel that way every single day. I recognized her hurt and talked about what happened often, but she never took the bait and opened up to me so that I could better understand her. I thought, “I am going to end up giving her absolutely everything I have and she’s not going to notice in the slightest.” I’d listened to the whispers and the screams long enough.

I’ve said this before, but I did not get angry that she was also angry. I was furious because she refused to tell me anything that gave me any headway. All I could do was talk about myself when it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I also didn’t always want to talk about her, as if I was mining her for information. I wanted an easy give and take, the strength and comfort of someone I’d known for a very long time.

There was every reason to stay except having a feeling of safety and security when we talked, because it was missing for a very long time. Any attempt to lighten the load was wrong, so I didn’t get tired of her. I got tired of how I felt about myself. She says I’m “a lot.” She has never really grasped that she’s a lot. That for everything she’d like to change about me, there’s something I’d like to change about her. What I cannot get her to see is “this is me. Take it or leave it.” And that’s what we’ve both been trying to say to each other for years, mostly at the top of our metaphorical lungs. I have found that it is much more fun to fly with a dragon than to be touched by its fire.

I’ve thought for many years that if I did ever see her face to face, that I would go mute. That she’s the only person I know where that would happen. It’s not that I am not interested in talking, it’s that I would be completely overwhelmed before the conversation began. But I know us. We both know how to make each other laugh. After a few minutes, it wouldn’t be weird. One of us would say something to break the tension, and the spell would be broken. This person that we’ve each built up in our heads will be gone, and it will seem like we’ve never met.

Here is something I also know. I will never know how much of my e-mails she’s taken in until I hear her talking around other people, because I know what I’ve written. I would know when she was quoting me and when she wasn’t, and I would never say a thing. It wouldn’t mean as much to her as it would to me.

I do know that if we were at the same party, one of two things would happen. The first is that I’d be telling a story and get a detail wrong, and from across the room I’d hear, “THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED. This is how it happened…..” The second would be her seeing someone else mistreating me because despite how she feels about me at any given moment I know she’d eat off their legs.

What I mean about getting a detail wrong is that all of the sudden she becomes very, very familiar with absolutely everything I’ve ever said when she is irritated. When she’s irritated, she quotes me back to me. How much she’s irked is inversely proportional to my joy at watching her quote me, because the more angry she is, the more likely she is to do it. I don’t do anything to irk her on purpose, I’m just saying that after a fight, when I feel calmer I go back and reread everything. I notice style, structure, all of it. Even when I’m devastated, I still find beauty in hearing from her at all because I rip her off mercilessly. Without my e-mail history, I am so much dumber, I promise you. I hope that in some ways she feels the same, because my dexterity helped her when her own words failed her. It’s something I hope she knows, really- that wherever she is in the world, my heart is with her. That’s because everywhere I go, her heart is with me.

So, even if she was trying to avoid me at a party, she’d never make it. We don’t have any mutual friends so far, and I’m not interested in making them…. mostly to protect the innocent.

I also know that no matter what, as long as I don’t start going with the crowd, she’ll still be in my audience. I know that when she told me that Dooce sucked now and she wasn’t going to read anymore and I told her it was her job to tell me when I should retire because she could just re-send that e-mail.

Come to think of it, that’s what would happen at a party. She’d hear me use a joke or two I’ve told in front of her and then we’d be picking up the end of each other’s sentences because we’ve both heard them before.

We could also have a lot of inside jokes that other people wouldn’t get, but we’d be falling out. For instance, me being the president of Overthinker’s Anonymous not because I am smarter, but because president is a public-facing office.

I think part of me hoped she would join Lanagan Media Group, because she would be great at both writing and podcasting if she had the bandwidth. She told me that she was always looking for what to do in her next career, and I think part of me hoped she would say “writer,” but I didn’t push. I got her stuff to help her in her own direction. She’s talked about writing before, but in a faraway sort of way. The bits of her story I’ve gotten to write because our lives overlapped are unique and beautiful. I know she thought it was unique. One out of two ain’t bad.

I feel like the way autism logic works, people think you’re much more negative than you mean to be because neurotypical brains are used to hearing things in a certain way. There are patterns to neurotypical speech that contain social cues. Autistic people can imitate them, but they cannot understand them. However, not being able to pick up social cues is only one of the criteria for autism. You do not have to have every single one to “prove” you’re autistic. For me, it’s a mixed bag. I do not recognize social cues in a person based on what they are thinking, but from the millions of faces I’ve seen before that looked exactly like that when X…… or when my parents described people’s emotions to me without meaning to…… I started understanding speech very, very early. Therefore, I have overheard things and ruminated on them for years before I understood them. But it’s because I’ve ruminated that I have accurate heuristics for the most part.

It’s easier to social mask when you’re hearing phone calls regarding pastoral care, because if you’re the pastor’s kid, you’re learning how to talk to people while they’re upset…… and mostly at each other. For instance, people who need marriage counseling, etc. But of course there’s a lot of people angry with you, too. Mostly over the things you’ve said.

Being a creative is being a creative. Preaching and writing are two separate skills, but they are two ways of expressing the same ideas. With me, it’s readers who don’t come back. For pastors, it’s church members who inexplicably disappear. Therefore, I am used to an ebb and flow in size and don’t get wigged about stats. I check them, but I don’t focus on them. The only stat I really like is how many flags I got that day. I like how far my site goes. This week, the leaderboard has been Africa- hello to South Africa and Ghana.

OH! South Africa!

Speaking of which, I started watching this YouTube channel called “Flipping Johannesburg,” and it’s incredible. It’s tempting to move to South Africa in some ways because land and resources are so cheap. I could build my own house or purchase one in disrepair so that I could have more land for cheap and more room to overhaul. The last house I watched on “FJ” was 800,00R, which is about $40,000. It was a U-shape with everything from a garage to staff quarters to a huge pool in the middle. I am certain that it took a lot of work to get it where it is today, and also a lot more Rand. Because of this, I am grateful that when I cannot go to South Africa, Flipping Johannesburg brings it to me.

And finally, I am grateful for Zac. He and Oliver, who is a dog, have made me feel more at home. It’s so much fun to have two hiking buddies. It’s nice to have someone to hold onto when I walk. It’s exciting to see him when his car (Antimony) comes over the hill to the Kiss and Ride. Yes, that’s really what they call the place where you pick up and drop off.

If he gets there first, he’ll park. If I get there first, he barely has to slow down and I’m on his way home, anyway. It makes me feel good that he’s relatively close to the Metro so it’s not a big imposition to drive me around. He also knows that all he has to do is say “I’m busy” and I’ll Uber. He does it just to be sweet to me and I appreciate little things. Like, how it is problem to worry how I’ll get around? It was Sam’s whole deal, too, except that Zac (for some disastrous reason) thinks that I am a fully functioning adult and doesn’t have an issue with saying “God, I’m slammed. Meet me at my house.” Therefore, Sam never got to see that I’m a perfectly capable adult. She drove me around and sulked about it because she offered and then regretted it. So, of course the easy thing to do would be to stop offering to drive me around so that I don’t have the choice to say yes or no. Because I can feel energy very well and if you resent that you have to come get me, I’ll know it. I feel it like a scar on my skin.

I would only need a car if I moved from the DMV metro area and out into Virginia or to the eastern shore. With a combination of bus, train, and/or Uber I can get anywhere. I just need a little bit more notice. This is great because if you call me and say you want to do something short notice, I probably won’t want to do it, anyway. I am bad at transitions and like to have my calendar planned out in advance.

Therefore, I am limited to staying in the city because I don’t want to lose excellent transit without a car payment and insurance. A car is just another place for me to let stuff accumulate. I’m not sure I used my car for much more than a high speed crap wagon.

“High Speed Crap Wagon” is my new band name.

I’m grateful.

Write Til it Hurts, Then Write Til You Feel Better

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My jumping off point today is this phrase, because it’s a play on something I heard at a lot at church- “give til it hurts, then give til you feel better.” It was our way of making fun of Evangelicals, yet let’s be clear. This is a church that I went to as an adult. Not that my dad and I didn’t joke about things we’d heard and seen….

For instance, one of my favorite stories about my parents when they were young is that my mom was having dental work done and she was all laid out with the bib. My dad walked in and said, “my. Don’t she look natural?” That’s what people say when they see the body at the funeral home. My dad is often funnier than I am, and I am often funnier than he is. It’s a give and take. Although I like it better when he calls me “Chief” than “you go, girl.” I am not in charge of anything, so it may not seem all that flattering. But I’m young (all things being relative), so perhaps I am just “not living up to my full potential,” which is not something he said but is said by every teacher ever who doesn’t know that kid is neurodivergent. That’s why gifted & talented classes are mostly filled with depressed, anxious teenagers.

We are so goddamn smart that it doesn’t make sense we’re so dumb. That’s because we’re not dumb. We:

  • Have demand avoidance, even down to taking a shower. Urging yourself to do things and not being able to accomplish them leads to guilt.
  • Guilt over having demand avoidance.
  • Shame over demand avoidance
  • Getting overwhelmed to the point of nausea
  • Hitting the limit to which we can be stimulated, leading to anger at ourselves and lashing out at others, or alternatively becoming non-verbal
  • Guilt over meltdown
  • Shame over meltdown
  • Go into burnout, which generally means sensory deprivation to reset, and the length of time varies for all autistic people
  • Lather, rinse, repeat all day long with every demand or decision all day long

When you are as smart as I am, along with all the other people with low needs/high IQ, you can see every side to every story. You are not limited to black and white, but all the colors in the spectrum. When everything becomes grey area with no solid base, you drift. You get overwhelmed, and go into a world of your own.

For me, that’s intelligence. I wouldn’t have a million dollars worth of trains in my basement, but I’d have a first edition Le Carre signed “David Cornwell.”

Speaking of which, yesterday autocorrect made me misspell both Jodi Picoult and change “Jennifer Finney Boylan” to “Jennifer Finney Boyle.” I guess I’ll need to go through my Android tablet and turn off spelling and grammar. I do that a lot, because I don’t misspell much and autocorrect doesn’t know everything- like poetic license, plays on words, acronyms, people’s last names, and thinking it knows better than me that it’s “utopian ideal” and not “utopia ideal.” Little things like that drive me up the wall, and it’s worse in voice dictation because Apple thinks it fucking knows where punctuation goes and it drives me up the wall and back down again. I want to throw my phone against a rock for making sentences look like this:

Rebecca, when are, we, going, to Starbucks?

Going back to correct all that is a nightmare, but I use voice dictation when I don’t have a keyboard because typing on my phone is hard as shit for me. It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I hate it so much. All phone companies lost me when they got rid of thumb boards and slide out keyboards.

It’s why I use my phone a quarter of never. I don’t like to call people, and I don’t like to type on my phone. Therefore, I use my iPad or my Android tablet for nearly everything. That’s because I like the bigger real estate for calls, anyway. If I’m calling, it might as well be a video call because I know I’m not going to see you very often, etc.

Therefore, I really only use my phone for voice calls. If I decide to walk somewhere, I leave my phone at home and connect my headphones to my watch. The middle man carries very little value except that I have to have it on to unlock all the features on my watch. However, it’s a fully functioning “dumb phone.” If I had money, I’d upgrade my watch before I ever bothered with my phone, or replace my older iPad with a newer one because it can do everything except control my watch (emphatic fist shake). However, for what I do, I do not need to upgrade any of my technology. I do three or four things and none of them are mobile gaming. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what chip and graphics card the motherboard on the tablet has, it just has to be adequate.

I have Microsoft Office, AndrOffice (Android port of LibreOffice- a full desktop application for you other writers in the crowd. I find it easier to use a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for it.), a web browser, a basic photo editor, and JetPack. So far, I’ve been able to upgrade to every version, so my hardware can’t be that old.

I also watch movies, but that needs a better network connection than anything else. I’m not picky about the picture, but some people are. Those are the people that should buy high end tablets, because you’ll end up sitting in bed with it vs. watching TV, especially with headphones while your partner is sleeping (I have never needed to do this with Zac, but it’s possible, just like connecting Bluetooth headphones to your Kindle to listen to audiobooks.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again as writer’s advice.

We all make notes in our books. Having a Bluetooth keyboard connected to my Kindle makes it where I can use my notes later and sync them with Goodreads. You can choose whether your highlights are available to the public, so lock it down and it’s a private, free repository of your highlights and the notes you put with them. That way, if something happens to your Kindle, you still have everything and you don’t lose months of work. I also used my Kindle quite extensively when I reviewed books professionally (putting that out there because people often offer me books for free with a gift certificate so I have a verified sale to review.

I have liked most of them.

However, I’m not a harsh reviewer because I am so precise with language that I can make a bad review sound like a good one. That is because I want to say what I liked and didn’t about their books without hurting their feelings.

Of everything I read, I liked “Pancake Money” and “Dead Lemons” by Finn Bell the most.

Some of the others were downright drudgery.

“What would you say to universities about stifling writers?”

“In my opinion they don’t stifle enough.” (Flannery O’Connor)

This being said, you don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, either. They gave you their baby for free. It is something that they’ve birthed over a tremendous amount of time. A lot of care went into it just to get to the finish line. I was crushed when Supergrover thought I was dismissive of her writing when the only piece of advice I gave her was “come on, SG! I know you have more than that in you.” She doesn’t dive as deep as she can. However, she can turn a phrase when she’s in her element, and she’s not often in her element. I’m not sure there’s really a place she calls home in her soul, and I don’t mean anything derogatory by it. I mean that she doesn’t dig as far as she can go, but if she did dig as deep as me it would be the best book you’ve ever read in your life.

I know because I’ve read it. I know the parts of her that she’ll share, but she’s not often in a place to take those things and dig deep on them. She’s pressed for time all the time, and introspection is really hard work. REALLY hard work. However, I have never said she was a bad writer. If it were true, I wouldn’t have basically memorized everything she’s ever said to me- both the good and the bad. I have been furious by some letters and angered by others. We are not so different, we just choose to act like it. It’s devastating to an enormous degree, because if she read my entries from the standpoint of counting up how many phrases that are hers hidden here. And now my keyboard has decided that the “Enter” key is the only one that doesn’t work. I have no idea what is causing this, because it just drops and reconnecting doesn’t help. Maybe you’ll get more later, because I’m not really feeling the whole “writing session is over” thing. I am feeling disappointed and frustrated that I can’t keep writing right now. I should save that feeling for writer’s block. “What if I wasn’t permitted to write?” It goes a very long way. I could make it all one paragraph, but Chason told me that short paragraphs are easier to read on the web. I try to be mindful, because he does web design for a living. This is not one of those days, apparently. So, anyway, I quote her all the time from her e-mails and her other writing. She said I dismissed her when I, unlike President Clinton, inhaled.

Just Me and the Boys

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

People who have known me my whole life have seen me in makeup and heels, with curled bangs and either waved or crimped hair (really). My hair is very thick and stick straight. Without a waver, I would have had no body in my hair at all. Now, I keep it short so I don’t have to worry about “body” to make it look good. So, you see, my hair has never been a part of my feminine identity. I just wanted to wear what A) I thought looked good B) fit into the category of not really showing my body in any way.

I am not a prude, I am autistic and want cloth to make me feel secure and help me move better (my cerebral palsy/hypotonia/lack of 3D vision are also tied to autism). Therefore, I am usually wearing trousers as opposed to shorts, and if I’m not wearing a long sleeved shirt, it has to get really damn hot before I’ll even think of taking off my hoodie.

Bryn and Dave coming to visit is a perfect example. Since we’ll be going to museums, that means jeans and a t-shirt with a hoodie or a jacket. That’s because it might be cool outside, but it will definitely be cold in the air conditioning. They want to go to SPY, and when Bryn told me that, I said, “the SPY museum? I’m not familiar.” For new readers, they should just count out the middle man and give me an apartment out back.

The last time I went, I got a long-sleeved boys’ t-shirt (size large fits so perfectly on me because the shoulders look tailored to my frame and the sleeves don’t go over my hands). It’s navy and has three stripes across the front with a spy in a hat carrying a briefcase is running through it, as well as International Spy Museum stacked on the stripes. It’s one of the coolest shirts I’ve ever seen, and says “Washington, DC” down the sleeve. The only thing it doesn’t have is the official logo of the museum on the sleeve, and personally, that’s what makes it for me.

When I first moved here, the spy museum was on F Street (now it’s at L’Enfant Plaza) and I loved it because of the Shake Shack across the street. It was also more intimate.

Here’s the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to me at the museum which makes for hilarity later:

So, at the Spy Museum, the introduction has changed. On F Street, you walked in and there were plaques with all these different covers on them. You had to choose one and use it throughout the whole walkthrough. What they did not say is that it is sort of a computer based training sort of thing, where you have to remember the details of what you’ve heard and answer questions about them.

I’m lightly panicking because I am only a tiny bit known for my acting ability and I wouldn’t know the first thing about magic (that’s how Tony and Jonna pulled off their tricks- using the same concept as you would use on stage, and in an intelligence officer’s case, their stage is their area of operations).

I decide that because of my frame, my best shot at this is an 18-year-old male from Britain called Colin.

So there I am, walking around like a jackass…… I’m trying to figure out an accent, mannerisms, walk, the whole nine yards.

Then, I got inside the museum and therefore the first computer, and I nearly fell on the floor laughing.

That was the day I bought a t-shirt that said “Argo @#$% Yourself” in black with the museum logo on the sleeve. Then, years later, I got a picture of him wearing the same shirt from Jonna and it made my year because he’d already passed and I wondered if he even knew about them.

Later, I learned that he and Jonna were on the board of the museum, so I’m pretty sure he knew about them.

God, I hope that they make more Mendez movies. I would love for Hollywood to make a mashup of “The Moscow Rules” and “In True Face.” That’s because since “Argo” won best picture, that story has already been told. The ones during The Cold War have not. I assume that Hollywood will get it together.

Rule #1

Assume nothing.

Rule following gets you nowhere in my line of work. In the world of “go big or go home,” this is the only place I feel truly comfortable doing so, because it’s such a part of me. I’m not very physically capable, but I can throw together a sentence or two. I love that other people love my candor and honesty because it shows me every day that I do not have to please anyone. People will show up every day to hear what I say no matter what it is.

That being said, they will always have to come to me. I am not Shonda Rimes.

:::stares in Grey’s Anatomy:::

“It’s an American tendency to ruin things a little bit so we can have more of it.” -The Good Place re: ice cream vs. frozen yogurt

I am strong enough to take massive criticism by ignoring it. That’s because for every person that says my writing is terrible, there’s one who thinks I’m the best blogger they’ve ever read. Or, in this day and age, they think long form Internet posts are new because they’re too young to remember 2001, which is when I started my old blog, “Clever Title Goes Here.” I sometimes wonder if I’d have done better staying under the same name, but now that it’s been 12 or 13 years since I tanked Clever Title at my own hand, I’ve gotten back any potential “customers” I lost. My web stats aren’t enormous, but they aren’t small, either. I have to compare my audience to congregation size, because then a small number of people looks ENORMOUS.

Today, I had web stats on my post a minute and a half after I published it, and a like three and a half minutes later. That means someone is reading me AS SOON as the entry comes out. And then, my watch buzzes all afternoon because JetPack doesn’t tell you every time someone visits, but every time someone notices you inside the WordPress community. Therefore, an astounding number of my readers are people who are writers just like me.

Including, apparently, my boyfriend….. Who didn’t tell me he had a blog until we’d been dating a year. A year. A YEAR, people. It’s been the most helpful thing I’ve ever experienced, being written about rather than writing about someone else. I don’t have to cut off any one of my limbs to see Zac’s blog entries about me, he’ll link to me and I’ll get what’s called a “ping back.”

Because I got a ping back instead of a note from Zac that he’d answered my daily prompt entries with one of his own, I thought I was meeting this great new local blogger, and my friends will think I had as big a “dumbass attack” as I actually did when I didn’t know his userid….. MrWould.

Speaking of which, Zac is not a super fan. He surfs and reads me occasionally, but we don’t obsessively read each other’s writing. It feeds me because I actually get to tell him about my life and add more detail than I can here because we have more modes of communication- like talking. Sometimes I forget that I actually do need to see people’s eyes… Or in the case of a video chat, their legs. 😉 If you haven’t seen them stand up in three years, it’s been too long since you’ve seen ’em.

There’s a lot to be said in a hug that can’t be voiced, and I need to remember it. Keep it. Write it down.

I just did, but I hear a particular voice in my head when I type it. Supergrover and I have a favorite “influencer” on Instagram, so when I heard the voice in my head, I thought of SG! and laughed.

Ah, where were we? (When I think of her personality, I go a little starry-eyed…..)

My audience size is not influencer size, but that has less to do with my talent and more to do with the fact that less people are willing to read long entries at all. I had a guy in r/washingtondc ask me “do people still have blogs?” This is why Jaz called me “prehistoric,” I guess.

I am, however, known. People who have much stronger voices than me have liked things I said. My favorite so far has been “Picoult, that line slayed. I’m stealing it.” The heart was worth its weight in gold, because she was my mother’s favorite author in the whole entire world.

We were also both watching the first trans woman we’d ever seen on Oprah Winfrey, and I told her she hadn’t aged a day since then (I think her autobiography was published in either the late 90s or early 200s) and what was her secret? She said, “moisturize.”

That trans woman was Jennifer Finney Boyle, co=author with Jodie Picoult on the novel “Mad Honey.”

I’ve met Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Jonna Mendez. Therefore, I have met my top three favorite authors so far, and I hope to continue meeting them as I acquire good books. There are some I need to get on it faster than others………. I learned that lesson hardcore when I got to DC just as Tony Mendez stopped doing public appearances because of the Parkinson’s. I missed him by mere months.

There are just so many reasons I wish both Dana and I had been here before 2015. That being said, I would not have wanted to wait any longer to see that we were capable of physical violence when we were both melting down, because then I could say honestly that we were not good for each other without putting blame on either one of us. Neither one of us are all bad or all good. There had been a storm brewing for quite some time at that point, and I believe that the only reason we didn’t survive is that we didn’t listen to ourselves whisper, so we listened to ourselves scream.

If you ignore a problem, you think it goes away and it doesn’t. It accrues interest in a bank account you can’t access because you won’t. No one wants to go through the pain of introspection- not even me. It is truly a feeling of “Feel the Fear, and Do It, Anyway” (Susan Jeffers’ groundbreaking book). This is because the more I explore the internal mechanisms of my brain, the more I feel comfortable in my own skin. My bullshit detector has grown in full force, because I have found my own north star and internal compass. Sometimes, it’s devastatingly wrong, but it’s still my compass as opposed to trying to earn someone else’s or give mine away.

My goal is a movie deal based on my novel, and I think I can pull it off if I work very hard. But it is not time for writing fiction yet in terms of a work in progress. That is because I don’t have all the main story points worked out. I don’t have to work out highlights, but transitions. Where the peaks and valleys are, because I’m writing about war. I have to learn the ins and outs of what means victory and what means defeat. That’s because I don’t know whether the book will end with an L or a W. For instance, a country that wins a war but is bombed within every square inch doesn’t feel like a win to them once the real work of rebuilding sets in. Yet no one ever seems to remember how much work goes into rebuilding something and think, “maybe we shouldn’t blow things up.” I know that war is diplomacy through other means, but it seems like people could try a little harder than “obviously, we cannot reach a conclusion so let’s just start killing each other; whoever gets the most shots in is the winter.”

We can’t all be Elizabeth McCord.

So, in my quest for world peace, I am also thinking about scaling. I cannot go from not knowing how to write fiction at all to producing a book quickly. I am soaking up master classes from everyone I can find. Brandon Sanderson put his whole semester of “Intro to Science Fiction” at BYU on YouTube. There are lots of others, but so far, this playlist is my favorite.

Brandon actually says in the first lecture that this is not just for science fiction writers. He’s going to throw everything at us and we can take it or leave it, from plot, setting, and character to getting it sold.

Zac is also a good resource in this because he submits fiction to contests. On one of them, I was in the writer’s room. “We” got some good feedback. I didn’t help write the whole story, but offered suggestions he took and it made me feel like a million dollars.

I am so rich you wouldn’t believe it if words of assurance could be legal tender. I have so many friends across the world……………….

And also you. 😂😂😂

Kidding, kidding.

This has been a marvelous tangent (realizing what irritates me about Tolkien- I am in this picture and I do not like it. #unsubscribe #block #report), The point was supposed to be about my being nonbinary, and I went from clothes into sensory issues to God knows what and here we are, back at the place where we started.

I wear boys’ clothes, yet comfortable with my femininity. People have expressed this to me in a variety of ways, most of them unprintable. A taste of this would be “you look like a boy, but you….” I’ll let your mind finish that sentence because this is not a family show and you know that already.

My point is that when I started really trying to examine my gender, I realized I saw it on me, but not within me. That how much of each gender I feel might show up in my clothes, accessories, etc. but I have no official attachment to either.

I am very aware that I sound male on the Internet and I use it effectively by saying things a woman would say “in a man’s voice” online. More men pay attention to me that way, and I do not mean that I am inviting male attention. I mean that I have both sets of social masking and I flip from one to the other depending on who is with me. When I am alone, I am stereotypically male. You can see it in my tone even in this entry. My brain is mostly male. I just don’t have any attachment to the male or female body, which is why I am not trans or cis. I feel like it’s a good place to be, because if I had to have a double mastectomy, I would be relieved. All of the sudden, my shirts would hang right. I don’t mean I am unhappy in my body, I am saying that it doesn’t matter what gender I look like because it’s not really a part of my reality.

So much of gender expression is automated by society…. But do people really sit there and think about the fact that they’re cis all the time? I would think it wouldn’t come up unless it was a question people genuinely needed to ask themselves. What cis people don’t understand is that they don’t have to understand. They just have to treat nonbinary and trans as a non-issue. As a redditor posted, “I don’t know French, either, but I respect it exists.” Just because you don’t know something doesn’t make it invalid. The people making it invalid are people who don’t know Jack or shit about gender because they never had to doubt it.

I know I sound like every computer geek who’s ever lived….. And most of them are male. Therefore, I have social masked men my entire career. I also like the Texas old guy patois, and I slip into it easily online because I slip into that patois when I’m not speaking vocally.

I don’t like my voice, so therefore I don’t phrase things like a woman very often. For some reason, hearing the pitch of my own voice makes me act more like a woman than I feel in my head.

Social masking.

My voice is also higher in a recording than I would like it to be, and eschew that, too…… Unless the notes are already high and I need the help.

It always sounds better in the room than on a recording when I sing, because when I’m on a recording, you’re not taking in my emotions. I have a lot of emotions, even in Latin.

I actively run away from my voice because it’s a trap. I don’t sound the way I want to sound, and I don’t want to lose my top range, either. I often think I would think about my childhood a lot less if my voice was deeper, and only the people that were there would understand that tone matters, that dropping an octave makes the note feel so much further away…. Not so extremely loud and incredibly close.

I need a breath after that paragraph.

In this case, it actually would help to be able to cry out from the deep instead of the waves. I got very, very, very lucky that the chord ever resolved at all. Otherwise, I would have been a lovesick teenager chasing after someone who didn’t want me.

Which is what I think about, when it’s just me and the boys.

I Have Absolutely No Idea What to Say Today

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Despite my best intentions, today may be a “show about nothing.” That’s basically all I know about Seinfeld because I wasn’t a fan back in the day. I don’t remember a lot of what I watched in high school except “Animaniacs” and “Jeopardy!” At that age, I was usually sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my headphones on trying to be Miles Davis. I assure you that I always thought I sounded better when I was alone, because I wasn’t focusing on pleasing the crowd and making a show go well.

I do remember the highlights. I was more happy that I impressed Doc than impressing a crowd, because I did a solo in “Come Rain or Come Shine” and Doc’s response was “Leslie Lanagan! 9th Grade, ladies and gentlemen. NINTH GRADE.” I was also the soloist on a local Houston TV show called “Black Voices” (yes. Really. But it wasn’t because Summer Jazz Workshop was all white. It’s because I beat out everyone else. I got that solo from Konrad Johnson, director of one of the most famous jazz bands in  the nation- Kashmere High School. I’ve mentioned this before, but Kashmere got a chart on the soundtrack to “Baby Driver,” and Konrad, who has now passed, is memorialized in a bigger way than just locally in Houston.

When a black jazz director picks the white boy for a solo on a television show called “Black Voices,” it means the fucking world. I have rarely felt more “I’m on top of the world” than that. It’s also really funny in retrospect.

If I had to describe my sound, it’s very much like Wynton Marsalis. This is because he’s who I studied the most closely to learn both jazz and classical. Let me tell you about the time I met Wynton. I walked right up to him and said, “Wynton, I’ve waited my whole life to meet you.” It’s funny because I was 15 and also true. I’ve been listening to Wynton since I was in the womb because my dad is also a trumpet player. You can see him most weeks on the Second Baptist broadcast in Houston, or streaming over the Internet.

My dad’s claim to fame is that when he was in high school, he went to the 50 yard line and played “The Star Strangled Banana” all by himself instead of having a singer and accompaniment. I have no doubt that it was absolutely gorgeous, because I inherited his “elements of style.”

Speaking of which, a bookstore worker was talking on Reddit about how this person came in and said she needed a book for her daughter, who was a writer. It was by “shrunken white,” and EVERYONE was confused. But what writer wouldn’t have known it from “shrunken white?”

(It’s “Elements of Style,” by Strunk & White.)

If I have any advice to give writers (because I’ve done it so many years, not because I think I’m “all that and a bag of chips”), it’s write where you feel the most comfortable. Sometimes, it’s at my desk. Sometimes, it’s under the covers.

Write where you feel the absolute least threatened, because your emotions will flow through you a lot easier that way. You’re still writing about your own head when you’re in fiction mode. It’s just expressed as your characters.

That’s because we’re making it up as we go along, hoping you’ll track with us. Even if you’re an architect to plans in advance, that’s no guarantee that people will track with you. It’s your system, not theirs. I am not an architect. I’m a gardener. I start at one place and dig down. Otherwise, it’s not my diary.

It’s trying to impress the crowd, and this time, I don’t want to do that. I want to move and challenge people so that they’ll come along with me and not the other way around. The right people will gravitate, and whether that’s a hundred or 10 million is of no consequence to me because I’m obviously going to write whether people think it’s worthy of money or not. I don’t have to be validated by anyone else. I have received enough praise and been compared to enough people better than me that I feel solid. I don’t have to worry that I’m so far not successful because of lack of talent. If Margaret Cho and Jonna Mendez both think I can write my ass off, then I fucking can.

So, I don’t have to believe the people who say I’m a hack anymore.

In terms of writers to whom I’ve been compared, I get David Sedaris the most frequently. I can be as funny as he is, but I’m not. We don’t often share the same goal, which is to make people laugh outright. Mostly, I can’t because I don’t feel like it. When I’m not feeling funny, I’m not.

And that’s why people come here- to see both the good and the bad- not because mine is better than anyone else’s, but that mine exists over people who aren’t writers. There are lots of people with web sites that don’t actually say anything. I don’t want mine to be one of them.

I would be a powerful speaker in public if I liked my voice, because I have been told I already am a powerful speaker in public. I know this solidly because I have preached sermons multiple times that have been well received. You don’t graduate from being a preacher’s kid without having picked up some tricks over the years. Just because I’m not a minister doesn’t mean I don’t have that patois when I’m writing or in front of a crowd.

I don’t have to believe the people who say I’m not a good preacher.

My grandfather always said “write it tight” because he was a publicity man for Lone Star Steel. He actually learned the same type photography as Jonna Mendez, basically hanging out of an airplane to take overhead photos. It’s interesting to me that she was a spy and he was publicity and yet they learned the same tricks.

In terms of writing it tight, I do in certain sentences because it fits a mood. That mood is the one I’m in at the moment. I am INFJ, neurodivergent, nonbinary, queer, poly, etc. Therefore, I have never made a decision on what kind of person I am in my life.

“The Counselor” personality is a thousand years old when it is born. We are born with a desperate need to search inside ourselves for answers, because we have an absolute neediness when it comes to wanting to improve the world. We need to feel wanted and valued, but the way we do that is by trying to lead people by laying out our vulnerabilities first. It is not a narcissistic game, but a realistic understanding of what it will take to create connection and resolution vs. power over.

My personality is enormous in the smallest of ways. I don’t approach this blog like I’m a god, but that I am whispering into the night and hoping it resonates with other people. This is true among people who do not know me, but is not true among people who know me.

Therefore, I feel like I know Jesus on a deep and spiritual level, and anything written to amplify his life into being divine is not the message and never should have been in the first place.

Sticky, sticky blood theology bothers the everliving shit out of me. That’s because it’s focusing on what I believe was a marketing campaign to spread his story. That I don’t have to have mystery and magic to think that the historical Jesus is valuable and actually taught people things to which they should pay attention. Our entire religion backfired during The Crusades because supposedly religious superiority launched war off a nomadic preacher who taught people to love each other.

Again, it’s the strangest transformation in history.

The first mistake was turning Jesus from a brown person into a white person, and blaming Jews for the crucifixion and not the Romans. He was a destitute homeless person, basically. But he did it by choice.

I do not understand people who trade his supposed glory for what he was actually trying to say– to you and to all the other people in history who have colonized others. My favorite line in The Gospels is “render unto Caesar what it Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” This is because it’s like he’s telling power to its face “you do you, but okay.”

It’s the messages they’ve missed in the middle of the mess. And I am so tired. Evangelicals are exhausting because they treat Jesus like this professional Christian superhero when he was basically thrown away like white people have thrown away black people for hundreds of years.

There is no reason for this foolishness…. And yet, they persist.

Focusing on the resurrection is not about any of that. It’s being willing to believe that if you will be forgiven for your mistakes, it means you’re allowed to make them. It does not mean you don’t have to say you’re sorry….. And that’s the kind of Christianity that’s woven into the Republican Party.

You do you, but okay.

Pricks on My Skin

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just thought of something and it occurred to me that I wanted to remember this feeling. I don’t write about anyone in a negative way to write about them. I write about them so I remember why reaching out is a bad idea. I have to remind myself every day that Supergrover and I aren’t talking this week…… Sigh. We’re both tired. Tired of so many things.

I don’t come absolutely unglued in these entries because I feel a need to shame people. I write to explain why I can’t go back in time. The fact that I broke my beautiful girl’s heart is a fixed point in time is so painful that I’ve been to some really dark places over the years. It doesn’t matter as much to me what she’s done as what I have, because it takes so much longer to forgive yourself than to forgive someone else.

I regret that I never got to know her in person, because she said she’s more fun and funny in person and I’ve never doubted it for a minute. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in deep grief that wouldn’t go away simply because we wouldn’t stop picking on each other and get it together. We were never fighting about the thing we were supposed to be fighting about.

She couldn’t get vulnerable enough to fight about the real issue, and I don’t think she ever will. In her last letter, she talked around it. She got very close. I realized it when she said “you’re not the only one who has triggers.” I’m the problem. It’s me.

She can’t admit that she’s scared of me. I’ve told her I’m scared of her. We both took each other to the mat. We both fucking lost, because we each had a little red button regarding my writing and her career. Something we could hold over each other’s heads for 10 years and fight about something else.

So, that’s why we fluctuate on how close we want to be. It’s not a one-sided problem. It is, as she says, “a wheel with many spokes…” Which I had to retype because at first I typed “a spoke with many wheels.” I think we are on the same page, I just call it a tapestry. I think we say the same things in different words without realizing it a lot of the time. The most interesting thing to me about her last letter was how close I was in terms of seeing what was going on. I was right. She said that my words felt like pricks on her skin, and any strength I had left went out the window. I thought, “I am not communicating effectively, because this is not what I want in the slightest.”

So, of course I would just keep explaining.

Just like according to Jim Gaffigan, “if there was a Catholic service started somewhere, it’s still going on,” I felt similarly about starting a letter to Supergrover. Because again, I call her that because she’s cute, cuddly, and works blue. She also said once that she didn’t mind being monstrous, and that was the picture that popped into my head. That’s because she’s Alduin when she wants to be, and has always been my Pet Monster on a Fraying Leash, Inc. I sent her a meme of a little girl braiding a dragon’s hair.

Why a dragon had hair that long is another matter.

But the thing is, I’ve grown into my own type of dragon over the years, but I’m always afraid I can only sneeze sparks. I believe that in English, it would be called “imposter syndrome.” I’m not sure anyone really gets over it. I know lots of people older than me that still get intimidated by things. We’re always learning that the world is bigger than we think it is, which is why the greatest acknowledgement as you age is how relatively little you know. I’ve studied political science and international affairs since college. I can assure you there’s a lot I don’t know. But I do research the news thoroughly because I don’t normally write about stories immediately, but it’s the easiest way to get illustrations for my blog. Although I’m noticing that my posts on history have gotten attention, too, like “The Personal Computer.”

I study the news to stay relevant, because I want it to be a mix of me being able to exercise my demons when I need it, but also be able to weave current events and history throughout my writing no matter what. I have gone into sensory deprivation lately, though. I have never known less about the world because right now I’m in burnout over it. It’s too much, too fast. I’ll get back to it. I just need a breather to reset.

I feel like the blogging prompts were all meant for memoirs, except on rare occasions. This is because most of the prompts were talking about recreating a scene in your mind. Depending on who you ask, I am either brilliant or terrible at it. By the time the camp was large enough to be firmly divided, the less I cared because both sides had a hot take that wasn’t necessarily true. I am neither as brilliant nor absolutely fucking evil as everyone says. I talk a lot of shit for someone who can’t reach the top shelf.

But it’s because I’m talking it out and you’re seeing my emotions go up and down that eventually “shit works out, my dear.” You see my struggle as I come to peace within myself, because in order to let people go, this is how I grieve them. Fortunately, since this is the Internet, they’ll be able to come back later and re-read my words without so many emotions attached. I have often found it surprising how much I’ve learned in five years. 😉

That’s because they’re not seeing the 3D character. They’re reading every day, when entries are actually just micro chapters of a book. In order for you to see yourself as a 3D character, you’d have to read it bound. My dragon would look so much different to herself if she went back to 2013 and read forwards. The plot moves forward, and shit works out.

I have written about emotions that cover the entire spectrum. There are some feelings I can’t describe even now. But it’s not about making her feel bad. It’s to remind me that I shouldn’t reach out, when it’s not what I want. I’m not whining about it, just trying to retrain my brain. For 10 years, my absolute first impulse has been to tell her everything. I’m autistic and this is a monotropic thought process (the hitting “compose” part). Therefore, I experience a lot of anger- also not to anger her, but to remind myself that my emotions are valid, and her opinion of me doesn’t determine my worth.

I didn’t say “right” or “wrong.” I said “valid.”

We both invalidated the other’s feelings all the time because we were so eager to run out the door. It’s been a disaster every time I’ve tried to retrain my brain before, because I’ll just crash and burn and it makes her furious whether she says anything or not. When she does, she doesn’t say it without spikes, which gets my hackles up because I’m not itching for a fight. And yet if someone tries to make it hurt first rattle out of the box, it induces red mist rage and I go blind. Unfortunately, I can type with my eyes closed and hilarity does not ensue.

Unfortunately, this is also startlingly common among autistic people because we cannot regulate our emotions.

“Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.” -Sylvia Plath

With neurodivergence, there’s a switch that flips between “obsessed” and “completely disinterested.” There is no middle ground absolutely ever. ADHD people are great at multitasking in some cases because even though they’re monotropic thinkers, they can switch channels so fast that no one notices. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve noticed in the kitchen. You’re multitasking and in hyperfocus at the same time. It’s where you’re “in the zone,” and finding the right ratio is hard as FUCK.

God forbid I have an unexpressed thought, but I gave myself a space to do that without bothering anyone else, but they came here expecting that if I portrayed them as a deity once, it would always be that way… Even those who have been reading my writing for years. They’re never allowed to change and grow over the years because they fired themselves. I describe times where my emotional needs are being met and everything is wonderful, and I describe when my emotional needs are being ignored and how it’s my problem to deal with, but that doesn’t make it easy. When someone is committed to not hearing you, then you don’t try to change them. You walk away.

But I wouldn’t let Supergrover go and not because I didn’t want to; I felt like we were trapped in a vicious cycle because of our trauma bond. Believe me when I tell you that she is one of the most beautiful, most capable, most successful people I know. Believe me when I tell you that the medium is the message. Emotions hit harder in writing. Both of us have huge emotions and a terrific amount of empathy, and we both throw it away to pick on each other. Over time, it became less and less worth it because she was Breadcrumbing me and wouldn’t admit it until she did.

I don’t write to punish her. I write so that I remember I have a reason to move on, because otherwise I never would have had the strength to let go. In the beginning, I thought she was single and I never wanted to let her go ever. But then I decided her boyfriend would take issue with that once I really took in the enormity of the situation and had a better handle on it.

But it’s not just her husband that would object to not being able to spend time with her, and I’m ok with that. There’s her parents. And her kids. And her siblings. And her friends. And her dogs. I’m just the late night crowd, literally the piano man. She’s even put bread in my jar.

But that’s because my writing didn’t make her mad because she was reading as a fan. She read it with totally different eyes once she was in it, and I couldn’t leave her out. I just can’t say everything I’d ever want to about the situation, and she doesn’t want to help me manage it. So I wing it……………………………… Poorly.

There are some life events that are too important not to record, because I don’t really have any day to day memories of Kathleen EXCEPT for what I’ve written on my blog. We were together when I was a junior in college the first time around. Therefore, the reason I write so obsessively is so that my memories don’t fade. My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. I want this fucking blog.

So, you can call it silly or stupid or whatever you want, but I bet The Bloggess is crying into her bank account over it. Maybe I’ll get there one day. Maybe I’m just a hack. However, that’s not up to me. Apparently since Jenny got a big metal chicken before I thought of it, she’s more successful than me (kidding, she’s one of my favorite writers of all time). If only I’d bought Beyonce first. Emphatic fist shake!

It doesn’t bother me when people come and go, because if it’s not worth reading, I don’t encourage people to stay. I want to be worth your time, but not because I have to bend over backwards trying to explain my life in a way you’re not angry because I botched the characterization…. And come back later and apologize, because after you’ve thought about it, I had a valid point. You were angry. Or, alternatively, I explain my thought process more fully and you understand it, when you thought I thought one thing and it was exactly the opposite, because you don’t actually know what I’m alluding to- you think you do. How well we communicate is what allows me to capture people in real life.

So, first of all, I don’t want friends who don’t believe in me as a writer, because there’s never going to be a time in which I write the way you like it consistently. It’s an impossible task. It’s setting me up to fail.

I’m not going to let anyone set me up to fail. I owe it to my beautiful girl, because it was her love and adoration that made me feel this way. That I had a right to take up space in the world.

She gave me back to myself, and I sleep deeper most nights because of it. She appears in my dreams frequently, all the conversations I would have liked to have had playing out as scripts in my head. God, I’m such an INFJ. How dare I use my dreams to go to therapy? It seems like a lot of work. That’s because it is.

It’s essentially praying, dividing my brain in half so that I’m thinking about what I’m saying and creating the responses as well. It helps me get clarity and calm down. My clarity is not someone else’s truth, and if I wasn’t a writer, you wouldn’t know any of this. I am not out to psychoanalyze anyone but me, and the way I do it is by looking at the situation with an omnipotent third eye. I am very judgmental when it comes to situations, not people. I look at problems through the lens of medicine, psychiatry, and ministry.

“Grace never leaves you where you were found.”

-Anne Lamott

I Just Didn’t Have It In Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I got demand avoidance over writing. I take a lot of heat for my opinions, but I am of the same mind as Ben Franklin…. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” So, first of all, my blog is why I stand up- to have a voice at all. Sometimes it shakes, and I speak my truth, anyway. That doesn’t mean that my truth means someone else is lying. They are not having the same experience as me. So, if we have mutual friends and they have a different story than me, please believe both. It’s not a matter of truth vs. lying, but what both people picked up in the room- and by necessity, those won’t match because we didn’t know what the other was thinking. There is room for more than one truth, and mine isn’t the only one. That’s because there’s truth, the subjective, and Truth, the objective. I do not traffic in Truth so much as truth. I cannot be omnipotent, I can only be a diarist. The problem comes in when my readers want me to be omnipotent, representing their mindsets.

I am not here to take away validity from anyone else’s story. I am here to name it and claim it, whatever it is. It really hurt me when Supergrover said that I’d painted some things as fact that I didn’t have the right. I had no idea what the hell that meant, because it’s not like she talked to me about what I was writing, or offered suggestions as to how I could make it better and more accurate. I was floundering because I had no information and my responses were feeding themselves without any input at all. So, if you leave me to my own devices and never address anything, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because you don’t have a problem with it. If you tell me there’s a problem, I can regroup.

I cannot be held to the standard of apologizing for everything I don’t know. Everything I don’t know is fucking enormous, in this situation and in others. What I can do is apologize for what I do know. I’m shattered that I hurt my beautiful girl at all, ever, but I am so incredibly human and fallible. I made mistakes. Full stop.

I just got tired of paying for them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over……… You get my drift. As I told her, “I don’t get to decide how long you hurt, but I do get to decide where the line is between justifiably angry and holding a grudge.” I didn’t get tired of her being hurt and angry. I got tired of her not wanting to resolve any of it so we didn’t have to live in hurt and anger.

As I have said before, I would have cut off any one of my limbs to read her blog entries about me (she’s not a blogger, I’m just sayin’). I would have liked to have been angered and moved by her words, too…. And I was, but only when she was mad enough to say “I’ll answer this one, but after that, fuck right off.”

I know she doesn’t want drama. I know I don’t, either. But we’re both cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It’s an unbreakable connection on both sides, because after a few months goes by, the urge to tell each other things returns in full force. Then, we get close and after a few months, we’ll blow a gasket and tell each other to fuck off again. It’s seriously like an addiction I can’t kick, because neither one of us are very good at no contact. This is because it makes me cry every single time she says “I’ve been good. I’ve followed the rules. You said you wouldn’t reach out again, and yet, you did.” The fact that she thinks she’s being good by not talking to me wrecks me every single time. We are not cut out for this.

We are both tenderheart bears, yet not without our claws.

It’s just time to put them away, and for her, that answer is distance. For me, that answer is connection and resolution. I will never be happy with a relationship in which someone intentionally keeps things from me, because it makes me afraid and untrusting. I don’t need that anxiety, and I’ve confronted her about it many times before writing about it here. It’s frustrating, because she’s mad I let the world into ours, I’m mad that she doesn’t listen to me and you do.

In the end, I basically had to choose between being a writer and being her friend, and I chose me. It was time if she was going to keep stonewalling me, and I have no doubt that she would have done it until she died or I did.

But that’s my baby girl…. And I don’t mean that in a romantic way at all. I mean literally, in my mind, she’s a child. One I was supposed to love, protect, honor, all that. I did and I didn’t. Very mixed results. I do not blame her for any of that. I was a straight up mental mess. However, once I got it together, there were no more conversations in which we could make headway because we were still so cautious and resentful in the first place.

It is seriously one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever been a part of, and yet also something I never want to live without. I can’t, because even when she’s not here, she’s here. When I write, I can feel her presence, and she’s usually teasing me.

Something to the effect of “come on, Lanagan. I know you have more in you than that.” I basically just replace the person I know now with the person I knew 10 years ago because those memories are happier. I do not like all of the unpleasantness, and I am finished with it. I am receiving the closure I need the longer I go on having sent her very healthy messages in return, because it says to me that she was only in it for a dog to kick.

Being called a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years will do that to you.

Meanwhile, I have so many terms of endearment for her that I couldn’t even write you a list at this point. She can also act like a huge jackass, but I don’t think of that as her personality.

When I think of her personality, I go a little starry-eyed. Still. After 10 years.

It’s not a game, and I resent that statement more than anything else. I promised her I’d be there for her for her whole life. I didn’t know what it would entail, I just said yes. At that point, we didn’t even really know each other, and yet I knew I was forging an unbreakable connection.

It started to feel like only her pain mattered, only her thoughts mattered, only her everything mattered. That’s because I made time for it. She did not make time for my feelings in terms of responding to them unless they were about other people. I have never managed to convince her that we need to work on our own communication. No one’s relationship with anyone is off the table except for apparently the one between us.

I haven’t been saying that this is all her fault, or using my blog to be shitty to her. That’s because I was not having the same experience as her, so I doubt she’s been tracking with me this whole time. I am positive that has led her to believe things about me that are not true, because she doesn’t respond. She takes things in and “reads between many lines.” But no actual communication regarding any of it except for “I’m furious beyond belief at some of your entries, and moved by others.” Well, what the fuck are you mad about and what moved you?

I feel like both of those things are important for me to know.

Because if I knew what moved her, I’d always write like that. I always want everything to be happy and sunny in my world, but the world doesn’t work that way. It’s complicated and sometimes it’s dark. Sometimes, it’s really dark.

But, for every storm, there’s a rainbow.

The Importance of Being Earnest

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I started an entry about the whole move. I didn’t finish it before midnight, so I was going to finish today. Then, I decided I just wanted to start fresh this morning. I got an amazing night’s sleep, something I desperately needed. I will also be taking a bath in eucalyptus at some point. I’m not miserable, I’m just not young enough not to hurt after a move.

Although technically, I did all the packing. Zac moved. By the time he got to my house, I was completely toast because I’d stayed up all night trying to get everything ready. By the time Zac arrived, all we had to do was throw the totes in the back of the car. However, they were a bit too heavy for me while I was exhausted. So, Zac wins the award for being such a thoughtful person and taking over so I didn’t have to bust ass again.

What happened is that I was trying to fold my futon into a couch, and the mattress was upside down and backwards to be able to do that. There’s a special hinging system in the mattress so that one part of it has to be on the seat panel. When I flipped it over to the mattress side, I wrestled it all by myself and didn’t see the “this side down” tag to avoid this problem. So, on Friday night I turned my legs and arms black and blue trying to make more space in the room for sweeping, etc.

The futon and I fought. It’s not easy to admit when you lose to an inanimate object. However, in the end, I did get it done. It was a victory after all the sweat and bruises. So, again, I was glad that Zac could see I was wrecked from lack of sleep and exertion. I honestly believe that the pain is not all due to age. I really fucked myself up, but what other choice to you have in those moments? Where the only answer is “figure it out,” and the problem brings you to tears. So you cry and do it, anyway.

When we were finished with moving, we decided to watch Slow Horses and order pizza. Then, after we’d eaten, Zac pulled out a small box of cannoli, a delightful surprise. He’s been my rock through all of this, and I know for certain that if he’d had the bandwidth, I wouldn’t have been packing alone, either. That’s because it’s a huge give and take. We both get demand avoidance, meltdown, and need to call each other because neurodivergence, what the fuck?

It is a misnomer that autistic people know exponentially more about our disorders than neurotypical people, because we have the lived experience. This ain’t necessarily so, because data is not lived experience. We are as confused and mystified by our behavior as anyone else around us. That’s because I’m self aware enough to know when I’ve hit a wall, leaving my my mind divided in half, doing odd things and trying to figure out why.

Is it that I’m an INFJ and naturally introverted? Is it meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, anxiety, depression, hypomania, CPTSD, etc.? Those are a lot of heuristics to consider, so managing myself in terms of patient care doesn’t always go so well.

As I was telling Bryn the other day, “when you treat yourself as if you’re the best doctor you’ve got, you probably need a second opinion.”

I need more psychological support than I’m getting, because I need an autism specialist- both for working out problems and the process of creating values and visions.

I am always about “values and visioning,” because that’s language from the church in terms of creating a mission statement. It works personally as well as it does in groups. Therapists aren’t just there to help you overcome your problems. They also help you when you’re stuck career-wise and don’t know where to go from here. Mostly, that involves talking to yourself until you figure out that you have always had your own answers, you just need to be guided to them.

If it helps, I think of my monologue here as therapy, so maybe you can think of your therapist as your raw blog entries. You’re just saying them out loud to the one person who actually knows what to do to help you emotionally suit up for a healthier future.

“Half this game is 90% mental.” -Yogi Berra

In terms of finding that for myself, what I have learned is that being on my own for so long has made it where the bare minimum effort on Zac’s part looks enormous to me. Just the fact that he does things like pick up income due to our income disparity is huge. This is because it says “I want to do this thing with you and I enjoy your company so much that I would rather pay for you to be there with me than worry you’re not going to be able to swing it on your own.” It doesn’t feel like chivalry, but…. not going to lie…… yes, it does. He just only sometimes feels that way. Most of the time, it’s just that he recognizes his own white male privilege. It’s one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life, because it was so comforting to see that he wants his only goal in life to make his world better. This doesn’t just extend to me. It extends globally.

Zac’s small kindnesses are so endearing, because it’s not about all the chivalry. It’s remembering things I say and respecting my words as equal to his own. I have not known many men like this, because most of the men I’ve known who date women think their opinion is superior because they’re the provider (generally). When women become the provider, men often get jealous enough to derail their careers. I remember one instance on reddit in which a woman was making bank in her field because it was so incredibly niche and had a lot of sensitive information. He interviewed for a job at one of her competitors and she had to divorce him immediately because he forced her hand. It looked too bad in her niche field to even date a competitor, and this woman had been married a long time. She told him all of this before the interview, and he did it anyway.

I know intimately that I will never have any of those issues.

I have also learned, and I think I’ve written about this before at some point, that it surprised me how little difference there is between dating a man and a woman when both parties are queer. Dating a straight person generally leads to keeping them insecure and anxious that you’re going to leave them for the same sex. There’s still such a cultural stigma on homosexuality that two things are running concurrently. Jealousy and homophobia are best friends when you want the worst possible outcome. On the flip side, gay people think of you dating the opposite sex as betrayal. Frankly, I understand and respect this outlook, because it seems like we’re watching you embrace the thing that oppresses us. There is also no world in which gay people don’t treat bi people like they’re “not queer enough.”

I will give you an example. I surf dating apps just to see who’s out there, and I am astounded by the number of lesbians who have on their profiles “no men, no bisexuals.” This basically comes across to me as “Irish need not apply.” No one ever thinks of bisexual couples who are in the system have the best ability to change it. Since we’re more accepted, we have a bigger platform. I think it’s shitty to use heterosexuality as a shield, but I don’t think it’s wrong for me to date men, or treat other women like trash because they have. It’s really hard for me, because that attitude is friendly fire. I need gay people to hear that in 7.1 Surround Sound, and the bisexual community is over it a “fuck you” amount. Straight people who have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for gay people, gay people have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for the enemy.

🎶🎶 One of these things is not like the other.……… 🎶🎶

I get it. I really do. I don’t have to agree with you, because that’s not my problem to solve for you. Bisexuality has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating is cheating. Bisexuality has nothing to do with polyamory. You’re either wired for multiple partners or you aren’t. They are two separate mindsets/skills. Therefore, that does not have anything to do with sexual orientation, like we’ll die if we don’t have both.

All bisexual people are saying is that their partner’s equipment is a non-issue, it’s not a barrier to a romantic relationship. They are NOT saying “I’m incapable of marriage.” Whether they are or they aren’t is a separate conclusion from attraction.

However, with Zac I don’t feel invisible, and that’s what happens to bisexual people in heterosexual relationships. We both look queer as a three dollar bill, so we don’t exactly exude heterosexual privilege when we’re out and about. I realized that dating a bisexual man was not losing my connection to the queer community with my partner. That it’s important to share whether you’re in a heterosexual relationship or not, because we’re on equal footing when it comes to being oppressed by the system. It’s amazing how often queer cancels out white in a racist theocracy, theocracy being the key word here.

I am tired of the Bible being confused with the Constitution. It’s gone on long enough. I’m tired of atheist hate of Christians because we deserve their hate so much….. In America, Christ’s actual messages have been mangled into a religion he could not support.

If you dare to judge me, you are a Roman, not a Jew. Period.

That’s because Jesus was on the side of the oppressed. American Christianity would make him vomit. It’s tinged with racism because slave masters would use Bible verses to keep their slaves in line and justify their monstrous behavior………..

Not counting on the fact that the slaves would empathize more with the minority who was beaten and killed just like them. That it was religion that gave them enough courage to stand up and fight for freedom. If you are straight, white, male, and cisgender, you don’t see with striking clarity the horror of the situation……….

That Jesus was under the exact same constraints that Americans are now. It’s just that the conservatives weren’t Republicans and Democrats, but Pharisees and Sadducees. Same software, different case. Therefore, white supremacists do not see the irony in being the people who oppress others in his name, repeating the cycle for 2,000 years. Conservative evangelical faith does not see the liberation in the story….. sometimes through thoughtlessness, sometimes through malice. The thoughtlessness is because people who aren’t oppressed don’t need liberation theology. They don’t need to feel inspiration from the fact that a minority was murdered by the state.

Not only that, he wasn’t murdered for actions, he was murdered for ideas. He was murdered by a government who didn’t want the people to think.

“It’s people like you what cause unrest.”

So, when you think about it that way, if you are a Christian policeman with racist beliefs, you’re not actually being a Christian. You’re being a Roman.

You’re not the people for whom your sins were forgiven lightly. That’s because I’m betting it’s easier to forgive the whole world as an abstract concept than it is to forgive the people who are actively in the process of murdering you when you did it.

You are as worthy of redemption as everyone else, because grace and mercy are free of charge. But the more you exclude people, the more you separate yourself from the Jew you claim to adore while mangling his words into everything he didn’t say.

Where in the Bible do you find that Jesus would have accepted the behavior of people like Donald Trump? That is the real mystery of your faith, because your blinders keep you from seeing it. Your words and Jesus’s actions don’t line up, so how dare you think writing your own headcanon and retconning everything to support the crazy idea that Jesus would support war and greed, things like that is everything wrong with white church.

You don’t see the hypocrisy. You don’t see the discomfort you create, even in your regular followers because your services are so fear-based. Why do people have to say they’re a “recovering Christian” at all? Do you think that Jesus would ever want people to go through recovering from trauma given to them in his name?

It is the weirdest transformation in history.

However, a lie can get around the world six times before truth can put on pants.

I am trying to find the truth in it all….. wading through the bullshit of exclusionary Christianity that harms people all over the world and trying to decide what’s worth keeping. My biggest gripe is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so when most Americans think of Christians, they think of Evangelicals. My reputation proceeds me in the absolute worst of ways.

This is problematic because atheists think that all Christians go to some sort of fucked up Bible college and are fed all these bullshit ideas. They don’t think of Harvard, Yale, or Oxford Divinity School first. To them, The Archbishop of Canterbury and Joel Osteen have the same amount of education.

I know most of you know this, but for the record, I’m going to bet the Archbishop has more.

Most people don’t know this, but the former Archbishop, Rowan Williams, was really good friends with Christopher Hitchens. They have some marvelous debates on YouTube if you’re interested.

I think this is a good point because people like Williams are being left out of the conversation. That Christians are intelligent, but there is a war between people who interpret the Bible and people who take it literally. Unfortunately, the people who take it literally, as if the pen was actually in God’s hand, have entwined themselves with the Republican Party and are the loudest idiots in the room.

When people think of Christians, their brains don’t jump to Martin Luther King Jr. and Raphael Warnock. They don’t think of William Barber and Bernice King.

They don’t see liberation theology because they don’t need it.

Zac is an atheist, and he’s the kindest Christian I ever met in terms of showing actual Christlike behavior.

If an Atheist is a better Christian than you, that’s the point at which you need to decide which God you actually serve. Are you tapping into the universe, or trying to control it?

Are you a believer, or are you Pilate, washing your hands of the whole thing because hey.

He’s just a Jew.

And that is the importance of being earnest with ourselves about the Republican Party. We need to decide when we’re going to stop following the Sanhedrin and state that murdered him, or admit it’s been a good run..

The choice is yours.

One More Sleep

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s my last night in this room, as Zac is coming over tomorrow after drill to help me move my stuff, and if we don’t have time to do it all, we’ll finish it up Sunday after 5:00. I don’t think it will take very long, but that depends on our energy levels and the stairs at both places. I’m lucky in that Zac is very handy, so he has tools already that would be helpful and yet, I wouldn’t have thought of them on my own, like a drill and a hand truck, etc.

So, as I close out this chapter in my life, I have a million thoughts in my head, pictures going by too fast to get one to stick. The people who’ve lived here with me, the things that have happened, etc. It’s a lot. But my entire DC story minus the 18 months I lived here in my early 20s has been created in this one house, mostly this one room.

I hope I’m as comfortable at the new house as I have been here, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to cohabit so long without incident. It is one of the longest stretches at an address I’ve ever had.

Everything is, big picture, going to be the same. When you get into the details, my route around town changes. I “have a dog now,” because the house I live in now has five dogs, but none of them live on my side of the house. I don’t see them for months at a time, but I’ll hear them.

Jack will have free run of the house, and may sleep with me some nights. I can walk him whenever I wish. I think it will be good for me, because I always notice I’m calmer when I’m writing and Oliver, who is a dog, is in the room. His presence is everything, so I hope Jack and I will have the same vibe.

I need to get to work, but I thought it was too important a date to go without writing just because I was busy with other things. I am very, very busy with other things and absolutely could not afford to tell you all this, but I thought, “will it matter in five years if you didn’t blog today?” That’s the moment I stopped. This is a milestone.

Nine years is a long time.

When I landed at DCA, it was midday. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go right home or to Kramerbooks, but ultimately tiredness won out; I took the Metro to Silver Spring, where Hayat picked me up.

Hayat drove me to BWI when Lindsay called and said that my mother had died and I needed to come home.

Hayat gave me a Lebanese jewelry box that is one of my favorite things, because I designed my room around the color scheme of the tiling. The curtains are teal, and are thick enough to use as blackout. I never have to worry about working a graveyard shift ever again, because she said I could take them as well. 😉 And on that note, I have to go- for some reason my Android has decided it does not like the “Enter” key today, so I cannot make new paragraphs. I’m not sure my brain is capable of new paragraphs, either.

The Next Logical Conclusion

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that I know I’m autistic, what do I do?

It’s quite daunting having to reparent yourself with the skills needed to deal with an autistic kid, only you’re 46. It takes so much energy to be you and parent you at the same time, and I’m sure this resonates with a lot of people. The best part of being an adult is that there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep. The worst part of being an adult is there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep.

There’s no one to tell you to pack your lunch. And there sure isn’t someone to tell you to take a shower. Because parenting yourself is something that “you should already know how to do by now,” and is squarely in the wheelhouse of demand avoidance and a desperate need to fake themselves out of it with social masking. It seems unhealthy and codependent, but having someone to social mask is literally combatting meltdown and burnout. It keeps our routines stable so that we don’t spin out mentally/behaviorally. I believe that exactly all of my problems with Supergrover stemmed from meltdown and burnout, it’s just at the time, I didn’t know how to voice that. I could not tell her “this is too much, I’m overwhelmed.” I would not back down. Meanwhile, my disability is working overtime to prove that I can help her, support her, all that. She has different friendship needs than most people, and I was trying hard to show that I knew why and respected it. In fact, most things she thought of as “crazy” were about respect, but you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go. She’ll bang her purse on your head.

There’s already a perfect end to her story in my head, and it’s more than I would ever hope for in this lifetime, but not impossible. It’s a phone call. She and Michael are telling me that we have an important event to attend. Or maybe it’s just the two of us- who knows whether said event would be as important to him as it is to us. That’s because the event in question would be honoring someone who thinks the world of both of us.

But right now, I need to disconnect. I remembered that I had some tags on Supergrover’s public page, and I untagged myself so that they weren’t public anymore- not even I can see them. I’m not worried though, because our relationship has never lived on Facebook. It’s been in the quiet moments of the night, where a blank page starts off as intimidating, and then feels like a blanket.

As I’ve said, I write about Supergrover to calm myself. Echologia to bring me down when I feel shortness of breath, heart, and brain race. That’s why everything swirling around me is creating shutdown in terms of not knowing where to start. I defeated it last night, but I’m not sure I have the energy to do as much today as I did yesterday. I’m what you would call “indoorsy,” so when I suddenly have to exert as much will and energy as possible when I don’t have it, the wind gets knocked out of me pretty fast. Going to the gym would make my body stronger, but it would not stop me from getting lost in my own little world and falling off the elliptical. I have done it thrice.

With my kind of autism, I take most information in through sight. I can observe and note human behavior, but my processing differences make it feel like a double standard. How do I know how other people act when I am nothing like them? Learning to social mask. “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.” I do not pick up the morals in a situation if they are opposite to my finely tuned sense of justice. I pick up how someone else has dealt with a situation. And because I’m imitating someone else, it feels like the only time I use my real voice is here.

But the reason you can’t claim you know me based on my writing is that you cannot see my third dimension, all the thoughts that don’t end up here. There’s a lot more I can’t say than I can, and the things I can’t say are harder than the things I can, and with the little knowledge I do have, that makes me cry and shake enough.

It’s not because I’m a naturally depressed person. It’s that digging down into yourself and looking at your worst flaws is the worst job on earth. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t constantly rewarding. More people identify with my writing than don’t, and for the people who don’t identify with it, or have a problem with something I’ve said, they’re free to bring it up with me…….. or not. But I already know that if you’re covering up a feeling, you’re going to treat me differently and have the audacity to say my perception isn’t real.

For instance, I could never tell where I stood with Supergrover because sometimes she was like a loving aunt/big sister character in my life, and at others, she said really hurtful things like “you only know random factoids about my life.” I knew this was bullshit, just a dart.

I know this because all of the sudden, when it was my story to tell, did she start having a problem with the things she has told me. So, which is it? Am I the person that only knows random factoids about your life and you aren’t worried about anything I’ve told you, or is that the brave face you put on when you know I’m entitled to my own stories? I know this because she told me I was entitled to all of my feelings, while also raging that I’d let go of information she would have liked to keep quiet and it was incredibly hurtful.

I don’t just know random factoids about her life, because if that were true, she wouldn’t spend time analyzing my work to make sure she’s still unidentified. She’s said many times that her story ceased to be mine and long time ago, so I thought nothing of writing about our mutual trauma because it is indeed what handfasted us. I couldn’t explain anything without explaining it first. Otherwise, I just look like a lovesick teenager chasing after someone who doesn’t want me. This is not correct, and it never will be. We’ve both loved each other to the best of our ability, and love isn’t enough when you both need to stop treating each other as if they’re trying to trying to fight you all the time.

It was gaslighting, and a lot of it, but not because she was a narcissist. She was afraid, and there’s a big difference. The gaslighting was pretending for years that we were fine.

Morgan Freeman: They were not, in fact, fine.

If I take everything literally, that you have no worries about what you’ve told me and you haven’t, that your stories aren’t mine anymore, etc., do I actually deserve her ire in this case?

It would be helpful to know so many things. How many people know she’s Supergrover, for one. How much detail do I need to hide because more people than just me know that identity? Who is my audience that directly affects you? Why are you waffling on whether I am a straight up problem or not? If I’ve caused someone pain, I want to know the specifics. Otherwise, I will spiral out for days and days trying to figure out what it is that I’ve said that they’re mad about.

She comes by it honestly, because for us to really engage, we’d need some time to ourselves, even if it was asynchronous. She doesn’t often have time to write letters that are anywhere near the length of mine, so I think that she thinks I always expect that of her, too. I don’t. But if I’ve had a specific need go unaddressed for years, I only want the problem to be resolved, not assurance that you have read every single thing I’ve ever written. Ignore the rest, it’s all chatter. But it really got to me when she said that I was so demanding of her time and ability to give of herself, when I have been saying for 10 years that I do not deserve her and I will take what I can get.

Anything above that is off limits, but when you don’t give me any limits, I’m going to dream that way. I wasn’t “being demanding,” I was dreaming of a time where she naturally had more bandwidth- retirement. But, you’re going to think that I’m demanding of your time if you never tell me what your boundaries are. She said that three words were all she could manage until I called her on her bullshit for months. That she had to stop not giving me information and blaming me for what writing came out of it.

A lot of this is wrong and misguided because we didn’t have any boundaries. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I was using one concept for another. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I said I could read facial expressions and body language. But not when I constantly get “all is well, you’re worried about nothing……..” right up until she’s so angry that being apart is better than being together.

I don’t think I was wrong for bringing up a problem so we could solve it. I did think it was a problem that I couldn’t make heads or tails of her feelings until she said enough words that I knew my anxiety was for naught. But how could I know that without any information at all? It was so confusing, and why I resigned the game. I was tired of constantly being confused. For instance, “you have absolutely NO idea what I’m dealing with,” scaring me away from writing at all…… and “I have had the choice, countless times, to stop what I was doing and didn’t.” Telling me you’re that busy while also running from me is unacceptable. It’s a coverup, and very conditional love. If I don’t walk on eggshells because you’re mad and won’t tell me that, then I can just fuck right off. Is that in any way a fair and balanced relationship?

How do I make you happy if you don’t seem happy with anything?

And by making her happy, I don’t mean that I have the capability to change people from within (although I have been told I do help). She has to find those changes within herself, because I’m not here to suss them out for her. Why she can’t be open and honest and has to stick to the people-pleasing schtick is on her, and I finally saw her get out of that rut……..

She stroked my ego mightily, and my chest puffed up. When she told me that she couldn’t control anyone’s reactions, she quoted me directly without realizing it. Or she did and she was trying to hurt me by throwing my own words in my face……….. and I turned out to be teary-eyed and impressed. I’ve always had the motto “help her, anyway.”

So, when I saw the same behavior in Daniel- get angry at someone for bringing up a problem instead of acknowledging there is one- I was out and quickly. The relationship with Supergrover destroyed me, and I didn’t want another 10 years of fighting a battle that someone needs to fight on their own. It’s not my job to tiptoe around anyone. When I told Supergrover that I had issues I wanted to talk about, she said that I should find friends who didn’t bring issues into my life. There is no such thing. It was Daniel’s first answer as well. If we can’t solve this in five minutes, our relationship isn’t worth jack or shit. It’s too much. If there is a battle inside someone, even two minutes of vulnerability is too hard and it hurts too much. They won’t let go because they’re afraid of losing control, but life doesn’t make sense until you realize you never had any control in the first place.

If I could tell Daniel what I know about my story, the most private parts, he would shit himself for saying I that “just because I wrote in bulk doesn’t mean I write anything of substance.” This is because I’ve never met anyone who could play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” quite like SG. And she thought I wrote something of substance. I will take that ego boost over anything else that happens in my career. My ability to write could be taken away tomorrow and I’ll know that I accomplished every single one of my goals.

The first was to be seen and heard.

The second was to have people who identified with me that would tell me when they liked something and when I was an asshole with a God complex. That’s because I don’t have to take a single piece of your advice, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hear it. I will be angry and defensive at first, so I usually pop off and regret, another thing I’m learning to manage, because my response is always different than a knee-jerk reaction. But sometimes I write down my knee-jerk reactions because they’re important to prove to me later where I need to grow.

I also think that Supergrover and I should have a conversation about “painting my feelings as fact,” because I could write the way she wanted me to if I understood what she meant. And the reason I’d defer to her is that she was a writing major…….. and yet somehow still thinks of me as “the talent.” I do not know how to write in a way that doesn’t make anything look like a fact, because I am narrating a plot as well. She’s whipped my ass into shape as a writer before, so I have no doubt she could help me with this, too. However, I will do some research on autobiographical writing and see if anything resonates with what she said that gives me a little more context than wondering how and when I’ve been an asshole.

I play AITA all day long with myself, because it’s the fight within me of “say nice things” and “no one forced you to come here.” As I’ve said, the people in my real life knowing what I think of them is their choice.. If they want to be here, welcome. If you always have a problem with what I say, I encourage you to change the channel….. because seriously. Who even am I? Who cares about my opinion?

The only person that really should is me, because it informs how I feel about myself.

How I feel about myself this minute is that I’m proud I handled my move all by myself so that it is free to me- as in, I’m just going to hand my deposit and leftover rent directly to Colin on day one, and my rent hasn’t gone up, so I don’t have to make up the difference.

With Silver Spring, I have gotten two miracles in a row. Hayat and Colin were both the first people I called, and they both turned out to be right for me. Towards the end of April, I’ll have been here a full nine years, and I’m only missing it by a week.

I know from experience that we still might get one more light snowstorm, because when I arrived here in late April of 2015, there was snow on the ground. It was melting, but still. It had snowed on like, April 20th or something. I think I arrived on the 23rd.

Hayat texted me that it feels like it was just yesterday she picked me up at the Metro. I understand the sentiment, because in some ways, it really feels like I just got here. In others, this has been the longest 10 years of my life…… but so necessary in terms of growth and development that I cannot trade them. If I hadn’t become a blogger, I would not have seen autism coming. I would not have seen being nonbinary coming. I would not have seen how any of my friends affect my life, from besties to the smallest interaction.

It’s small interactions that get me the most, because I’m the worst at casual conversation. If I did something weird in front of you in 1993, don’t worry. I’m still thinking about it.

While I pack my “going to Zac’s” bag and try not to flip out that we’re seeing Jason Moran tonight. If I’d had time, I would have ordered a Senators baseball cap for the event, because Duke Ellington’s first job was selling peanuts at games, where he got to know Teddy Roosevelt peripherally because every once in a while Roosevelt would ride his horse down to the field.

So, if you ever doubt the power of living in Washington, remember that a middle class black kid from DC became friends with the President of the United States…………………. long before integration was even a thing.

In fact, that’s the perfect analogy for my life. I have the brain that’s capable of seeing patterns in world conflict like a president, but I have only managed to convince the people around me that I’m selling peanuts.

What I have learned through living in Washington is that people prefer to be treated like they’re all alike on a human level, and revel in friends who aren’t obsessed with who they are and what they can do for me, a classic Washington stereotype. Republicans sniff each other’s butts by asking how much they make.

People do that to me sometimes. Someone asked me how much my sister made, and it was so fucking rude. But, we were at one of Lindsay’s work events, so I didn’t want to go apeshit. I just said, “she’s a Democrat. Aim low.” The truth is that I only know she makes more than me. That’s it, because I don’t ask those questions, and she usually doesn’t volunteer that information except when she’s telling me what a job potentially will pay her if she gets it. I always tell her to aim for the stars, because not only does she travel, she eventually wants to live in a different state where the cost of living is a lot higher than Texas. She doesn’t know how she’d do it, it’s a pipe dream because she doesn’t often think about moving. But, every little bit helps when you are trying to save up for a dream.

I will use DC as an example because she doesn’t want to come here, so it’s not giving away where she’d look if she was actually interested in leaving Texas.

In DC, MD, and VA, buying a house here is ridiculously expensive, and the closer you want to “inside the Beltway” or “downtown living,” the price skyrockets exponentially. An apartment in the city is going to run you about $2500/month. Even in Silver Spring, you won’t find an apartment for less than $1,000…… maybe, maybe if it’s an efficiency. However, management companies are ridiculously relentless in raising rent, so you’ll be paying over 1k/mo in no time if they advertised cheap rent to get you in the door.

And, for $2500/mo in DC, you still only get a white box, especially in neighborhoods that aren’t riddled with crime. If you are in an area with violent crime, depending on where it is, you’ll still pay $2500 because it’s walking distance to the Metro or something like that. Housing does not go down when DC is only 60 sq miles.

Buying a house might be a little cheaper if you have the funds to renovate. You can get a good deal if it’s just a lot with a barely standing building. The land is the expensive part, not the construction.

But then you have to live in DC, and some of their laws are just plain strange. It’s weird that things come through the Senate, because DC’s needs are thrown under the bus by pork barreling.

Like, the bill will be something like “$15/minimum wage” or whatever it is that will do the city good, and someone will put a total ban on abortion in the bill. So, the bill gets struck down and the Republicans say “they wanted this minimum wage so bad, and then they didn’t even want to compromise.”

Make someone else look like that bad guy, because nothing you’ve done has ever elicited a reaction.

Global and national are the same as local.

Generally, if a person will react in a certain way, a country will also act like that. It’s a chessboard, and I see patterns all the time.

The important part is to just keep stitching. The quilt will come together eventually.

Or, with autism, maybe it never will. But I am not interested in turning myself into a person I was never meant to be.