Tag: Friendships

Staying Up

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What could you do more of?

I am slowly starting to stay up later and sleep in. Not by much. Just one or two hours. I’m starting this entry at 7:48, after I’ve done the things I need to do to get going. I have taken my medication, and gotten myself something to drink, and settled in. Therefore, I woke up at 0700 instead of 0500 for love.

That’s because the person that most represents safety to me and vice versa is in Portland, Oregon. That’s three hours into the past from here. I’ve done it with other friends, had this asynchronous life because I’ve had friends in Portland since 1996 or something like that and moved to DC in May of 2001. The events of September 11th did not drive me away. Kathleen did. It was the best mistake I’ve ever made. When I went to Portland, I found everything I have ever needed to know myself. It affects me every day, and I’m grateful to my time there for it, no matter how low my Vitamin D was when I got home (six).

I don’t stay up for me. I stay up for Bryn. I want her as a real part of my life rather than a fake one, and video calling is easier for both of us in the evening. It’s just that her evening is generally my bedtime when I’m getting up at 0500. When I get up at 0500, sometimes it’s so early for her that she hasn’t gone to bed yet. We make it work, and yet we don’t. It’s not a matter of how much we love and adore each other, just that our relationship isn’t as full of practical love as it would be if we lived in the same neighborhood. Maybe we will eventually, but I don’t want either of us to do the hard sell on each other. Our lives will unfold as they should. The difference between this relationship and most of my other virtual ones is that I don’t video call with them, ever. I barely even do audio. I can do that with Bryn because we’ve had so much face time over the years that we call each other no matter what we’re doing or how we look because the video call is more important than fixing up for it. Video calls are so much easier when you don’t give a shit how you look on camera. It’s not that we look bad, it’s that we’re going to love each other no matter how we look, so why waste time on something so frivolous?

I like our back and forth, the way we’re both on the “think it, say it” plan because we can be. It’s a trust that’s implicit and makes it easy to breathe. She’s made the commitment to learn my attachment style and love language, but she doesn’t really have to do research because they’re the same as mine. She understands something in me because she wears it on her skin, not because she’s lost in a book…. or if she is, it’s the one I’m writing for us.

You’ll just have to put up with romantic and flowery language from me about her because I am Anne Shirley crazy for her. She knows that she is my Diana Barry…. so much lighter than I am in some ways, darker in others. We complete, not compete. I am the friend that would get her drunk on purpose, though, and she wouldn’t complain because I’m an excellent bartender and it doesn’t take much for either of us. 😉

I am sort of in a relationship in terms of having a companion but not a possible husband, and she definitely is in a relationship with promise. It fits us to a T to have other partners, while also making space for each other; our history is too long for us not to put each other first in some ways. I might have to be around for the next boyfriend, and Dave will be excused for cause. I have no reason to believe this will be the case, it’s just a sitrep. We’re a package deal, get used to it. 😉

Being with our respective guys gives us more to talk about, not less. I don’t feel jealous and neither does she. It’s nice to have a place to unload about everything, because neither of us blink when the other has a problem. We’re on it like a team. Later I have to call Multnomah County on some business of my own, so I’m going to do hers as well. It’s no thing because if I have to do something over the phone, I know she’d be my proxy if something needed to be done in person. It’s a give and take now that I have someone on the ground that I can trust to have my back in a city where I used to live and still need to bat cleanup.

I’m not divorced yet, or at least, I have been unwilling to check. Dana told me she would take care of it, but I haven’t been sent anything to sign and I don’t think people have the capability to divorce someone without their knowledge. I could be wrong, but I can’t assume Dana is more likely than me to fill out paperwork, either, even though she said she would. I am not being catty. Paperwork causes anxiety for both of us sometimes because of the emotional attachment it represents. We’re both ADHD. If it fell off her radar, it won’t come back.

I can have empathy because in some ways, we’re the same person and that will never change.

Now my mother lion has kicked in, because I should have done it long ago for Dana and followed up on the paperwork myself, because I know it was difficult for two reasons. The first is that the way our relationship ended is shameful to both of us given the connection we threw away. We should have been able to deal with the Supergrover issue because I shouldn’t have gotten so high on her. Dana would know exactly how being married and being lost in new relationship energy would feel, because she was married during most of the time she was dealing with her feelings for me……………. yet another reason I didn’t want to get involved in the first place.

I struggled with the idea of having an affair because she was using her wife as a safety net if I said no and I knew it. That’s because her wife knew what Dana was doing, too, and was never blind to it. She saw how Dana reacted to me and thought her days were numbered, then stuck around watching Dana be lovesick over me for years and putting up with that shit. By the time she broke up with her wife, even our girlfriends were convinced we should be together instead of with them because we couldn’t stop talking about each other. Being friends was easy. Taking the leap was hard……………. right up until it wasn’t. By the time we were ready to leap, we had years of emotional closeness feeding our fire. We loved each other because of what we’d been to each other as friends, not because we each thought the other was perfect. We knew what contract we were signing, and we were better for it.

For a while.

She could not accept that the same thing was not happening to her. That my feelings were supposed to have been light and flirty wordplay to give me some dopamine after Dana and me going through a really rough time. Supergrover wasn’t threatened, and she was so cute about flirting with me one time that I knew I’d opened the door to something I could dish, but I could not take. I thought I was a silver-penned devil.

I was, in fact, mistaken.

I laid the golden fiddle at her feet because I had gone down to Georgia and knew that I’d been beat. It was a mistake. It called my bluff. I felt things I never had because it was attention from someone who really deserved mine.

It was all a mistake. It was not a happy compromise, It jumped me further into something she was rightfully afraid would happen. It jumped me into something the relationship couldn’t sustain, but it wasn’t her fault because I pretended to be so cool. it was the beginning of the end with both of them. It just will never be a new beginning with Dana because I can forgive her punching me, but it’s not worth a chance it would happen again and the statistics are against us.

I fucked up asking for more patience from both of them and then not actually doing anything to move myself forward. It was my own choice to feel heat for someone that would never feel that way about me, but that’s based on all the other relationships I’ve had, the mark my emotional abuser left on me. That I couldn’t really know someone until I’d slept with them. I know that because if someone opens me up emotionally, I tend to want all of them. I don’t tie people’s worth to it, though.

If they just want to be friends and I love them that much, I’ll sit in that pain until it goes away. I certainly have done enough of that to feel secure. It’ll never happen again, like women who do fall in love and realize later that it was never the sex that mattered and they’re better off as roommates and friends. But it’s because I’ve felt those feelings that I’m a real and genuine friend and also never less protective and possessive of her than her husband- and not because I want to “keep her safe from him” by acting like a jealous fool. It’s not him that matters. It’s the the rest of the world.

I’m not here to fight her battles for her, just with her. But I won’t if she acts like I don’t matter, gets angry when I tell her that, and treats me like an annoyance a good bit of the time. I’m not here for that, but I am for the relationship in which we do the work to be strong and comfortable at 20 years, like we predicted we would be in the beginning. I can live with boundaries, but not when I don’t know what they are. I will fuck up, and I have. I was out of control, then lost and finding my way back.

I can’t be lost anymore, because I’m tired of feeling insecure. I can’t make up fantasies to ignore the reality of the situation because they feed me. She avoids me in a way she shouldn’t, and that’s not my call. But because she says that she’s enormously impressed with me as a person, everything I’ve said tracks. There is room for all our feelings by now because nothing happens quickly anymore. There’s not an exhilarated rush of trying to know each other as fast as we can.

Our feelings are extreme on both ends. The lovebombing is absolutely genuine, and so is our conflict. The reality is that I would have left Dana no matter what because of two hard outs, not just one……… and now need Supergrover in my life despite her not needing me because of the first hard out’s upper limits, not because I am “trying to get her back.” I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t at that time. Life was full of hard choices, and I did the best I could with the information I had. It didn’t matter what Supergrover thought. It matters what I thought would happen to me in the future. Supergrover didn’t think about that and I know she didn’t because I didn’t, either. We both got lost in new relationship energy and told each other things that would have consequences long into the future without knowing how stable we were or weren’t. Without knowing how stable I was with Dana, because even I didn’t recognize the toll her DUI would take on me and how that was more of a threat to me than anything Supergrover said that enticed me. I never want to have to bail anyone else out of jail, because it was traumatic. My friend Volfe drove me downtown to pick her up, and she had already left on the bus. I was racing to get to her only to have my hopes dashed. I did get to see her later, but she knew we were coming to get her and she left, anyway. It made me crazy to the point I couldn’t think, and then Dana lost her license. The entire legal process wore me down, and Supergrover was the gift I needed at a time when I was really open to receiving it.

I fucked up by loving her so completely I couldn’t see anything else, and not because it was wrong. Some of my actions were crazy, but I’m not. It was all painful and could have been avoided. But I’d already run from her several times, saying that I couldn’t be friends with a woman who excited me this much, and because we couldn’t separate, we didn’t. The swings just became bigger as my emotions grew. It was embarrassing to tell her I had to back off and why so she didn’t feel like I was dumping her because I wanted to. I had to. Dana could compete with romantic love, but platonic trumped it because it had to, not because I wanted it to, for two reasons. I felt like I couldn’t have reactions in front of Dana anymore, because it drove her crazy for me to have a woman in my life that was just as important as she was for very different reasons. She could not accept that Supergrover and I needed a relationship that was separate from her out of necessity, not malice. I knew that every one of my actions would be up for discussion with someone. As Sam Seaborn would say, “oh, this is bad on so many levels.”

Having a relationship with someone who runs hot and cold is not my jam when they’re as close to me as Supergrover is. If we hadn’t already been so close, running hot and cold wouldn’t be a thing because I wouldn’t notice or care.

I reached out for Bryn because our attachment is secure. I don’t have to worry because there are no swings too big. We know that the other’s style is anxious, so we take care of it up front rather than letting the other believe we’re pulling back, or let the other know when we need some space, but we’ll talk about what was said later; we need time to reflect. It is not time to choose what kind of life we want together, we just know it’s there if we want it. I cannot be on thin ice. I cannot run from her love because it’s just too big. I can’t jump into something the relationship can’t sustain. We are there for every regeneration, making it a good story in the end.

I could do, need to do more of staying up…………… to read the chapters she has written on her own.

Speak More to That -or- That’s So Interesting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

In my last entry I was talking about hearing people’s voices in my head when I type, literally transcribing a movie onto the page. Two of the voices I hear all the time are ex-girlfriends, and one of them means just as much as the other even though one relationship was seven years and change, the other was three months. That’s because they’re the two that caused me the most growth and development the fastest.

The first title comes from Dana doing an impression of her therapist. When Dana would put out a statement, she’d always say, “speak more to that.” Every time we got into an argument, pulling that one out made us both dissolve into laughter and we could proceed arguing again because it was never a case of right and wrong, but a case of figuring out how to move on. I didn’t want to pack up and live in our problems. I moved to Washington so I could say, “what’s next, Mrs. Landingham?” DC gave me the backdrop to believe I could be more than I was used to being in the world, and I am.

I mean something to someone who really means something. Her Wikipedia page would be better than mine. That my history is woven into hers in such a unique and beautiful way will never leave me.

Beautiful girl, whether you believe it or not, meeting you is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Just because there are complications doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Our Apple Watches also have complications, and we use them every day. I hope the day comes where our complications are in the right place. We both need to be on each other’s six, and I’m on it if you are. I just need you to want it more, and you can’t. Life is long. I’ll wait because you’re worth it, and you always will be. When we can say “one more mountain…. hey, so what” we’ll be able to say “trust me baby, this is love.” (That’s an Amanda Marshall song, but mountains just about cover it in terms of metaphor.)

Sometimes I hope I can resolve things with Supergrover, sometimes I don’t. I feel the same sort of push/pull I feel with Dana. That because Supergrover won’t talk to me the way she used to and it hangs shame over my head. I don’t want to live that way anymore when I’ve agreed to do big things for her the rest of my life, and I did that without really thinking it through in terms of being a blogger. Neither did she. Now it’s the tie that binds because I need you guys emotionally to support me and I can’t slip up. It’s walking on a wire every day, because she made it where she couldn’t not be my first thought. Clearly, she doesn’t want that, but it’s work product, not emotions that are my concern now.

I don’t know what to forget, and what to remember.

I can talk about absolutely getting wasted off her energy, but I can’t describe her too closely. I can only tell you she’s up there with Helen Mirren on my list of gorgeous women (no one can beat out Helen, stop trying…….. but Supergrover does think I have amazing taste in women). I can say she has power, but not where because it’s a niche and would make her immediately identifiable. I have to think like a journalist protecting a source, not a blogger with friends who have everyday issues not tied to working here. The power imbalance is absolute and correct.

So that means I think a lot about someone who doesn’t want to think about me, and not for malice. Just through the nature of how we work, which is vastly different from each other. The problem comes in when she will never have a problem smaller than me so that I can move up on the priority list while I am also struggling, genuinely. I can either move on and try to forget, or we can be close. In the middle is too scary because I don’t know what I’m doing….. and I’m a perfectionist, so it’s really hard to admit that.

I am sure that Supergrover thinks that me digging deep to let go is what should have happened long ago, but I didn’t realize then what I do now. We both regret making fuckups that affected our careers, but by not acknowledging it, we are keeping to our separate corners, unable to trust each other when we should lean on each other the most.

In my own life, it feels like I’ve given up a lot for her that she hasn’t recognized, and it hurts, but it’s not my responsibility to change her. It’s not even her responsibility to want to change. It’s deciding how much chaos I’m willing to breathe without putting a safety net under the trapeze. However, it was never in the interest of getting closer tot her, it was an added bonus in escaping from Dana and getting a clean slate. That’s because I cannot tell her story. Only she can do that. She cannot even tell it to me, much less others. Whether that part is ironclad or subjective is up for grabs, because I cannot know that, either.

I’ve made a lot of assumptions and missed a lot of messages. She stopped standing up to me and started telling me that I wanted too much, so she isolated me from everyone else including her. I have a legitimate issue where I need her more than anything and she’s the one person who doesn’t have any bandwidth left over for herself, much less me. I have a ton of empathy, and know that’s not the whole story. She gets offended, shuts down, and wants to rage at me, but doesn’t. She saves up my e-mails to reply later, because she feels guilty and now doesn’t have any context to make connections.

I wanted to stop that part.

There was an ironclad space for me before, and there isn’t now. I have always understood why, yet marveled at the time that’s gone by without us ever really getting to the bottom of anything…. or if I did, it was completely on my own, like having a therapist who disengages and you feel like they’re bored….. they’re not. They’re covering up how bad they want to scream “LEAVE HIM!” When I perceive disinterest, what they’re feeling is trying not to take on my problems as their own. Those messages are drastically different, and lost in a chasm if you don’t address it.

I don’t have that kind of relationship with Supergrover, but I do have that kind of push/pull. I need things and get frustrated. I express that, she tells me I’m the only one who ever ruins anything. Then, she won’t tell me why she thinks that. Why am I so impressive that I’m worth keeping around when your responses come off as defensive and angry? To me, when you love someone and think they’re extraordinary, it means you’re willing to invest. I caused the original rift, butt she said she forgave me. Our ways of moving on were completely different. She thought the best answer was never to trust me again, but keep up the surface level stuff. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. I won’t feel insecure in an attachment and keep feeding it. I don’t care if she’s mine in a way no one else is (and frankly, I’m hers in a way no one else is). When she doesn’t look at my letters with love, she feels guilty and runs away. She shits on herself every time, saying that something isn’t good enough for me when it’s just that we have more to work out, and it’ll keep. Life is long.

She doesn’t feel as excited and impressed by her as I am, therefore why should I be interested in her? Meanwhile, she is 3D chess built on a Rubik’s cube. As I told her, “if you think about your story hard enough, you should want to hit that, too.” That was a time in which jokes like that actually made her laugh, because honestly. It’s just true.

We are connected because “what God has put together, let no man put asunder.” She is not God in this case, but she’s the face I use when I need to visit that place inside me to work out my shit on my own.

Through it, I can maintain a connection to the God I serve and how it is both Old and New Testament, vengeance and promise, everlasting life, and even still I’m making it up as I go along with fake as Christianese.

I just think of it as “the church has left the building.” If I translate that into line cook, it’s “we don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it.”

Going into your closet to pray has always been an excellent turn of phrase for me, and now it’s even more important. I don’t have to speak out loud to be heard. You guys listen enough as is. But you are the God that can take it, the face made up of many names, wants, and desires. I use God as the punching bag, not my beautiful girl. I can’t be sure that God is listening, but sure as shit, you are.

The second title come from an old girlfriend who knocked me on my ass with clever. she was a Rhodes Scholar who had the facade of a kooky teacher, but that was for show. She was brilliant, and a fantasy. We were at different places in our lives, but that didn’t stop us from having a ton of fun and leaving each other better than we found us….. eventually. It was hell when we first broke up because we had to live with each other, anyway (that has no bearing on my current situation……… Jesus. She’s straight. I’m gay. And we still would have had an easier time of it if we’d had triplets. I can laugh about that because we’re both past the age where we’d want to have kids, anyway.

But I know her. If I said “let’s foster” even ONE TIME we’d have five kids by EOB. But to be fair, that was her 10 years ago. She probably just adopted half her neighborhood instead. It’s one of the things that makes her Supergrover to me. It’s fun to have a hero that is also approachable. I think it’s because I am, too. I just talk about my life and invite other people to talk about theirs. I don’t choose friends based on what they can do for me, as much as they think I do when I don’t feel my needs are being met despite fulfilling theirs. Deciding how much energy they get of mine when I’m not getting theirs. It’s not dependent on how each other feels, but how well we can communicate to a happy medium where both people feel like they’re being heard. it is much more lonely to feel alone when someone else is in the room.

My ex-girlfriend used to touch my hand and say “that’s so interesting” to show that she really was intellectually turned on by something. It showed joy and passion on her face for every subject on earth. The whole time I’ve been writing, she’s been touching my shoulder and saying “interesting” the way she’d say it just so. I hear her in my head all the time, as a lot of my life is so interesting.

I cannot speak more to that.

I just know it’s there, and I’m grateful. I am settled within myself in a number of ways. I hope for a resolution in the end, it’s just going to take more than she thinks, but less than I do. If she thinks love is best served by avoiding conflict, that’s fine. I just need her to not do it to me, because she’s reinforcing the idea that I am no longer a value add and hasn’t stopped…….. when to me, I am Jay and she is Silent Bob. She is Harold. I am Kumar. We would look so cute together in a picture because if she’d just posted a photo of us in real life with a caption that said “I’m dating Pete Davidson” people would have believed it. They would have thought she was just as out of her damn mind as his other loves, while also being quietly pissed that they’re not dating Pete Davison, too (or her, for that matter. Christ on a cracker.).

But one relationship taught me how to feed the others. My relationship with my ex-girlfriend settled into her feeling at home with both Dana and me. There was a much larger age gap between us than Supergrover and me, so I was used to the yin and yang of having different cultural references and having to look them up. They’re west coast, I’m Houston. They’re Tupac, I’m Bun B. Different issues, different playing fields.

I am not explaining the rules of the game. I am giving color commentary on what it’s like to play it when there is no discussion or alteration of rules. You have to improvise and work with what you’ve been given.

Yet the more I speak to things, the less information you have. It’s just so interesting.

It All Mixes Together

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I remember things by the way people say them, because if it’s a good line, I will hear it in their voices for the rest of my life. Good lines often have a cadence to them. For instance, my pastor came up with “resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.” I came up with “messages I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.” I gravitated toward it because it had the same musicality. One line leads to the next, a call and answer. Resurrection happens by examining the emotional places you’ve never been.

I have memories playing in my head like movies a good bit of the time. My writing is what happens when I stick my head into a pensieve, and I’m giving you access to it. The messages I’ve missed are often in plain sight when I’m seeing me as a different person, rather than perpetually reliving things. I am not reliving anything, I am searching for what I can do better in the future, and that only happens when you can look at yourself and see both your inner Aziraphale and Crowley.

How do I know what will work in the future if I don’t know how I broke the past? I know how I’ve broken my past because I wrote it down, essentially giving myself a past because few people write about their lives to this degree. When they go back to reassess, their memories are faulty. You cannot say that yours is infallible, but if there’s a blog entry on what happened written that day, that memory is secure by the nature of the timestamp. I’m not just making shit up. I am also very musical with words by nature of crafting rhythmic phrases on my horn, music only I can hear because only I know the voices on who said what.

I retain information with rhythm, essentially becoming a mimic in my writing and in my thoughts; I don’t just go back to that one line. It feels like I’m standing in the same room again, even just for a few seconds.

I give myself a lot of good advice by going back and reading what I thought years ago and seeing if I’m doing okay comparatively. Except that I don’t think of it as listening to myself, but the people who inspired my writing that day. It’s like an actor watching their old films. They aren’t living in the story on screen, but the one about how the art was created.

I like having written intimate things about the people in my life, hoping that the musicality of my words will stick with them, because being my friend isn’t easy. They all have their favorites, I’m sure, and their favorites never match up to my favorite things I’ve written about them.

Bryn loves the mirror I hold up on our relationship because she says it teaches her new things about herself. She gets what I’m trying to be, which is so real that people identify. I don’t want to be famous, I want to be heard. That’s why I don’t have to be on Oprah to know I’m making a difference. My platform is smaller, sure, but a platform nonetheless. And on the Internet, where everything is protected by a wall of anonymity, I never know when I’m speaking to people like her or people like me.

In fact, now that I think about it, Oprah did give me the best advice ever. On the last episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she talked about how everyone has a platform. Your family. Your church unit. Your work colleagues. All of those people add up, so no matter how small you think that platform is, it’s enormous. Use it.

Oprah’s not on at 4:00 PM anymore, so someone has to pick up the slack.

It’s the message I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.

This is the Thursday of Our Discontent

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how I did it.

But I have a guess.

Somehow I did not post yesterday’s entry before the clock flipped over on the server. So, I did today’s writing prompt yesterday and now I have no idea what to do. I still have food prompt pieces to finish, but it’s not a “finishing” mood. It requires an editorial brain I do not have today. This is the winter of our discontent, the long, dark Bloguary of the soul, the long day’s journey into white (live, laugh, love).

I am being so dramatic for someone who just has to come up with a damn writing prompt on her own. Leslie, you do this every day. Every. Day. Buck up, buttercup.

Pack a lunch, son.

When I’m sitting in my room writing, I remember that scene from the 50th Anniversary Special for “Doctor Who.” Ten, Eleven, and The War Doctor are arguing, and for those who don’t watch the show, that’s three actors playing the same person at different points in their lives. Matt Smith (Eleven) starts laughing when they’re arguing and says, “I just realized this is what it must be like when I’m alone.” “What it’s like when I’m alone” is very much John Hurt, Matt Smith, and David Tennant arguing in my head, because that’s how it’s the easiest to tell what issues are working on which processor.

For instance, the heartbreak of losing Supergrover at my own hand eight years ago is nothing compared to the pain of trying to make it work and repelling each other so that neither of us were happy. But the threads processing on that core are alongside the other core, which is joy that goes all the way back to “you like to rap to Eminem? Explain to me exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS..” She said “you’ll fall in love with truth an honesty, as adorable as I might be.”

She’s right. I confused them and then got my head on straight. Trying to prove that my head is on straight has been enormous, because I was jumping up and down for attention in my own way, just not the ways in which she thought I was. She was getting mad at me by focusing on the wrong things. For instance, I wrote her something that meant “there’s nothing that you could tell me that would scare me away and I love you.” She took it as “who you are as a person is bad.” Those messages are drastically different.

Thus, trying to write it all out and it seems repetitive because I’m aware of the fact that not everyone reads every day. I have become the Ann M. Martin of bloggers. There’s a story here, but you have to make it through explaining club rules and characters for the people that would be confused if they read a book as a standalone. It also gives me room to stretch out because I’m not working on all cores every day. I see thoughts from the day before and something jumps out at me.

Blogging seems self-aggrandizing when you’re processing because it’s necessarily all about you. You can’t think about anyone else’s behavior as good or bad, you have to say what happened and how you reacted. You are not an authority on how the other person acted and reacted, because you’re not their combination of experiences or family history. Where it gets problematic is other people thinking I’m being a dick when I’m trying to say “I don’t live in your head, but you certainly live in mine.” Everything I wish I could tell them, but can’t because neither of us have time. I reflect on my problems in the third person when I do.

They’re free to read it, but when they do, they often think that I’m writing the way something went down to hurt them, when I’m trying to understand me. This is not limited to Supergrover, because I talked about her yesterday. This is every single person in my life who is threatened by the fact that I write. She told me at last interaction that I was entitled to all my stories, and I hope to God that’s true. I would never say anything to negatively affect her on purpose, and I’ll leave it at that.

Not just Supergrover, everyone in my life so far has thought about the negative things I’ve said more than the positive. If they can’t give me hell, they take it out on Lindsay because she’s local. I’m not Walter Winchell. I’m Brene Brown in real life. How her stories of “the story you’re telling yourself” play out in an anxious/avoidant trauma bond and how most people have them with their parents even when they haven’t been emotionally or sexually abused. Just as often the child has one style before and one style after. The style after is a mask, a myth we made in the middle of the mess to cope. The relationship with an abuser is always an anxious/avoidant attachment because the kid is so keyed up about accidentally giving someone away, and the adult is a monster, shearing a sheep many times because you can only skin it once.

Just so Supergrover doesn’t get wires crossed and think I’m saying my abuse repeated and she’s the monster, let me take a second and reassure her that’s not what happened at all. We’re just two different attachment styles because of who we are as people, and it’s the two adult attachment styles that have the most compatible wounds because our emotional blind spots are completely different. People who have an avoidant/attachment style have it because someone withheld love from them when they didn’t act as planned, especially their abuser, the one they’ve been programmed to think of as God. Your personality goes back to the moment your reality broke, the moment you became responsible for secrets too big for you to carry…. because the way you’re covering it up is counter to how you used to act, it’s taken as a behavioral issue and few people are smart enough to outsmart a child who’s been programmed not to trust their parents or therapist.

I ran toward Supergrover not because of anything illicit like an affair. It’s that her inner circle feels like being part of Lindsay’s, where I can’t tell people everything she’s working on, even when it affects me directly- like Lindsay’s hand in queer legislation but on different issues. I have been programmed to be a confidant from childhood, and it’s a whole other thing to choose to hear stories that are large rather than to have them put on your shoulders during years 12-14; you don’t even know enough to know that adults don’t do that to kids when they’re healthy. It’s the same dynamic as when a parent’s a drunk- the inversion of parent/child roles. With Supergrover, I get to bring my whole self to the table. I don’t forget about the past, I use it to inform my future. Supergrover and I just did that thing where fools rush in. Now she thinks I want her to tell her my stories so that I have more material, and I think that the reason I have to process so much on my own is that she’s ok with letting me twist in the wind and it is not okay. There are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the objective truth. Peace is found in knowing that I am finding my truth and reaching for the objective. But I don’t know the whole story, I know as much as I’m allowed to hear.

While that’s happening, Lindsaay told me I can write the story of us and our ugly stepsisters and to say whatever the fuck I want. My mother and her husband are both dead, and we no longer speak to their family. We just want to move on. The gist of it is that Lindsay found out about the funeral from Facebook. Our stepsisters didn’t even tell us when the graveside service was so we could be there when he was buried next to our mother. I’m going to do a saga, I’m not just mentioning it. I want to find the objective truth, the third eye looking down on both sides. I can’t know the story they told themselves, but I know the story of how it made me feell.

I will find it by writing it out, and so might they. But they’d never let me open the book.

Keeping on the Lights

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

For Dana and Supergrover, because they deserve to know what happened and why, and also why they’re the loves of my life and would have been for all time if we had been a team.

I’ve learned to keep the backlight on when I type, because if I keep the RGB going, there’s less of a chance that the Bluetooth connection will drop.

It’s a metaphor for my life.

Being with Supergrover is different in every way possible depending on how she’s connected to you. I’m one of the ones inside the wire. Just like Lindsay doesn’t tell me everything, but there’s more a chance that I’ll be bored by it than anything else.Yet, I broke up with Dana because there are two examples in my past where she betrayed my confidence, so I knew that when Supergrover could trust me, I couldn’t trust Dana and I was out.

I hinted that to both. I didn’t want to lay it all on the table back then because I couldn’t tell her that I had a solid reason for moving to DC that included Supergrover, and I didn’t tell Supergrover that because she would have thought I was guilting her when I wanted to be her hero. She was already mine. Moving was only an attempt to put physical distance between Dana and me, and to give physical proximity to someone who might want it, might not. Obviously, I’m not bothered with sharing physical space because I’ve been friends for 10 years with Supergrover despite buying coffee for each other and not drinking it together… We’re still friends in my mind because we’ll always be on each other’s radar whether we talk or not and I don’t want to live in enmity.

We all would have had a much more traumatic relationship if it had gotten worse. Both would feel guilt if I expressed something I thought of as a problem to work through, not an indictment on our relationship. I sent both of them away when they wouldn’t open up anymore because I was lost in my own world without it.

I, in a very real sense, had fallen in love with the one person I couldn’t marry or divorce. When we try to stay apart long term, something will happen here that gets noticed. I’m hampered as a writer. I had to remain devoted to her for both our sakes and vice versa, impossible when you don’t talk to an empath. I had to learn not to want that, though. I am attracted to emotionally unavailable people, now more than ever because I can maintain my own boundaries and don’t truly need anyone, but I’d like them.

I left them behind because they couldn’t talk about their boundaries.

I forgave Supergrover for the things she’d done that made me angry in a concrete way. She talked around everything. Empaths don’t do that. I can detect by energy when you’re holding something back. Supergrover would wait until she was absolutely overwhelmed and pop off at me; she put me on the back burner until she was stressed out. Then, she’d blame me for being insistent when I told her that I’d do anything to stop notifications on her phone if she did want to read and didn’t have time. I wasn’t telling her to be johnny on the spot, so she thought I was a dictator when I was responding in real time. Kindness went unnoticed emotionally, but showed itself in our thoughtful gifts.

I just didn’t see we couldn’t divorce before and I went all out in being an idiot fuckboi. She was straight, but that was only one issue. She was taken and she didn’t tell me, so I was playing with fire.

I hoped she was sapiosexual because I’m a silver-penned devil. She wasn’t, but I didn’t care. She still made a great character in my life. Dana encouraged my romantic feelings by telling me Supergrover was hiding them and she’d never make the first move. I can’t think of when I’ve ever believed anything so stupid. I can’t think of a reason Dana would do that if not to just add kindling to the fire and break up faster without telling me she wanted it. She was nice and not kind.

It would have tracked to me that she wanted to see me fail. I became addicted to the drinks Supergrover was serving. Just straight up Narcotics Anonymous. Dana would understand absolutely all the way around because she knows Supergrover thanks to me and I wished she didn’t, because that was a large part of our divorce. Not trusting Dana was more of import than she realized when she betrayed my trust with multiple other friends, and anyone would’ve in this situation but not when they refuse to see it.

Because we can fly now, Supergrover told me what she drives so I figure that if coming to visit me was a priority, she’d survive the cattle call at Southwest. Virtually, she’s grown into my guard dog here, but it’s taken so much time for us both to stretch out………….. which is the perfect description of what our relationship should do rather than both of us trying desperately to move on because we’re addicted to being strangers on a train and repelling each other because of our careers.

Our notifications are every bit as addicting as crack, and that is true on both sides even when we don’t respond right away. I’m just wrapped too tight because I think she still feels threatened and she is because she doesn’t know when the other shoe is going to drop, so she doesn’t tell me anything that calms me. I ratchet up her anxiety by being me, in whom she has trusted and gotten burned. I need her in my life for very concrete, objective reasons and yet I am passed over for the subjective because the objective is not important to either of us right up until it is. The objective is something that she would only tell a partner, and she doesn’t see it that way because she’s not me and doesn’t have to filter every day. Her story is based on seeing everything about my reality while she’s thinking I’m aiming at destruction. It is not true. I am not kidding when I say she’s the love of my life and will be whether I want it that way or not because we both made the ultimate fuck up and can’t get over it.

Words matter.

She changed my life with them, and didn’t accept that the way she did it would affect my future. She’d send me everything except her heart, which makes me take my fair share of bullshit, not that I don’t create it on my own.

I’m begging for growth. We are dealing with a situation I can’t write about publicly so I write to her. If she denies that fact and doesn’t have a connection to me, I could make a mistake that hurts her and I just don’t want to do it.

I proved that I was just as paranoid as she was and not just with Dana. I gave her relief when she realized that if I got close to someone mutual, they could be dangerous to her. Neither of us wanted it to happen. She just wanted it more than I did, so I gave her that gift…………………….. but I told her why it hurt and it was a mistake. She saw me as bitter when I just wanted her to recognize that I was willing to do whatever it took to keep her. I was in it for the long haul.

I began seeing another woman that didn’t need to become a mutual friend. I didn’t know that was a possibility and got rid of her quickly. That second one was huge in a way that she took in and thanked me, but she didn’t give me any more trust capital than she did before. Instead of realizing that I was protecting her like she was protecting me, she focused on her guilt. She would lash out at me when I needed anything, so I felt like she took up much more room in the relationship by necessity, but didn’t recognize that she also became my confidant out of necessity and expected me to put up with it without saying anything. I didn’t feel bad about anything she said. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to need anything, ever, but instead of taking care of each other, we turned our fire.

It broke our triangle because Dana didn’t write to her as often as I did, so they never maintained a relationship. It caused a divide and conquer move, because I told Dana something she didn’t get to hear and I didn’t know that. Then, I did something that couldn’t be forgiven and it wasn’t, because she treated me completely differently and things never went back to normal- even after years of apologies.

I’m stepping out on a ledge, because my behavior didn’t make sense to anyone back then, and I want to lift the curtain because it was so much more reasonable than I could tell people it was. I came across as a lovesick teenager at that time in my life, when the situation was actually dire. Hopefully, this will explain a little about why I was so flipped out in other people’s heads, and so logical when no one was looking for it.

Dear Supergrover,

If you can say that I’m still goading and provoking instead of asking for information after I wrote you something that I thought you’d actually take in, then I know this relationship is completely dead. There is no two-way communication, and there never will be. We cannot do any better than this, and it’s a train wreck, all because you say you can do nothing about telling me how you feel.

How I feel is that once trust was broken, you just wanted to be a fan, and I thought you were reaching out to get closer. When I accidentally texted you, that was it for me. I was shamed beyond belief because you didn’t believe for one second that it was an accident until I wrote out what happened on my blog and you dropped in two days later. I wasn’t telling you to come back. I was explaining to my readers that I’d done something wrong.

Editor’s Note:

She thought I was trying to harass her when I absolutely wasn’t and felt threatened. Therefore I was surprised that a woman who thought I was threatening her still wanted to be friends. It didn’t seem logical, and I wanted to know why she wanted me back, in a sense. If I had to guess, it’s because it felt to me like I’d feel when someone was hate fucking me.

You’re charged up with adrenaline when you fight, and it’s the equivalent of us taking Adderrall when one of you is not ADHD. I become an addict very, very quickly because dopamine is more like Adderrall than any other drug.. You feel it immediately and it’s just as powerful as three energy drinks at once. Neurotypical people buy Adderrall and spin out, because they crave it- it’s so great in the short-term. The side affects will slowly ruin your life, which is in a very real sense exactly what happened between us. Supergrover has different needs from most people and I’m one of them. I was getting high on dopamine and she wasn’t handling a crash she caused. But we have a solid reason to keep getting high off each other. She said “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor as well.” We’re both drunk as fuck and don’t know how to talk about it. Doesn’t stop the addiction. We wouldn’t have lasted this long if we could kick it. The thing, though, is that when we’re working on all cores and threads, we are unstoppable. We make each other’s minds better, but we blew the idea of divorce out of the water like we were shooting skeet. That’s because now we’re both unhappy and connected irrevocably.

You got stuck when my mother died, because you didn’t tell me you only wanted to be a fan, but now it’s eight years later and you still act like I have no trust capital at all, berating me for all my opinions and putting words into my mouth. I do the same thing to you because you don’t say anything and I have to fill in all the gaps on my own. You seem amused until I actually want to talk about an issue and you don’t.

There’s not an issue you actually want to talk about anymore, it’s just avoidance no matter what I do or say. I didn’t have to move to DC to break up with Dana because it would have been the right move whether I’d stayed in Houston or not. because what you fail to realize and have for a long time is that telling me the secrets we share was a divide and conquer move, because when you were displeased, I didn’t want to tell Dana anything ever again. I know you had no idea what you were setting in motion, therefore there is nothing to blame except the situation, not you.

I had never kept any secrets from Dana before, therefore I had no idea how it would play out. But would I trade this relationship for that one with almost nine years of reflection? Fuck no.

I would have traded *anything* for the first two years alone. Anything.

I wish I’d managed myself better, because it wouldn’t have turned you into the wire monkey I cling to despite the lack of cloth. It’s not a slam, it’s reality.

You know how I feel about you and you’ve been okay with it unless I actually needed to tell you something and have you respond. How you can ignore the good while focusing on the bad is easy to take in, because you’re a Timeless Child just like me. The trauma bond bears little resemblance to you personally. It’s that we both trauma dumped and handfasted, then I spiraled out and you didn’t. I can respect you not having empathy for bipolar or ADHD, but I cannot respect you protecting yourself forever based on that mistake when I have gone so far and above to prove to you that you’re safe.

I’m a cook/writer. Do you think that sharing my resources with you was easy?

Of course it wasn’t, but it was the only way I knew how to put my thoughts into something you might accept as an apology because words weren’t doing it and gifts did. You could see changed behavior that you didn’t with letters in a concrete way. I didn’t do it to spend money, I did it to turn my love language into action the way I would have if you’d ever let me buy you that beer Aaron still owes you.

Now you won’t step up at all, and I know my place. So far, it is not with you. If I have to ask you to carry the bricks, you’re not the one I should be building with. And if that fills you with rage, so be it, because you haven’t changed your behavior in a way I could see it. Where are the words that mean as much to me as actions mean to you? I have told you that my love is real through both, but you only seem to count one.

I love this city and I’m glad you’re here, but DC is home. I can keep tallying up the reasons that it is good for me, and your fear of me moving here put me into a chokehold. You asked Dana if you needed a restraining order when I’d only told you 50 times that I missed DC and I needed to get out of Houston. That didn’t change just because I was spiraled out, and I did get better. We just kept fighting because I was so bitter about it.

So, when I tell you that you’re harping on me by telling me I’m a judgmental dickhead all the time, it will not stand that you just keep doing it.

So, before you entirely write me off, know that I think you probably do take care of your friends. I just think that I am no longer one of those people and you’ve just been lying to me all these years because you were lying to you and you haven’t done anything to prove me wrong. I don’t put much stock into SBUX. It’s not that it’s not great, it’s that it can’t be the thing that helps both of us move on.

You’ll listen when I’m all about the gifts and adoration, but not when there’s a problem. You think that a problem means I think less of you, when I’m just trying to say there’s a problem. It doesn’t mean anything in terms of the way I think about you, but I’m done having to listen to it.

When you start treating me like you actually forgive me instead of shutting down, you’ll be allowed back into my circle. If you don’t, I will know that I just chose the pattern I love the most…. that it was always about finding someone emotionally unavailable and trying to please them because I didn’t have the skills to do anything else.

I have acknowledged my humanity and have told you my thought process. You keep yours hidden. That’s why I think you need to get yourself together. It’s that if you’re emotionally available with your husband and your other friends, then I’m the only one you have this pattern with and therefore you think it’s completely invalid. I think that’s because you’re hiding the fact that we’re not really friends.

I stepped up and you didn’t. It’s been eight years. I do not deserve this. You can disagree with me and change your mind, but you can’t be the friend that rips me a new asshole every time you can’t talk about something due to your own protective reflexes.

I talk about every reaction as if you’ve done something because of me because I don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside influences and you won’t correct any of my assumptions.

When you give me no information, you can’t be angry I don’t have it. I wanted to correct that problem, and you bailed.

Nothing about this is my problem anymore. I just wanted to tell you yet again that my feelings/issues are valid. I deserved more than this. I deserve more than this.

Editor’s Note:

I should have told her I loved her at the end, but I didn’t. Everything in our relationship boils down to how I say things. If she focuses on my anger, it’s easier to push me away. So, to her, I do love you. More than you’ll ever know. See past e-mail for details.<3

Every Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How often do you walk or run?

I do not have a car, therefore I take the bus or the Metro everywhere. This leads to a good deal of walking, but I prefer it to driving. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but I love all the guilt-free reading and writing time. I carry my Fire tablet and my Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, and it fits perfectly in my lap without making me take up more than my fair share of room. Plus, mobility is great for creation. My ideas come faster and more furious when I’m walking, and I’m grateful.

I never take walking for granted, although I will say up front I’m bad at it. I look untrained in the ways of walking sometimes because I have a mild case of cerebral palsy that affects my movement and balance. It is still preferable to what my life might be like if my CP was worse. I have empathy for everyone who struggles with physical issues, and there is no such thing as competitive suffering. I have perspective. I suffer much less than people with walkers or in wheelchairs, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer at all.

I prefer walking when my friends are with me, because it’s ok for me to hold onto them when I need it. In fact, I think Zac prefers it. 😉 CP is not the only thing that makes me need to hold onto others. I don’t have depth perception, so sometimes I don’t lift my foot high enough for a step and trip. Sometimes I don’t judge the distance from the doorjamb to my shoulder correctly and hit it harder than one might think. I also have an alternating field of vision because my eyes don’t track together, so the worst I’ve ever been hurt is when I haven’t seen a step down. This is because my reflexes aren’t generally fast enough to save me. It is not unusual for me to have a scrape on my face because of it. I am generally covered in bruises, only some of which I can explain because it’s just too time consuming to walk back through my day and post-mortem.

When I’m exhausted, all of these issues get a hundred times worse.

My friends are helpful. Strangers are not. I have fallen and hurt myself to the point that my pants are ripped, my knee is skinned up, and there’s blood on my face…. yet no one has ever offered to help me up unless they already knew me. I do not expect strangers to help me, I’m just surprised because it’s hard for me to see other people in pain and not stop.

I would like to continue being surprised about this rather than jaded and bitter. No one is just like me, and few people are as empathetic, and I don’t mean this as “I’m all that and you’re trash.” I mean that my personality type, INFJ, is only present in 9-15% of the world’s population. We are the pastors, counselors, and social workers of the entire population. We are not all religious, but we are all spiritual. The reason we’re the empaths of the world is that we’re relentless in self discovery. We want to find us so we can find you.

People only understand each other to the level that they understand themselves, because when someone tells another their story, the listener is filtering it though all their life experiences. Whether the other person’s experience is good or bad is based on the listener’s first family, the partner they have with their family, and the way they have always operated.

I have been walking and thinking about this for 10 years now, because 10 years ago I had an experience for which very few people have filters. I didn’t know shit from Shinola™ and made a ton of mistakes. I grew from them, but I’ll never be the same person I was, either. It’s one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. We all have many lives, we just don’t change faces to do it. I never want to forget that story, nor the ones that proceeded from it. They are more beautiful to me as I age, because I never want to forget this version of me.

I am writing a story; I want it to be a good one in the end.

Right this moment, it is not good or bad. It is not time to choose. It is time to reflect, give myself distance, and pick up the pieces. My routine has changed greatly, and I am thankful for it…. most of the time. At others, the situation and people are so irreplaceable that it feels like I will never get over losing it. I set the ball in motion for all this happening, and that makes me even more prone to bouts of deep grief, because it’s harder to forgive yourself than anyone else.

If I do forgive myself, it will only be by putting one foot in front of the other, forging a new path…. without becoming so bitter and jaded that I’m unable to forgive and forget. Not only do I not want to close the door permanently, it would be incredibly unfair of me to do so considering how many times I’ve walked away and reneged. I just don’t want to go out of my way to fix things anymore. Eventually, you start noticing when a relationship has no return on investment, because we were not checking the story we were telling ourselves. It was off to an enormous degree. It hurt that my arguments were always shut down; that I was not allowed to need anything while she was allowed to ask for everything and receive it, no questions asked. The imbalance was okay for a while. Too long, actually. The last straw for me was the person who brought those circumstances into my life disagreed with me for many reasons, and wouldn’t tell me what they were.

We fought tooth and nail, when that wasn’t my goal at all. Depending on the day, we were each trying to hug a cactus. We would be able to complete each other and celebrate our differences if we were both willing to slow our roll. Our adrenaline ran too high, and we crashed. Neither one of us has it in us anymore.

But even when I’m angry, she’s still my favorite person. I call her Supergrover because even when I think she’s acting monstrous, she’s still cuddly, adorable, and blue. Ok, maybe not that last one. But she does have a double master’s in irreverence and profanity. We are so much alike that it’s easy to see how we got here. People generally hate things in other people that they hate about themselves.

We are sitting back to back, unable or unwilling to simply turn around…..

And walk back towards the other.

Honestly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite word?

The reason “honestly” is my favorite word is that it rhymes just for me. If you ask me what I mean, I will tell you that I can’t do that. It only rhymes for me. It’s not even an inside joke. It’s music only I can hear…. a waltz, and Strauss is about to bring in the horns.

I love music honestly and completely, the most pure thing in my life because there’s nothing a choir and orchestra can’t fix. In my head, anyway. When I’m sad or angry, two things happen. The first is that I sing it out. The second is that I conduct it out.

The last time I had to conduct about a problem, it was Desplait. Alexandre Desplait wrote the score to “Argo,” and conducting anything on that album is a full body workout. I am a terrible conductor. Just terrible. I don’t do it to get better. I do it to get exhausted.

It’s the only way I really fall asleep. I have never slept much, and people kid me all the time. “Do you ever sleep?” is popular in my crowd, but it’s true I don’t need much. Most of the time I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 0500 unprompted. This week it’s a little different because I can tell that my mood is swinging upward, and I don’t know that because of mood and behavior. The only real side effect that I have consistently with hypomania is insomnia. I feel lucky that it’s not worse, but it’s like getting my period. I am tired and in pain all the time because of brain race. Why can’t I sleep if I’m so tired? My body is not running the show. If my brain says it’s an all nighter, my body will fight it tooth and nail. When that happens, I can take 75 or 100mg of Benedryl and it won’t do a damn thing.

I’ll have to see a doc about it eventually, but I’m a writer so I hardly notice. Have I been writing for three hours or three days? It is always a mystery when I’m finished writing as to the date, day, and time. Luckily, I can look it up quickly. I just notice that finishing writing is a lot like waking up in the morning- discombobulating because you don’t know where you are after writing, either. But that’s what makes writing worth it. If you are a writer, fiction or non, you get to live in three worlds instead of just waking and dreaming. The characters and research turn into plot and setting. You cannot see anything outside of it while thoughts are pouring forth. A bear could rip out the back wall on my house and if I was writing, I wouldn’t even notice. I don’t even need headphones most of the time.

I’m not saying that my process is any different because I have it wired and other authors don’t. I am explaining a universal concept. All writers are more than one person. Even with non-fiction, there’s your writing personality and your physical space personality. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they’re not. I hope Karen Slaughter is a “not.” 😉

I take responsibility for everything I write, because I know that I’m influencing culture. My platform has gotten bigger over the years, but so many people have repeated the things I’ve written/said as their own that I hear my own words out of someone else’s mouth a lot…… particularly when they’re forgetful because I have the memory of an elephant for what I read. I can remember conversations with Supergrover nearly verbatim because being friends virtually meant I had to read everything to respond. That’s the way I take in information the best. So, part of the reason that she thinks I’m judging her is that I’m actually using her words and she doesn’t remember that she said them. I don’t mean that in a “gotcha” kind of way. I remember everything she’s said, not just the words that hurt. That’s because she’s a great writer and I try to quote her as much as I can because the way she said something fits an occasion perfectly and I got nothin.’

I can’t talk about my writing without talking about my inspiration.

Honestly.

AITA?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

It’s not really a question. I know I’m an asshole a good bit of the time… or I seem that way, because I’m direct and don’t sugar coat anything. I live the mantra of “be kind, not nice.” The difference is that “nice” says “oh, it’s okay” no matter what the other person does or says. “Kind” says “these are my boundaries. If you want a relationship with me, here’s how.” The reason it’s kind and not nice is that it’s counterintuitive. It’s hard as hell to have conversations about emotional boundaries and no one likes them, so let’s just avoid, avoid, avoid. That’s when a problem goes from small to enormous. I talked about that this morning when the daily writing prompt hit me hard…. and then something else hit me harder.

I don’t use all my e-mail accounts all the time, because I’ve gotten lazy and don’t authenticate every e-mail account on every device. It hasn’t been a problem until today.

I missed an e-mail from “The War Daniel.”

It’s been sitting there since August 25, and I know him. He probably thinks I’m mad at him when I just didn’t see the e-mail. I mean, yes. I’m totally mad at him and he can take a right….. and then I think, “the reason I say ‘take a right’ is that I got it from him and I hear him in my head every time I say it. Might want to slow your roll there, hoss.”

For those just joining us, Daniel is my ex-fiancee. He broke off the engagement in a fit of rage, but the fight was so worth having that it was good he just left. His daughter is trans. I’m bi. He didn’t know shit about either, and thought I was trying to fight him when I was trying to reach him. He couldn’t see anything except his own pain, which I do not discount. He’s an addict. I know from addicts. Bipolar presents the same and I’ve been a line cook for years. I’ve wondered if the reason someone didn’t show up for work is that they drank themselves to death. Daniel’s alcoholism is absolutely that severe, because he’s a combat vet. It’s a long row to hoe for both of us. That being said, I have the skills to be in a relationship with someone that traumatized because for some people, that level of addiction is the worst thing they’ll ever witness. For me, it’s Tuesday.

He’s equipped to handle me because he’s the equivalent of a nurse practitioner. He knows from bipolar. I am sure that he’s seen a thousand cases over the years, because if you don’t have it and you’re an addict, please get in line. Your diagnosis will arrive shortly because alcoholism will induce it. Alcohol is the pitocin of the whole operation. Congratulations, it’s mental illness.

The e-mail only said “checking on you,” and my reply was equally innocuous.

But it doesn’t take away from the fact that he had the courage to show up. He didn’t make excuses or apologies. He checked in on me.

That’s something.

It’s something that could lead to something else, or not, and either way it’s fine. I’ve had enough distance from actually being asked to marry someone and having it blow up in my face later to forgive something like that. Here’s why it’s so easy. I know Daniel was in a lot of haze and confusion, and he won’t be completely competent to make any decisions like that until the fog clears out of his brain. I know it like the back of my hand. He is not fine. He will be fine.

As I said months ago, “what kind of partner would I be if I gave up on him right now?”

I choose to acknowledge his humanity now so that I can acknowledge his divinity later. I hope we’ll get to have that conversation, but I’m not banking on it. He’s just turning over in my head because of the e-mail. I honestly haven’t thought about our situation, because of his alcoholism. It’s not that I’m unfeeling or uncaring, but Supergrover and I discussed it and we agree that family and friends are not the people to help someone out of something like that. I had to let him go- and the hardest part was not being able to take him and drop him off at rehab. Not being able to go to family days. It would be the case no matter what, because I don’t live in the same state.

I didn’t just pick him up after he fell off a turnip truck, either. He’s been my friend since second grade. He was my first boyfriend in any official sense, a badge he wears proudly. He doesn’t care that I’ve been with women since. He’ll wear rainbows and shit as easily as I will. It’s not broad strokes he has problems with. It’s the fact that he’s not queer at all. I am not saying that to slam him or make him feel bad, it’s just that his frame of reference is completely different. He does want to learn, he was just dealing with too much at once.

Having completely spiraled out in the same situation, I have a lot of empathy. I honestly cannot hold back forgiveness because I am so sympathetic to what happens when everything conspires to make you crazy. Daniel is not as fabulous as I am, though, because he needs alcohol to be that level of crazy and I can handle it all on my own….. the badge I wear proudly.

I hope I’ll have the chance to teach him how to love me a second time…… because everyone sucks here. Placing blame will get us even closer to nowhere. We both pop off and regret. We both love hard. It remains to be seen what will happen, because I don’t put a lot of stock into three word e-mails….. except one I got from the aforementioned Supergrover that I would like to forward to Daniel because he doesn’t know how enormous it is and I do:

Also. Thank you.

Certainty

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you?

“The opposite of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.” -Anne Lamott’s priest friend, Tom

Everyone knows that guy. The one who paints their feelings as fact in a bad way. I differentiate because I often paint my feelings as fact, but that’s because I have the certainty of knowing I could be wrong, and my next responses will adapt to it. It’s what happens when you show up to an argument with the hoped outcome of reconciliation. When the only thing you have certainty about is the fact that you’re right, it’s not an argument anymore. It’s a lecture.

This particular topic hits hard because it’s exactly what Supergrover thought I was trying to do to her. To paint my feelings to get her submission, not her argument. I could not convince her otherwise no matter what happened because she didn’t know any of my other friends, had never been to any of my houses (I’ve lived in several over the last 10 years), had never looked at me while we were talking.

None of my friends think I’m a dictator except her. I have to remind myself of that constantly, because her avoidance tactic is to dismiss the whole argument outright and posit that my way of arguing must be because I’m judging her and not the situation.

She also doesn’t want to really resolve anything, so she hasn’t gotten the fun side of me in a long time- because we are not the same. She’ll sweep everything under the rug and act like nothing’s wrong for years on end. I will not. That’s because I have done it most of my life and catering to other people’s problems didn’t really help me at all. It helps her for me to need nothing, and I tried as hard as I could to be that for her… and not because she told me to do so. I know her reality, and just like I would never call Lindsay in the middle of the day and expect her to drop everything (if I was in a medical emergency, maybe), I wouldn’t call my beautiful girl, either. The difference between the two situations is if Lindsay arrived and she was mad at me, we would have it out between beeps on the heart monitor.

Supgergrover is the kind of person that keeps everything close to the vest, one with a stunning array of pockets. It has nothing to do with her professional persona, she’s always been like that. She’s always been a secret-keeper because abused kids are. I used to be exactly like her in the ways I didn’t want to be, now I’m exactly like her in ways that make me feel stronger than I’ve ever been.

I don’t protect people’s feelings, ever, because what I find is that in protecting people’s feelings, you’re actually not doing that at all. You’re avoiding feeling guilty and horrible in the moment, so you decide to sugarcoat something and then time happens. Now, that person has no idea how to respond to your new reality. When they react the old way because you weren’t clear, it just adds more kindling to the fire.

The flip side of the coin is that if you don’t tell anyone anything, you have the safety and security of your secrets not getting out, but that’s all. You aren’t creating the future of the relationship. Secrecy cuts off two-way communication because when you’re afraid of talking about one secret, you become afraid of talking about all of them. Letting another person do all the talking might make you relax in the moment, but they won’t walk away with clear boundaries and neither will you.

This is why secrets kill. They affect your ability to listen and to talk. Instead of having a conversation where two people are entirely focused on each other, it’s one person talking and one person sweating bullets about talking because they’re not really in the conversation. They’re lost in preparing to discuss something while running through the checklist of things they’re “not allowed” to say. You can take out the quotes when talking about adult issues, it’s just that so often “the thing we don’t talk about” is something a person should absolutely talk about, perhaps call the police for good measure. A person who is eight can be reliably trusted to keep a lid on what happens while their parents are away because, and I say this facetiously, kids are stupid.

That’s because to most parents, abuse happens to other kids. It’s not the the children who have done something wrong and have somehow deserved their lots in life. It’s that they’re good parents. They’re watchful. They don’t know any sexual predators.

People who have been abused have a better eye on their kids than those that haven’t, just because they understand the nature of the process. However, it doesn’t make them better at parenting if they haven’t healed themselves. They’ll have emotional blind spots for the rest of their lives, and they don’t gain sight with therapy. Your brain is permanently disfigured the way your skin would look if you’d been through a fire. You don’t get a therapist to get back the life you would have had before the abuse happened. You get a therapist to find out what you’re going to do with your new reality.

I’m outspoken because I am not the person that people have thought I was all these years. I couldn’t have been. I was holding on to emotional abuse because, and I say this facetiously, kids are stupid.

When you are certain about things, you know that there are no abusers around your child. But that’s the bad example I’m using for a lot of different things. For instance, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once said on international television that there were no gay people in Iran. You cannot tell me that this is an objective fact, but he was certain.

The American election wasn’t stolen in 2016, but some people are certain of it….. while ignoring the certainty of Russian celebration.

The only way to survive in this world is to act like you know absolutely nothing, because the moment you get locked into “the way things are,” you lose the ability to move into “the way things will be.” It is even harder for people who have dealt with childhood abuse, because they already fear change…. a secret might slip….

I’m certain of it.

There is No Such Thing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your ideal week.

There is no such thing as an ideal week for me. My life is too up and down to predict. What I do know is that an ideal week is spent balanced between my close friends/family and my writing. Enough isolation to satisfy me because my friends remind me why I don’t want it. I’ve had some incredible experiences over the last couple of days. It is a combination of things, mostly being able to say yes to things I said no to previously; it had the potential to make me avoid feeling bad about myself, and Timeless Children don’t do that. If there is blame to be had anywhere, we’ll find it. That is because we are used to being the cause of conflict because our abusers have told us that if we say anything, we will be. We don’t do it to protect us. That’s a side effect. We do it to protect you because we know you’re the adult and we’re not. You’ll be believed and we won’t.

I write to avoid a lot of that stuff because I don’t have the bandwidth to think about relationships on that level all the time, and I don’t pay as much attention to relationships in which I’m not in tune. I know when I’m not, I can sense it by the other person’s energy. Writing causes isolation and it feeds me, so I lose track of the world around me. It’s using my mental illness for fun and profit, really. I’ll never be The Bloggess, but there is a solid chance I’ll be Leslie Lanagan.

I put down my worries for a while and went to a bar that had an arcade with Zac, who then proceeded to treat me to Chinese-Peruvian fusion in a restaurant he was flabbergasted I didn’t know because it was a Jose Andres…. and I’d said that I love any excuse to throw Jose some money. Picking that restaurant in particular was part of the gift. It was eating amazing food, and supporting World Central Kitchen, which I believe is right up there with Doctors Without Borders in terms of reputation.

Today I’ve been shopping around on Amazon because I got a gift certificate. I ended up with a henley and three long-sleeved t-shirts because they’re essential in the fall. I basically spend all winter dressed like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory.”

I saw a t-shirt with a hammer and sickle that said “totally not a Russian spy” and I thought about it. I’ll have plenty of time to think it over in the future because Amazon will remind me I looked at that t-shirt once a week until I’m dead.

Tonight, Lindsay is taking me out to dinner (a bonus birthday gift because we’re going to a concert at the end of next month). She’s staying in Falls Church, Virginia, so we’re trying to work out where. I am just glad that I am getting a second night out in a row. I’m not sure that’s happened in years. I like it, because my appetite is suppressed most of the time and I eat more when other people are eating with me. Eating and drinking are very much alike that way. Not as much fun to eat or drink alone, whether it’s the glass of wine together after the kids are in bed or the coffee together before they wake up.

Those are the moments I live for with my friends, because the conversation is generally more intimate and I don’t do well with small talk. It doesn’t register, so I stop paying attention. The friends I love the most feel free to say whatever they want, when they want. That’s because they allow me the same courtesy.

It’s what makes every week an ideal week. I always have room to be me.

Filler

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?

I write exactly like I talk, so I tend to ramble the way I would in person without the need to feel aware of how long I’ve been talking because you’ll stop reading when you get bored or you’ll stay til I’m finished and either way it’s cool. No hard feelings. I know I’m a lot. 😉

But I hate filler, so if there’s one word I wish I could take out in conversation, it’s “um,” and preferably all the other nonsense that comes with thinking before you speak because you cannot see implications and speak simultaneously without tripping over your words….. or at least, I can’t. I’ve tried to be slower about responding so that I can work through the complications of what I’m feeling on my own and decide what to say. The closer you are to me, the longer it takes for me to speak. That’s because I care about what some people think because I don’t want my words to make a problem worse. I am trying hard to keep our relationship healthy by not reverting to who I was when I was younger. When I was younger, I was programmed to be a preacher’s kid, so I have that Southern pastor vibe. I also have a crippling need to take care of everyone else first. If I had money, I’d go broke, so I go for broke emotionally. I love taking care of my friends that way, being the one they call to discuss issues because they know they’ll get an opinion that’s genuine.

I wanted to learn to be an eloquent speaker, and I think in these pages I am- in person I do not have a delete key to go back and take out anything. It is frustrating to an enormous degree. Conversation is like cooking at home and writing is cooking in a professional kitchen made to help me move faster.

This is entirely due to my generation. We’re the ones that didn’t have much technology in our lives as children and became obsessed with it when we were older. That means our first Internet relationships started in high school and we’ve been doing it a long time. We all have friends we’ve never met and are comfortable with it. Sometimes it crosses over and sometimes it doesn’t, because what people write isn’t all of them.

I isolate in person, but not online because it’s the medium with which I have the most dexterity in conversation. I can pull information and make connections at an alarming rate in this medium that doesn’t come through in the physical space. I have shown myself the best and ugliest parts of my personality, and because it is in writing, I have a very good idea of how not to go wrong again. You don’t get that with conversation, because your memories bend and blend. You can’t do that when you can go back and just look at what happened. You don’t have to rely on what you understand happened, because it may not be accurate at all.

People fight over memories too much because they don’t go back and read them. Everyone has a text history to a certain degree or another and it helps you to keep perspective, but not when you don’t have the energy to scroll up once in a while.

In a sense, now everything in life depends on knowing which people in your life will scroll up for you and who won’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s the extent to which someone wants to know the objective truth of what happened and who wants to live in the story they told themselves even when it’s false information.

It’s a lot easier to be humble in any relationship when you can go back and say, “I’m sorry. Dick move on my part.” You get stuck in a relationship faster when you think your memory is more accurate than someone else’s while also refusing to look it up. We made the choice to put more of ourselves into this medium, not being published but texting to our families and friends more and more. We need to act like it. There’s proof of everything you do, and you are not the main character in every story. It helps me to think of it this way. In every situation I encounter, I ask myself whether I am speaking Spanish in front of Karen or whether I am Karen. The revolution will be televised.

I hold myself accountable to my e-mails, text messages, and blog entries. It all matters. But because I am in touch with my emotions, I don’t go back and try to justify my behavior at all costs. I don’t have the black hole of need clawing at me that says I must be right or I’m not a good person.

I am definitely a good person, but it’s because I acknowledge that I have done bad things, but my actions weren’t the entirety of me. I just don’t want a relationship where anyone holds me to my worst mistake, and I’m not going to be the person that does it to someone else.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, is a glorious mess.

I want to be able to say that clearly, without hesitation or subtext. But in person, there would have been a lot of spaces and, um….

No, I Just Hurt

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you holding a grudge? About?

I am not a person that holds onto things. There’s a part of me that would love a day with any one person from my past whether they’ve wronged me or not, with one glaring exception that I wouldn’t have thought would come in my lifetime……….. but I’m not even holding onto anger regarding that situation. I’m just angry about it in my writing because I do not want her as the kind of fan who thinks she can reach out any time she wants, because that would destroy me…… for a bit. There’s no one alive who ever really gets over anything. It just moves from a place of pain to “this is something that has happened,” but if the situation comes back up, the feelings you had then are still stored in your body. Even if the same thing isn’t happening, it will feel the same way.

I would like to see the look on Supergrover’s face if and when we had to have we had that conversation, because my beautiful girl is a monster on a leash…… that she carries in her mouth and will let you hold if she thinks you are worthy of lifting Mjolnir. My mind bent like a pretzel when she decided I was. If you try to hurt me, you try to hurt us. It won’t go well for you whether it’s her or me that made your hackles go up. That one fan coming up into my yard would set us both off, I don’t care how pissed we are at each other, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that crap. It’s the same way on both sides. When someone comes after her, I want to jump between them. It’s just not possible, so I hope it’s the thought that counts.

There is such a thing as loving someone until you die while also knowing you aren’t good for each other, and either you need to correct the problem or move on. It might be hell in the moment, but love doesn’t go away. If I found out that something was going on with her I could actually fix, it would be done already. It doesn’t mean I should sit and wait around until she needs me. It means that no matter what happens between us, I’ve made promises that I intend to keep.

I think it’s cute that she’s a boss ass bitch and I’m basically “Player” from Carmen Sandiego. It makes our perspectives wildly different and thus easier for us to call out each other’s bullshit because we’re objective and uninvolved with any of the people the other might talk about.

That part I really did like about our relationship, and I’ve made other friends that way. I am not as close to them because it hasn’t been as long, but still the same feeling of two people in wildly different situations that can listen to the other because they don’t care about anyone but the person they’re talking to in the moment.

I don’t have to care what their husbands do, what their kids do, what their friends do because I am not trying to maintain a relationship with any of them, therefore I don’t have to balance my emotions because if I say something about one, it affects my relationship with the other. Conversations are sacred, and so is trust. I’ve learned everything about how to do virtual relationships the wrong way, so I’m adapting to make it better. I found someone that made me think so hard about myself that it was sink or swim. I could deal with the fact that me being in love with her was a pipe dream and move on, but nothing can be unsaid and I’m a writer. I don’t have the safety and security of knowing when I’m close to the hard out because I want to be seen as the loving friend I said I’d be….. after I was a total dick, of course. Rejection sucks, but it doesn’t last forever and I am not the kind of person that believes in the friend zone. There was never going to be a time where my ruminations meant that if she said no to me, her friendship didn’t mean anything to me. It would be the opposite. I know how we work. She’d fire me in a hot second, probably due to annoyance alone. But I’ve always wanted to know the things that don’t mean anything, like I said about Zac’s work colleagues the other day. She’s unique in a different way, but the concept is the same. I liken it to Cyrus and Olivia from Scandal, after hours, when it’s just them and wine and popcorn.

One of these days, she most certainly will wonder whatever happened to me and look it up. If the stars align, I hope it’s at a book table…….. where I’d gaze lovingly into her eyes, and ask her to sign my book.

I believe in fairy tales. I would never hold a grudge that meant we couldn’t fix it in the end. There’s a solid reason we should be friends, but she thinks I need too much when she hasn’t said what she needs from me and how we could establish boundaries that made us both happy. Believe it or not, I do not enjoy being ripped a new one for my crafted pages and having them called lectures by a judgmental dickhead. She never knew how my responses would have changed had she told me honestly how she was feeling and focused on the good things I was telling her, or asking me about things she thought were negative so that I could tell her if they weren’t.

Because our ways of showing love are so wildly different, neither one of us were getting what we needed from the other. I tried to correct that problem, and she bailed. But she didn’t take back her friendship. She said that nothing was ever going to change and the way she treated me blew sometimes and was incredible at others. I tried to love her in a way she could hear it, and sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. It was very confusing for both of us and she didn’t have time to mull it over. I got tired of so often being responded to when she thought I was trying to fight her and not when I was telling her that I thought she was the greatest human being I’d ever met. Poll ten people that know her. We all agree, even if nine of them work for her.

I don’t dwell on my negative feelings because to me, the things that I’ve written about her combine to make a truly intimate portrait of our relationship all the way through, and it means something. Even now, I know it means something. Even if Michael and me are the only people who ever read it, it doesn’t matter. We’re the ones that will need it the most if she goes before we do, which I only say because now that my mother died so young, I can’t be sure of anything. The dice of the universe will roll one way or the other. I don’t have to focus on what might happen, I feel happy that I have prepared something that will last longer than all three of us. One of these days, WordPress will be an artifact. People will want to know how we lived, and a blog is a good example of writing about daily life. Sometimes I feel like I’m a column in a small town newspaper.

Not feeling guilt or remorse over any relationship once I feel enough time has moved forward to have closure is essential. I don’t want to be the type person that spends her life wishing things were different and not actively trying to fill my time with new opportunities.

But you guys have read every day what I’ve dealt with in all of this. How it’s painful and glorious, but there’s no problem that is not solvable if we both want to work on it. I’m just okay if she doesn’t, because my memories are enough. It’s pointless to hold a grudge, because it will do more to hurt you than they will ever care.

Just Come Pick Me Up

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

Bryn, the other author on this site, had to put one of her dogs down today. His name was Duncan, and he was deaf and blind. Despite his limitations, he could do tricks such as balancing on a ball. I can’t do that and I can hear and see. He was a marvel to watch, and he will be greatly missed by both of us. I haven’t lived in Portland for over a decade, but Duncan was part of my life back then, too. It’s hard to be in DC while she’s in Portland, but she’s not going through all this alone. Dave is with her and I’ll get to video call with her when she’s ready. I don’t want to intrude on her grief, and wanted to let you know what’s going on if you want to leave her a note. Having lost my mother, I do know that right now she’s probably not up for reaching out, but I’m trying to send her as much love as I can for when she’s ready to receive it.

I know that I’ve said that a woman irritated me because she said that she knew exactly how I felt about losing my mother because her cat had died. That was because I didn’t think the two things were comparable, not that I don’t have empathy for deep grief no matter what kind. I am not saying that it doesn’t hurt. I’m just saying that it’s different in scope, but the reaction is generally the same physically. Grief makes you weak, weepy, and lost in your own little world. That’s because trauma takes time to process and it’s a little while before the shock wears off.

When I get frustrated with a situation because I’m here and my friends are elsewhere, the line inside my head becomes “Jesus Christ. Just come pick me up.” I figure if anyone can displace time, space, and location he’s probably my best shot given the available options.

Right now I’m miserable because all I want is her- to comfort her and make sure she’s okay in the middle of a really hard situation. Most of the reason that I’m miserable is that I’m one of the people she’d turn to for love in a practical sense. Of course I can go to the grocery store. Of course I can sit here and listen for hours. Let it out. Of course we can sit next to each other and not say anything. Should I put on some relaxing banjo music so we can sit outside on the back porch and talk? I could install a swing…. probably the thing we both miss the most about The Big Yellow House because we had so many conversations there.

When Bryn and I have been at parties together, whether at The Big Yellow House or her parents,’ we become the social battery charging station, disappearing and generally making others wonder where we went. Because we are both ridiculously social right up until we aren’t, our conversations were a way to get away from all that having to be “on” bullshit. Not being introverted is a mask for both of us, and it’s because we are both Timeless Children. We live to please to avoid having to deal with conflict, so we call each other on conflict when we have it in a beautiful way. We are both re-parenting ourselves to be self-sustaining and it is beautiful to watch. We have a sweet, innocent, intense love that will never go away because our bond runs so deep. She was 14 and I was 19 when we met, so there’s pretty much nothing more pure than having someone you’ve known that long still in your life. I didn’t move to Portland to be with Bryn, but she was a large part of the package.

That’s because after I finished my first year of college, I left the day after classes ended to see what Portland had to offer. It was just a two week visit, but it was enough to convince me I’d be happy there and I went for two more summers to make sure. In ’97 was the More Light Conference (meeting of pro-queer Christians at Lewis & Clark), ’98 was billed as the “ordination of the century,” and ’99 was the wedding of the century. By then I was completely enmeshed. I just fit in without having to try so hard.

I met Kathleen shortly after, so I spent a couple summers with her instead of going to Portland, but we went together for an MLK holiday trip and it was a haul and a half from DC. We had a good time, and I wonder all the time what would have happened if Kathleen had gotten a job in the PNW…. and not for selfish reasons. Portland has a vibe where you really relax and she was wrapped way too tight. I also wonder all the time what would have happened if my beautiful girl had come to Portland, because when we were talking about it, she wanted to see Dana and me and drive down to Coos Bay. It’s a beautiful memory to create in my head with both of them. I love moonlit walks on the beach whether it’s romantic or not, and we’d be bundled up in sweatshirts and jeans even in August. Touching the water in the Pacific is not really advisable without a wet suit. I’ve lost the feeling in my feet every time. So, it would have been great in my mind to walk along with either one of them at a time where they could really let go and be themselves.

Even though it’s neither here nor there, those images make me happy. I don’t have bad feelings toward either one, and I often retcon the past with stories of what would have been nice so that I know what I want to do next time for the people in my life. Ways in which I can emotionally show up when I can’t afford to just book a plane ticket.

The other thing I really enjoy thinking about is the Pacific Ocean, because where I lived made me able to see Cape Disappointment and find my way back home.

To Duncan and Bryn.

Hell….. with Beads

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.

A friend said this about New Orleans, but this is how I feel about travel. It’s a full-on parade of thought; I’m excited until I’ve been away from home for an amount of time that’s never enough to settle. It’s why I’d like to do Air BnB. It would be great to spend a month in Paris rather than a few days in a hotel and at a better rate. Paris is a city that in order to understand it, you have to adapt. You’re from the United States. Your rhythm is not the same. That cognitive dissonance takes time to resolve, so I like trips that are long enough to make you forget your other reality and stop comparing things to it. When I’m in Mexico, what takes the longest is flipping my brain into Spanish. Having conversations where you are both processing thoughts and emotions while translating is exhausting, and Mexicans are so kind about it. The French are not, or at least not the ones I’ve met because I’ve only been to Paris. It has less to do with the fact that I only know a few words and they’re frustrated and more with the fact that Paris is like New York and London. They don’t have time for you not to know what you want, just like if you need something from someone on the tube in London, say the bare minimum and move on. Talking to strangers isn’t their thing in either city. It would take me a long time to adapt to Paris, but “my wife” says that when she reads me, she sees colors of David Sedaris.

That wasn’t flattering at all, JFC.

It makes me feel comfortable that David is the kind of person that if I ran into him in Paris, we might be able to strike up a friendship because I would remind him of the time we met in Frederick without hounding him for anything. I have so many creative friends in my life that fame doesn’t faze me. I just want to sit at the table if they think I’m worthy of it. Writers don’t give other people their time if they don’t think that person can keep up with them intellectually. They have so much fun and devastation on their own that it takes a lot to get through to them. You have to prove that your company is better than “the characters they keep.” Nothing is more important than complete isolation when you’re writing. For me, that looks very much like the classic image of a coder because I did web development for a long time. My favorite tools are text editors that color code and I type with all the lights off and my editor in dark mode. I’m just not doing the HTML because WordPress does that for me. I mention the way I work because it leads to the fact that the story of the farthest I’ve ever traveled includes times where I haven’t left my house.

I have lost myself in this world where I spill out everything in order to lead from the back, and it has fed me in every way that’s been missing. I love feeling confident in the fact that I can express myself, and don’t mind that my archetypes are Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mr. Robot. I also have to accept that the virtual world is not the physical, and to be responsible with relationships. For instance, I don’t know if my new writer friend knew how I felt beforehand, but it made me feel good that when I asked to friend her, she really saw me as an actual friend because when she messaged me, she sent voice notes instead of typing. It just normalized everything, and she’s got a gorgeous voice Yes, we’ve sung for each other, and now I know a karaoke night would be in order if I was in the ATL or she was headed to Air and Space.

I have to remember the fact that other people don’t have the archetype of Mr. Robot and don’t write like they’re coding into the night, one thought pouring into the next at a frantic pace, made more urgent by the sound of their own typing. I get going and I say things that are over the line without truly thinking of the consequences. The separation of being virtual heightens everything, and I don’t want to feed into it.

I don’t want “my wife” to feel like I am wandering from who I really am, and she can be a better judge of that by hearing what I mean in the way I meant it. Her voice notes were just a good reminder to keep it real, and we’re having a good time. She’s not only an actress starring in a play right now, she’s a recovering attorney who went to school in the DMV and does conflict management in the ATL now. Endlessly fascinating and we haven’t found a lag in conversation yet. It’s what really examining how far from home I was willing to go has meant to me over the last 10 years. It’s been the journey to hell and back with someone because I caused the root of the conflict. Losing someone is one thing. Being responsible for it is another.

It’s why I’m glad there’s medication to help me cope with all my silly ruminations, and ironic that the more I spill them, the more you gather. My medication just introduces upper and lower limits. It guides the direction of my compass, the only thing that matters when sailing foreign seas.

Explaining Myself To………. Myself #shatnerellipsis

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If I hadn’t been trauma bonded to Supergrover and not to Dana, none of the last 10 years would have happened. I am not “goading and provoking.” I am talking about the things I understand to the best of my knowledge, knowing that my memory can’t always be correct and if I want a relationship now, being able to forgive and forget extraordinarily quickly because I’m using the power of my writing to lift me out of depression when I go back and read it.

This makes me self-sustaining to an enormous degree. This epistolary chapter is a “lecture” on how a relationship is affected by deep secrets that aren’t bad in any way at all. I am accepting the reality of the situation. I am acknowledging my humanness- being responsible and letting go of guilt, being mindful and carrying no shame. I believe the good news of the Gospels, that we are loved unconditionally by God. This is part of the creed from the UCC church I attended in Portland, written by my abuser’s partner. That’s how good I’ve become at letting go through my faith. I hope you’ll let go of yours by the end. This is because my relationship with God is not cute. Everything in these entries is me arguing with God like an old grumpy writer with the personality of an Evangelical Orthodox nut job who is an emotional dumpster fire a lot of the time.

I’m also neurodivergent, so I spiral out when everything is in writing and therefore hits harder because I’m making up their tones of voice and no way to correct things when a joke doesn’t land. No matter what starts a conflict, my anxiety rises to the level of The War Doctor, where I am the bomb and you are The Moment……… because that’s my definition of what God is and will always be. The moment you are abused, your reality breaks and you need a third party. That’s why being an addict and bipolar present the same. It’s how trauma affects you your whole life once it happens. I know that now because I met my emotional abuser when I was 12 years old. It didn’t get physical because it didn’t have to. We trauma dumped and handfasted because I intrigued her mentally whether it was intentional or not. I had to forgive her and move on, but I swear to God her world will fucking end if she trauma dumps with someone else that age. No one will kill her, but she might not hate it as a viable option. That’s because Dante’s Inferno is every bit as real in terms of the lens through which I see everything and so do you if you’ve had anything similar happen to you. That’s why I trauma bonded with Daniel and agreed to marry him so fucking fast. I didn’t go insane. I’m emotionally equipped to deal with a Doctor Who is a very bad patient (a turn of phrase from voice dictation on my iPhone in a letter to the absolute love of my life. She just doesn’t accept it because she thinks that her trauma is so much worse than mine and treats herself like shit because of it. If she only knew what kind of person I think she is and started to believe what I’m telling her the first time, she’d see a person who has no problems with worshipping the water she walks on while also being able to tell her that I think we’re headed for a train wreck.

She escalates because she doesn’t want to open up and so do I.

We could have had a love that lasted for all time in these pages, because our secrets married us the moment we said them. Words made it real. Real fast. I agreed to all of it. It was Oppenhemer, and Fallout 3 is entirely responsible for the allegory I saw in playing that game because it was Biblical. When I destroyed Zax with logical fallacy, that he was omnipotent because he was programmed to be omipotent, seeing the loop in the code for the first time, I saw my inner Vault-Tec for what it was and accepted that I was a Lone Wanderer- not only because I wanted it desperately. I also couldn’t get out of it, and that’s why both Supergrover and I think that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future.

I am not asking for her to be mine, I am asking her what our future looks like and my problem with her is now twofold. The first is that she only understands me to the level she understands her. I am not guilting her. There isn’t a human who doesn’t do this. I am saying that we cannot interact in the future if she can’t acknowledge her humanness as well. I don’t want the stakes to be so high in our relationship. I wanted to normalize everything, and it was up to her whether that was virtual or physical, but never in a way that she thought was inappropriate for reasons that span from she’s straight to us both acknowledging that if we did it, there’s more chance that we’d destroy each other afterwards than accepting a different reality and being happy in the long term. That if we fuck this up, it’s over for both of us. Just mutually assured destruction and I’m serious as a heart attack. I didn’t give her my whole heart because I wanted her inappropriately. It’s because our emotions made us Siamese twins.

It’s why I devour everything about intelligence. I crave it. I don’t know anyone at CIA and I don’t have to. The reason I love it is because they can blow shit up when things are actually wrong and I can’t. I’ve been emotionally laden like a pack horse since I was 12, a deep cover operation in which I got lost and forgot my real identity. That’s why I need David Webb to become Director of CiA by the end of the story. When he wins, so do I. That’s why I love the conflict in Black Panther. I am both T’Challa and Erik. When love wins, they have a Tolkien CIA agent. Now you know I’m actively trying to make Zac laugh. He is giving me what served me in relationships I’ve had previously, without taking on the baggage of what didn’t. That way, I can love him with my whole heart while also not being bothered to care about absolutely anything he wants to do when we aren’t being the most obnoxious couple you’ve ever met in your life. Really. Talk to us together and you’ll throw up in your mouth a little bit. I’m not bothered about finding someone else because I am not desperately seeking attention and validation……… as people who are sick from trauma do when they don’t get well. Boldly keeping all your emotions hidden in order to be what other people want will kill you, and I mean that literally.

The best sermon I’ve ever heard came from one of the people I’ve been emotionally intimate in an extremely healthy way right up until it wasn’t because we reverted to who we are- neurodivergent and unaccepting of each other’s humanness while both being ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. It’s why I think things could be perfect between my beautiful girl if she’d let it happen. Our professions are compatible and we chose them for a reason, which makes us literally perfect for each other when we aren’t complete assholes.

The first line was “the day my father died, my brother was in jail.” She gave an unpacking of what it’s like for a church to hold on to that level of trauma and I’m a fucking PK. You have no idea what kind of trauma I was dealing with and not because of their inner demons trying to hurt me. I was bleeding out in empathy because I didn’t have any clinical separation. That’s how my trauma bond presents, and it is as ironclad as a marriage in the Holy Roman church………….. and you have two wolves inside you. You decide which one you feed. I express that by talking to a God in which I can stand up and say “I AM BAPTIZED.”

That’s a whole story in and of itself. When you’re a PK, if you pee on the person doing your baptism, you’ve just peed on your dad’s boss. Given how the UMC treated my father, I have embraced their inner Aziraphale and Crowley. The bishop who baptized me served a predominantly gay church after he baptized me, so clearly I was baptizing him as well. I love the idea that he made me a queer person loved unconditionally by God, and he is the YouTube video of Supergrover waking up Superqueer after an organ transplant with me. When I resolve trauma, I get funnier. That’s because Jesus is hilarious to me when he’s not struggling with his own demons. But what I’ve never done is go straight to Golgotha and looked away. I am Emmit Till’s mother. I want you to see what that man went through and how I view his story as a trauma survivor. He didn’t need to be bodily resurrected for me to believe that because his religious leaders gave him hell. He went straight to Golgotha without looking away and while he was on the cross he emotionally blessed and released everything by forgiving the people who murdered him. Doesn’t mean he didn’t want to murder them with words. But in order to forgive everyone on the cross, he had to walk through his own valleys of vulnerability. He had to get as mad at God as he possibly could in order to go to the mountaintop. To me, the importance of the crucifixion is a negative amount, because the resurrection didn’t happen on the cross.

He resurrected himself when he was ready to leave the garden and face death. if I could translate the scriptures written to account for his time there into line cook, it would look a lot like “fuck you. How could you do this to me?” He raged until the Red Sea parted in his mind, and if I know him as well as I think I do, he made that connection while he was still alive…………

because he was a rabbi, and I was born to upper management.