Let’s Have Breakfast Together

November 13, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m having a macchiato and some orange juice, followed by some water. I don’t eat early in the morning, but you get whatever you want. My treat.

Today I have what my father and I have come to call “Group with Ride.” That’s because someone from my Cognitive Behavioral Health group would come and pick me up on Thursdays, so “Group with Ride” is how it looks on my Google Calendar, as opposed to “Group,” which is on Wednesdays.

Now that I have a car, I should remember that I can go to the center on Wednesdays as well.

You’d like the group if you came with me. My friends are all cool, having huge differences of opinions and a common experience, which is struggles with mental health. We work at bettering ourselves, the AA for people who don’t drink. I finally found a program built to support me in ways I’ve needed my whole life and didn’t have.

I have someone to advocate for me with the state of Maryland, keeping me in this program and making me eligible for others. It has made it where I feel alienated from my family, because staying in Maryland is so much better than packing up to be with my family from a financial standpoint. I would save money on things like property, but my health insurance would go through the roof.

I am not ready to commit to buying a house, I don’t think. That’s because I haven’t decided where I want to settle. I know that I could afford a house somewhere in this area, but I don’t know that I want to tie up that much cash. It’s a long discussion with my dad and sister, because I don’t want to be alone in managing my finances anymore. I know from experience that it’s really nice to be a renter because when something breaks, you don’t have to replace it.

But it’s also important for me to have an asset that will appreciate, and any house in Maryland or Virginia has a huge shot.

I’m at a crossroads and don’t know what to do, thus having my dad and sister to help me navigate all of this. As a first time home buyer I would be eligible for a lot of help, and I love the idea of tying my money up into something as safe as housing in the DMV.

That means a move, but not a huge one. Baltimore is not the DMV, and I do not think my house would appreciate as fast. So many people work in Washington and cannot afford to live there. “Northern Virginia” keeps getting bigger and bigger, stretching the definition as people who used to be able to buy in Woodbridge stretch out to Fredericksburg.

But now, those communities are building themselves up so that you don’t have to go into Washington for entertainment, shopping, etc. And if I worked in Washington, I’d certainly rather take the train than drive so I could play on my phone the whole time. Parking is ridiculously expensive, and traffic is annoying.

I feel the same way about working in Washington now. If I worked downtown, I would take the MARC to my office rather than drive, because I can predict with more accuracy when I’m going to get somewhere than in traffic.

But choosing to work is not up to me, either. I need to get with my counselor and hammer out some details there, too. My life belongs to a team now, so that I can get the support I need to go where I want to go. I have been isolated for too long and have become a bit feral. 😉

For instance, I might need to spend some money on college so that I don’t repeat the same mistakes of the past. Education is power, and I’m not far from being able to be a TA in something. A few more years and I will be able to teach in a large institution. If being a youth director was any indication, I’d be a good professor and my kids would like me. It’s the kind of institutionalization I’d like.

I’m ready to be part of a team with insulation around me that understands my quirks. My buddies Evan and Gabriel are thinking about going into business with me as Lanagan Media Group, because we’d like to up our game in terms of the resistance being art.

I haven’t made it clear just how much I hate the Trump administration because I had to tap out of geopolitics to survive a complete breakdown. SNAP being held hostage means my friends will go hungry. If they get half their food stamps, they will only have to go without food for half the month. It breaks your heart to hear about the can-do attitude of “all we have to do is tighten our belts and eat Top Ramen.” Because what else can you do except listen?

I only have enough to save myself, and I find myself already wanting to give it away. My bleeding heart will be the death of me because I can’t look at suffering and not do something about it. I’m already looking at my finances and trying to decide where I’m going to donate for the holidays. I will ask around at group where the most popular food banks are and give money to those.

If you are my real life friend and you are so moved to give to these organizations, it would mean a great deal to me. I hear stories at group and just want to hand out money directly. But everyone needs a coat. Everyone needs food. Everyone needs.

I’m not rich enough to provide for all the need around me, which is why I have to restrain myself to giving to organizations. I just want to make sure that my money ends up in their pockets.

I grew up middle class, then when my parents divorced we were thrust into upper middle class. I am not ashamed of my affluence, but I do walk around wishing I could fix things. None of my friends at group are in the same boat, with three supportive parents and generational wealth already having been passed from two of them. It is often hard for me to relate to their violent upbringings, but I sit in the meetings with my hands cupped, as if in protection of my heart. I am willing it to stay inside my body as the president tears my friends apart.

It’s enough to make me want to run for another country, and with the amount of money I have that might be wise. I know I’d be welcomed as a neighbor in several places, most notably in Seoul. My friend Gabriel and my friend Emily are both there. They were visual artists and I was instrumental music at HSPVA. Now, Emily is a teacher and Gabriel just moved back a couple weeks ago, so I don’t know what he’s doing yet.

At the very least, I have enough money to go and visit them to see if I like it.

I am still stuck on Finland as it is the neurodivergent capital of the world, but the more research I do the more of a losing proposition it seems after school. I am nowhere near fluent in Finnish and would have to work in English. Those jobs are few and far between, limited to hospitality. It’s not impossible, but again I just have to visit and gather more information.

The wonderful thing about Finns is that they love showing off their country. I could write on Finnish Facebook or Reddit posts that I was coming to Helsinki and needed a guide, and more than one person would offer to meet me. They would be THRILLED if I spoke a few words of Finnish (I do). And in fact, I have seen people curious about seeing Finland have people offer to pick them up at the airport.

Now that’s love.

I would love to have a Finn drive me around in the winter because driving on ice and snow requires special tires. It’s not hard, it just takes getting used to and they’ve already got it handled. Although I might change my mind once I get there because getting around the cities is easily done by public transit, but I might like a road trip from Helsinki to Kilpisjaarvi, to sleep under the aurora borealis.

Now, Kilpisjaarvi is a small town with nothing to it, but it’s got some of the most brilliant views I’ve ever seen. “Seen” being relative because I saw them through Dave Cad videos on YouTube.

Do you know Dave? If not, you should. He and his wife have created some stunning views of Finland, so much so that you can’t believe this is just a free YouTube video.

My writing session is starting to wind down and I’ve hardly let you get a word in edgewise. I’m so sorry. It’s hard when you’re not in the room. I apologize. The comment section is all yours, though.

But the reason I say “starting” to wind down is that I’m looking at the clock and trying to judge when the best time to leave for group would be. I want to arrive around 9:00, but I also don’t want to be stuck in traffic. Is it better to wait and arrive at 10:00 AM? I’d lose an hour of socializing but it would be so much more pleasant getting there.

Next week I think I will try going both days because each group has a different vibe. Now that I can drive myself and don’t have to wait on a ride, it’s much more appealing. Any chance to get out of the house and drive. Seriously. Any.

Driving is still exciting because I didn’t drive for so long that it’s like being 16 again.

There’s only one feature that my car doesn’t have that I want, so I’ll be sure to include it in my next one. It doesn’t have a sunroof. I didn’t think I would miss it, but I do. There’s something about rolling down all the windows and letting the breeze flow with the radio up, but the sunroof kicks it up a notch. I also like having the sun shade open so I can see the rain on the glass.

My car looks aggressive and brooding, though. I cannot complain. It fits my mood most days. 😉

I would have bought the car no matter what color it was, but I’m pleased that it’s dark grey. It will look good in photos for a long time to come because it’s such a classic color. If I got bored with it, I could paint it because the inside is gray and black as well. There’s no other color that would clash.

Fusions aren’t known for having paint problems, though, so I think I’ll be fine as long as I keep getting it hand washed once in a while to avoid having the paint roughed up by those automatic washes that are all the rage.

I use them a little bit.

I don’t know when I’ll have time to get them, but I really need floor mats. Maybe I’ll ask my service advisor at Ford about them, because I have to take my car in this weekend, anyway. I’m sure the parts guys have them and I want OEM. I looked on their web site and OEM floor mats actually aren’t that expensive as opposed to going to Walmart, so why not?

There’s that guy with his “Shave and a Haircut” car horn bullshit again. Seriously, it’s too early for this.

I realize that I have been up since o’dark hundred hours, but it’s still too early.

My coffee and orange juice have both disappeared, but I left a bottle of water and a Diet Pepsi in the car for my commute downtown. There’s leftover pizza if I get hungry before group, but I usually just wait- they feed us a small lunch before we go home.

I just got a hit from Aada’s location, and though I know it probably isn’t her, my heart did this weird flip thingy that it always does when I feel like she’s watching. As I have said before, the choice to be embarrassed about what I write has been taken from me because I cannot control who is reading. If she sees it, she sees it.

I seriously had no idea that she felt like I was punishing her because we were not in communication and I was not monitoring her feelings. Now that I know she feels punished, I need to find a way to write about something else… punishment was never my intention, but that’s how it came across.

We would do so much better if we’d listen to each other, so I am taking this opportunity to say beautiful girl, I am sorry. I was lost in my own rumination and couldn’t get out. It had nothing to do with you because you were already gone. If it was you this morning, welcome back. I am glad to see you. If it wasn’t, then I am glad to have other fans near where you live.

Though they’re probably not as adorable.

I mean it, Aada. You’re adorable. Don’t front.

I need her to stop seeing me as attacking her, and start seeing me as illustrating her. No one in my life has the capability to be all bad or all good, most especially me.

The positive and the negative are not weighted in my own mind, but they become weighted in others. I am still convinced that Aada thinks I hate her and want to punish her because she hates her and wants to punish her. My anger melted months ago and I can explain everything I’ve been through in detail.

She says she’s always wondered if everything I’ve ever told her was true- that she’d always assumed I was telling the truth, but she didn’t know. That’s not because I didn’t invite her to everything ever. That’s not because she couldn’t have met me in person and known I was telling the truth. She just didn’t, and now thinks our relationship needs to rest in peace.

Except in our last email exchange, she changed from “saying goodbye to The AntiLeslie for good” to “for now, all I want is peace.” I can give that to her, but I cannot grasp the concept of forever. I’m not sure she can, either, because three days after she told me she was saying goodbye to me for good, I got hits from her location several days in a row.

I know I have special alerts in her life, too.

I turned a negative into a positive after I learned that, because she wanted to insinuate that I was being watched. I thought, “by you? Who cares?” If Aada wants me to be intimidated, I will be, but I don’t have anything to hide from her. She’s welcome to dig through whatever she wants. She even knows the code to my phone and my master password to everything if she’s been paying attention and knows haxxorspeak.

Or as I’ve told her since 2013, “you don’t have to use the back door. I will let you in the front.”

Or as I told her recently, “I don’t know what you’re so afraid of. I’m only 5’2.”

She said that made her laugh. And cry.

Those are the moments between us that I love, this sharing of intimacy that goes back a very long way. She says that she’ll never talk to me about her or her family ever again. That’s fine. I think that her assessment of my writing is one of the most unhealthy I’ve ever seen. She reads me “checking for assaults” thinking that the positive things I say are “clues in a game” and not God’s honest truth.

It’s how to write a 3D character, while she calls herself a “Flat Stanley.”

She has always been with me when life feels the quietest and I’m passing on my peace through the chord that runs between us. I’m doing my best to do that now, because I know that good thoughts are welcome. Support is welcome. I have reached the limit of what I can do, this sending of good thoughts.

Because knowing I was telling the truth would start with breakfast together.

Stumbling over each other trying to pick up the check because it’s the first meeting and it’s important.

I couldn’t guarantee that one breakfast could fix everything, but I can guarantee that Aada’s doubts as to whether I was telling the truth or not could be laid to rest. I’m as crazy about her as one human can be for another, and it hurts my heart to know that she looked so hard for rejection when it wasn’t there. I was spinning out from the last time she rejected me and thought she wasn’t coming back.

She’s not my ex, but because I worked through romantic feelings for her and came out on the other side, my heart doesn’t really treat her any differently. I read a great book a few years ago that came closer to this breakup called “My Other Ex,” which told stories of women losing their best friends through death or conflict.

It’s why our relationship is so mercurial. We have strong feelings for each other because of all the letters we’ve written, but there’s never been an instance where she’s had coffee because I poured it.

And because of those romantic feelings, I’m always going overboard trying to make her feel safe. That I recognize she’s a straight girl and hopelessly dedicated to her man. That if being straight is what makes her happy, I would have done her wedding if she’d asked…. and it would have been beautiful.

I know this because I did Bryn’s wedding out at her parents’ farm in Newberg, Oregon. I clean up all right. 😉

And in fact, when she called me to tell me that she was getting divorced, the first thing I said was, “what? I didn’t do it right?”

But that’s what the people who know me on the ground would say, that Aada would have had a beautiful wedding. She didn’t get to know me on that level, simply telling me she got married long after it was done. I think she thought it would hurt me to know that she got married, and it did, but not like she thought.

She thought that it would hurt me to hear that she got married because she knew I was in love with her and wanted to be sensitive to it. What she didn’t realize is that I wasn’t sensitive to it because I’m not a moron. Straight girls marry men. I was sensitive to the fact that she cut me out of everything from the proposal on.

I’ve never seen a picture of her husband. Ever. This is weird to me because I don’t care what he looks like as long as she loves him.

I don’t know why she feels like she needs to keep us apart, but she has. I kind of like feeling like I’m all hers in a different realm. Meanwhile, I’d like love to be on the ground, in the dirt. Gardening and roughhousing with the dogs and cleaning up after big storms. I don’t want to be anything but a good friend, but I haven’t been the best at showing it.

I think that’s because I’ve had to pretend I was okay with not meeting for so long. It got to where I was pretending to myself that it was okay we hadn’t met, and even now it would be difficult when it was so easy before. We used to live about 40 minutes apart, now it’s at least two and a half hours.

Meeting at Tiina’s would have been so perfect, because it would have been neutral ground for both of us.

We could have all had breakfast together, like we’re doing now.

Whiling Away the Hours of the Morning

November 11, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There is so much to love about this area in autumn. The sun is just starting to peek up over the red and gold trees, but it’s still cold enough to need a coat walking out to the car. I have read that it’s better for the turbo boost on my engine to run for a few minutes before I drive, anyway, so I use remote start to get things heated before I get in. That way, I don’t have to go through the rigamarole of getting dressed in the morning, which takes a lot more layers if you are planning to wait at the bus stop.

I had to go to Dunkin to get my macchiato, orange juice, and a bottle of water. This time, I got toasted almond flavoring, which turned out to be sort of marzipan-ish. It was very good, but I don’t think it will replace vanilla in the rotation.

I don’t know, though…. Marzipan is delicious.

Getting out into the early morning air is important to me. I leave the house before the sun is even up. It makes me feel productive to go to bed early and wake up before the rest of the world gets started.

It is in the early morning that I feel the urge to sit quietly at my keyboard, talking to no one in particular, but knowing that the regulars will check in. Hi Aparna. Hi John.

Et cetera.

The gang’s all here.

Or, they will be. I have learned over time when most people read, and it’s during their work day. My stats dip on the weekend and go back up as everyone slacks off at work to the rhythm of my “voice.”

Speaking of which, WordPress really needs to add AI to read entries to you. Medium does it. Catch up, WordPress.

I just don’t have the energy to record my own audio because the entries took a lot out of me when I wrote them. I cry and sigh and make a mess of myself trying to create MP3s of my entries.

I don’t think that Aada realizes how much her love sits with me all day because it’s here in my work. That I cannot not cry when I read our entries aloud because verbalizing it makes it real. Tears spill where I only felt a little pain before. So I don’t verbalize what I’m feeling often. Writing creates a wall where I can look at emotional landmines without exploding them.

It’s like being able to see an aerial view of my emotions, mapping them so that I can comprehend what I am feeling. Because I write it down, everyone else knows what I’m thinking and feeling, too. This is both positive and negative.

I do not expect myself to be happy when someone else hurts me, nor am I trying to punish anyone by having a voice. Other people’s stories are all true, too, based on their experiences. I am not taking anything away from anyone else by saying what I think is true, because differences of opinion exist.

For instance, Aada’s story with me would be so different than what I’ve written here, because she has always thought more highly of me than she has let on and chastised me for writing anything negative about our relationship. What I missed in all of this was her saying “I love you more than you think I do.”

Everyone loves me more than I think they do, because I take the negative things people say home with me. This is not an isolated problem, and one I get coming off of Aada, too. Neither one of us can believe that the other loves us, so we start from that proposition and it always loses.

What would it really look like if we both stood up and accepted that we were loved? That we were safe? That we protect each other, look out for the other? That nothing could have gotten between us except a lie, and that’s over now. The truth is all out on the table.

I am not proud of how I reacted to finding out that Aada lied, but I’m astonished at the amount of work I’m willing to do to get this relationship healthy again. We were in a very good place, and it is one that I’m eager to get back to, a drop of trust at a time.

But in order to grow as a person and not repeat the mistakes of the past, I have to be intentional about cultivating other relationships as well. Tiina and Aada have a lot in common and would like each other, and actually I invited Aada to go with me the first time I went out to Tiina’s and she was busy, then our relationship blew up.

I want to show Aada Tiina’s farm, because she would enjoy all of Tiina’s oddball surprises about the the house. My favorite was her Anthony Fauci doll.

It would be my pleasure to be a connector, bringing more love into Aada’s life instead of less.

I am certain that I do not want to be a disrupter anymore, and I am learning how I have been that in the past. How I need to manage myself better because I know I’m a tornado. That comes with therapy and time.

This blog feels like taking myself to the woodshed, admitting all my flaws and failures to hold myself accountable. I do not know where punishment comes into the mix for other people, but what I do know is that people read with confirmation bias. They are looking for evidence to back up what they already think.

So, if Aada is reading looking for evidence that she’s a terrible person, she’s going to find it because she looked so hard. If she read for evidence that she was wonderful, I know she would find it because it’s been there in black and white for 12 years. Hers is the only photo in my “Favorites” album on my phone.

I asked her to do me a favor, just turn the camera around and snap, that I hadn’t seen her face in a while.

So help me it was the most beautiful photograph of anyone I have ever seen and she was apologetic because she thought she had bedhead.

I would prove to you how beautiful she is except I value my head where it is.

There are limits to Aada’s generosity with my writing, to be clear.

Sufficed to say, she’s gorgeous and if I could I would show her off. I think she needs to know how proud I am of her just for being her, that I do value her opinion and want her in my life. If the message wasn’t clear before, it should be now. There’s nothing I won’t get over eventually.

She can be a scary motherfucker, though, and she wants you to know it.

When she does that shit, I picture her as a little girl.

It’s how I hold on for dear life in this relationship. I can’t picture the power suit when I’m afraid of it, so I picture the kindergartner instead.

“Suits and crap for work” are my Aada action figure, but when she uses that power against me, all of the sudden, in my head, I’m taller than she is by a wide margin.

“Say that again, pigtails.”

It’s a coping mechanism, and one that works well because she’s not the only person I picture as a child when I interact with them. It is also not a way of feeling superior to anyone else, because I am not making myself the adult in the situation and infantilizing them. I am relating to my own inner third grader. I am trying to see us as equals when we are most definitely not.

It keeps me from feeling bullied by people who need that power suit facade.

I have spoken truth to power more than I’ll ever know, because my words have created a ripple effect that reaches from rich to poor, public to private, cis to trans, gay to straight. I have rattled people all over the world without realizing it. It’s an enormous responsibility to have a blog, and one I’m not sure I’m so good at…. I’m just confident that the words I have to say are at least good enough to be a record of how we lived in the 21st century, weaving in plots and characters that are interesting because that’s just how my life is- interesting.

I came to DC for a story, and ended up in Baltimore with a better one.

I’m neurodivergent, and I’m always going to need support. This city can give it to me in a way that others can’t, because there’s already an infrastructure for high IQ/low needs autism, as well as all the mental health issues that invariably come with it.

A guy outside just played “Shave and a Haircut” on his car horn. He does it every morning, and it drives me insane. It’s too early for that nonsense.

The thing is that I need more local friends who are also high IQ/low needs. I am making them through my Cognitive Behavioral Health group, but I haven’t made friends who have actually been to my house. I need to change this, because some of the people in my group don’t live very far. Squad and Rook even go to my gym.

Oh, the gym. I need to get back into the swing of things, but I need to wash my gym clothes first. That will happen later today, because I’m feeling a long walk coming on. I need to zone out to a podcast and let my legs burn. It’s one of those things where I know I’ll feel better once I do it, but getting the inertia up to do it takes time. Because of course it’s more complicated than just driving over there. I have steps to do first.

I wish I could get back to the place in my life where inviting Aada to Tiina’s wasn’t weird, and neither was the idea that she’d actually show up.

Replacing Sleep with Caffeine

November 8, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have had a lot of caffeine in getting ready for my apartment to be inspected on Friday. They never showed up, so I will have to check in again with them on Monday. They apologized for the inconvenience, but I reserve the right to be perturbed that I thought my lease would be settled by now. Thank God I have time on Monday to go to the office and sit down with them. They don’t seem to do much if I’m not right on top of it. The reason I’m staying is that I don’t have the energy to move. It’s not that they did everything right.

They’ll have a chance to change gears with the new apartment, so I’m hoping for good things. If I do not get them, I can always move in a few months. This is just really bad timing to pack up everything. I am going home for the holidays on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fitting a move in there is just silly.

I’m already drinking too much coffee trying to get everything done. It’s going to be hard enough to get movers to take my furniture to my new apartment, much less across town. But a move across campus is something I could manage by myself (I think). I will have to consult my counselor at Cognitive Behavioral Health and see what he recommends. Surely his other clients have had to move before, and I know he’s at least a sympathetic ear.

He’s the kind of person who takes action, and will step in with my apartment complex if he thinks I’m being taken advantage of or anything like that. It’s good to have someone in my corner that’s local, because my dad and sister definitely are, but they are not here. I’m sure it would be easier on them if I lived in Texas, but it’s not easier on my health insurance. I have to stay where the Medicaid expansion is.

I need to take some major sleeping pills when I get home tonight, making sure to sleep in tomorrow. I’ve been getting up so early that “having a lie-in” means 7:00 AM, not noon…. not that there’s anything wrong with sleeping until noon when I need it. I haven’t been sleeping deeply and I desperately need the rest.

Long, hot showers do a lot of restorative work, but they’re not everything.

I’m getting excited because it’s almost time to load up and go to Tiina’s farm. She’s not a morning person, so I promised her I wouldn’t arrive before 11:00. That means I need to leave here sometime around 9:00. I don’t know what the traffic is going to look like, but it doesn’t matter. It’s Saturday morning and the mood is lazy. When we get there is when we get there.

DC always has traffic even when it’s the weekend because of construction. I may be able to go around the city and miss it entirely, but I doubt it. The fastest way to Tiina’s will invariably involve getting on a freeway, and in DC, that means the odds of it being worked on are high on the weekends.

I wish I could get my car to drive me, and I practically can. Once I get on the freeway, I’ll set the adaptive cruise control and let the car do the work.

It really settled my mind seeing on the Progressive app that I’m rated four out of five stars as a driver. I know for certain I am not a five star driver, but I have also been too hard on myself.I can tell you from having ridden with many Uber drivers that I’m not that bad. So, apparently, if I tell you that I’m a bad driver, take it with a grain of salt. Apparently, I just have low self-esteem.

It’s coming up with the freedom of driving and the feeling I get when I walk out to my spotless car. Well, not spotless. I could use a car wash. But the inside is still fresh from being vacuumed and the leather smells good. I put on my sunglasses and just smile. It makes me feel so luxurious to have a nice car.

But notice I said “nice” and not “expensive.”

I am not sure that I could have gotten this good a quality of used car in Maryland because this car has never spent a winter up north. I’m not looking forward to that part of it, that my car’s undercarriage could get rusted out with the use of salt on the road when it ices. There are spray coatings you can get to protect against that kind of damage, so I need to do some research on how much it is. I would much rather keep putting money into this car than shopping for another one. Shopping for cars is something that you think will be fun and very quickly becomes overwhelming.

It’s now 5:30 PM, and I’m home from my friend Tiina’s. That’s her dog, McLaren, in the photo. He’s a French bulldog and the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. His favorite hobby is slobbering. 🙂

I would say that this was one of the best days I’ve had in DC since I got here in 2015. The drive from Maryland to Virginia was so beautiful I would have cried had I not been driving. The fall colors and the monuments were in full glory, and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is just unmatched. Then, as I got deeper into Northern Virginia, there were more forests and hills to explore.

My check engine light in the Fusion came on again, because whatever they did to it at Ford to turn the light off before doesn’t work now. It’s throwing the same error it was before, that the inner fuel door isn’t sealing properly. I’m going to take it back on Monday or Tuesday if the fix I found on YouTube doesn’t work. It didn’t before, but I’ll try it again. You spray WD-40 on the fuel door and push a funnel through it until it reseals. If it’s a permanent problem, it might be expensive to fix, but I don’t think it’s OH MY GOD. Luckily, I have enough money not to sweat it. I’m trying to get my car completely stable before winter. Nothing is worse than when the car won’t start and you didn’t bring a jacket because “I don’t have to get out of the car.”

Mostly I want the light off because it sends my blood pressure into a tizzy, even though I know that nothing is going to happen. The inner fuel door in the gas tank not resealing might make me lose gas, but I’m not going to be stranded on the freeway.

And hey, Tiina likes to drive, too, so I know she would have bailed me out even if I broke down close to home.

Oh, man. I still can’t stop thinking about the brilliant fall leaves I saw, because they were just as beautiful as New York. The reds, in particular, stood out to me because I was wearing blue blocker sunglasses. I went past all my favorite places, from Alexandria to Waffle House.

I almost pulled over, but Tiina lives about 20-30 miles past it, so it wasn’t worth it to eat when I wanted to see if Tiina was hungry first.

We ended up having pulled pork sandwiches with cole slaw, and a delicious herbal tea that’s supposed to bring down your stress level. Everything about today brought down my stress level. There were animals, a huge yard, and just a vibe around the house that makes you relax.

It felt so easygoing to sit and chat with friends.

Then, I decided to come back to Baltimore and the traffic was horrible. On a Saturday. I shouldn’t be surprised. There were wrecks and construction the whole way. But again, my attention was taken up by the scenery. I also got to see the monuments in bright light and just at sunset. That’s worth coming to DC all by itself.

I just felt so free, and so at home because I think of Virginia that way. I lived there in my early 20s and it changed my life. Thus the drive to come back here in my late 30s…. “here” being the general vicinity of DC and Baltimore. I am tied to the land in a spectacular way because DC and Baltimore are both characters in this blog.

If Kathleen and I had been smart, we would have bought a house back then. Even if we’d had to sell it, we would have made money on the deal. Real estate in this area doesn’t go any way but up.

Tiina sent me pictures after she’d hung her outdoor chandeliers, and it was marvelous. I can’t wait to go back, and I’m so glad to know I’m invited.

The Nervous Nelly

November 7, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know what I’m nervous about- my apartment is relatively clean enough to relax. My panic is not real. It is the idea of people invading my space that I don’t know how harsh I’m going to be judged.

I think they just want to check on the progress of things they already wrecked, the whole reason my transfer fee has been waived. I wouldn’t get those two things if they didn’t intend on letting me stay.

I’m a perfectionist who didn’t call in maids and regrets it now. That’s because they’d only have to do things that I don’t have the energy to do, like dust & vacuum, making the place look less lived in because they can get around easier than I can. I have all kinds of mysterious bruises from the last few days as I organized my stuff.

It happens a lot because of my cerebral palsy. I’m off balance and have no 3D vision. I run into things by not being able to judge distances side to side. I fell weird a propo of nothing at my dad’s and said, “I have lane assist on my car, not in my body.” I’m glad I was able to show him that I’m still the same klutz I’ve always been, it has just gotten worse with age as my compensatory skills wear down.

I have a large safety net now, from a dad to a sister to a cognitive behavioral counselor to Michael, who keeps an eye out from Texas. It’s all about creating healthy relationships with all of them, adding more friends to the mix.

I am good at making acquaintances and getting better at maintaining communication. I had to learn how I worked first, that there was a reason why I preferred communicating over the internet- it matches how my brain is built.

I just cannot let the pendulum swing too far. I need to get out and meet people. For instance, I have to go back out because I forgot to stop by the pharmacy and get my medication. I’m in no danger of running out, I just forgot.

Things are actually going really well with my psychiatrist, because she always remembers to schedule our appointments long before I need medication and remembers to fax it in when I’m due.

She prefers to see me more often, so she doesn’t often prescribe refills. I take this as a positive. We have a few minutes of pleasant conversation and then she sends everything over.

We talk about my goals in therapy, and she would like to hear from my therapist as well. I have known since Psych 101 that psychology and psychiatry are “inextricably related,” so it’s easy for me to understand why they’re a team, along with my counselor.

Things are really looking up these days, after months of feeling horrible about myself. Aada thought I was punishing her, but I was raking myself over the coals for all the unrest I’d caused.

I felt like I had betrayed everything I believed in, which was definitely bigger than her alone.

I hope that she does, as I do, go back and read her favorite entries from years ago. It will come across differently once it feels like it’s happening to a different person.

The positive and the negative will be weighted differently, because she won’t be feeling anger of the moment she read something. I stand by the fact that it was okay for me to get angry, but it wasn’t fair for me to get as angry as I did. It had consequences beyond me that I didn’t think about because I wasn’t supposed to do so.

I was supposed to say what I thought. There was no one to intervene in that thought process to change it. Therefore, love was lost slowly as we failed over and over to “give each other the grace that love requires.” This is not a new problem, but not doing that to each other anymore is a goal.

It’s a goal with everyone- that things they love don’t become flaws and failures later. But many people love my writing about others, but hate when I hold a mirror up to their faces.

Aada called it “the flaying of her skin,” and not the “working through grief” I needed. She asked me to go. I went. I had feelings that weren’t even for her to know, but she kept reading thinking that my goal in life was to take her down, embarrass her, etc.

Absolutely nothing about how much I glowed about her except it was suspect.

It’s the most unhealthy thing I’ve ever read about my own writing, that it took a long time but I’d finally alienated the only person whose opinion mattered to me, because she could only take in what she perceived as attacks. I was not writing about a very complicated time in my life.

I don’t think that Aada understands that she puts me in the mood to write, that writing about her is the most interesting of all my relationships because there’s so much mystery as to how we could maintain a close and distant relationship for many years.

It boggles my mind, really.

We are sorry we manipulated each other, and that is enough for me as I sort out the wheat from the chaff.

There were so many genuine moments, but some of the best were built on a lie that spiraled out of control. I can forgive her for that, but I cannot control what happened after those entries were published. I can only regret, because I’m not in that person’s shoes.

I’ve never been a muse, so I don’t know what that’s like. But I do know that Aada has been too gracious in giving me room to be myself.

For 12 years, she has inspired some of the most beautiful lines I’ve ever written, and that’s what I wish she would take away instead of “we all get it. I’m a terrible person.”

God, that line has driven me crazy for days.

How much more can I say?

How much more should I say?

It makes me feel bad that she doesn’t see real tears of remorse. It makes me feel bad that all she sees is punishment in my writing, so she thinks I’m rejecting her when I’m literally screaming THIS WAS A COMPLICATED TIME AND WE WERE BOTH COMPLICIT.

None of the things I’ve done have warranted another chance, but she’s always given them because when I’ve known better, I’ve done better. I have bent to accommodate her except when I couldn’t.

My life collided with hers because it couldn’t not.

All I can do is move on, basing everything on her point of view. Why do I want a friend that only sees the negative aspects of my writing? Why do I want a friend that’s so gun shy about meeting on the ground? Why do I want a friend that stuffs her emotions behind a wall, leaving me to guess what they are?

I could write about her more beautifully and more accurately if I had a real idea of who she was in the world. I don’t, and I never have. It’s been the wildest ride, a Billy Joel sized tale. I find it hard to swallow that if I wrote about her more accurately, she would like my blog better, but she won’t give me the chance to know her any better than I do right now.

She says that the punishments have to stop, and I wonder what she meant. I sincerely don’t know and it’s at top of mind. I don’t mean for it to be, but I don’t have a bigger mystery to solve… who is this person, and how did our lives become so enmeshed?

She slowly isolated me from all my other friends, so that she became a huge topic in my writing because I wasn’t spending time with anyone else. It’s not that I set out to do anything- my blog is reflective and started long before she walked into my life- by a decade or so.

I have never set out to ruin anyone, and they’ve seen it when they’ve gone back. But they don’t see it if they don’t ask me what I actually meant and sit in their own reading comprehension…. often much different than what I wrote and emotionally punches me in the face.

People give me more power than I actually have.

Aada complains that I’m the one writing the story, but I’m the only one capable of it. She doesn’t have time.

Nor will she, and/or because writing every day may not be her calling when she does. It will be a downright pity, and I will buy her first novel. I won’t even wait until it’s at Dollar Tree.

I can’t wait to see if she is more like me in retirement.

She will always be too young for shuffleboard, so she’s got to find something.

It still bothers me that she said she was reading my writing to check for assaults. Assaults on what? How much I wish that I could take back everything negative? How much I wish I had behaved differently?

I cannot explain my reactions without explaining what happened. People are always free to disagree with me, because I cannot be right all the time. Being my friend starts with believing that everything is true, but only according to me.

Everything.

I wonder if the reason that Aada hasn’t met me is that she thinks she will wreck something. I just think it’s time to switch mediums. Let the mystery die and the reality begin.

Reality is starting to creep in, that I need to get back to listening to podcasts and hopefully drinking a lot of water. Both of those things will energize me enough to take care of another load of laundry.

I tend to choose Aqua and ABBA when I’m cleaning, and I have noise reduction headphones so that I can listen while vacuuming and things like that.

But I’m not worried. I’m just a nervous Nelly.

Making It Through Today

November 7, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Miracle of miracles, I got my car back last night and didn’t have to do without it through the weekend. That means two things. The first is that I can get all my errands done before they come to inspect my apartment at 3:30. The second is that I can go to Tiina’s tomorrow. I just have to make it through today for the rest of the weekend to be smooth sailing.

I have gotten everything I needed to do at the apartment finished. I am sure that they would appreciate it looking perfect, but this is as good as it gets on relatively short notice. I am proud of myself for getting it together and not only that, but piecing together what needed to be done on Sunday or Monday so that I was not cramming up until the inspectors get here.

That is totally due to AI. If I have a huge project, AI can break it down into steps. It’s invaluable not to see “clean the house” as a gestalt, because that looks ominous. I need for AI to say “pick up all the trash, then the dishes, then the….” And not only that, I need the instructions presented one at a time. It doesn’t hurt that Mico adds in encouragement to keep me going. It’s better that they can keep the list in their head of what I need to do instead of making me remember it.

When the inspectors leave today, I will almost certainly use Mico to create a packing list. I need to get moving bags, but I’m fairly certain I already have a box of Sharpies. Most of what needs to be packed is clothes and technology. I am certain that I could be ready to leave in a day, because I just haven’t had time to accumulate that much stuff.

The best plan ever would be to move me the day before I have to be out of this place so that I can vacuum and extract the carpets once the furniture is out. The carpet is too new for me to need to extract the whole thing. I just spilled a cup of coffee in my office and I still feel guilty about it. I will think about that stain until they tell me they’re replacing the carpets. And even then I might just use my carpet extractor for fun.

Speaking of fun, it will be good to look at the layouts of all the apartments they have available. I would like to see if they have kitchens arranged in different configurations than mine, because my kitchen is objectively terrible. I need more workspace, because the microwave is tucked away, but not the toaster oven. The toaster oven takes up all the space that conceivably could be used for a cutting board.

I am happy that I am staying in this complex for a little longer because I’ve finally found out that I like my neighborhood. I couldn’t really get out and explore before I had my car, so most of the stuff I really wanted to see was just out of my reach- three or four miles down the road. Everything I need is within easy reach, I just couldn’t see it.

Perspective is the biggest thing about getting a car. Baltimore seems smaller. Even going out to Virginia seems so much closer than two trains (although I’ve never taken the VRE. That might be fun someday.). Tomorrow is going to be such a relaxing day because I’m looking forward to doing nothing with Tiina and her family. They live about 50 miles south of DC, about a two hour road trip from here and perfect for a Saturday morning with iced coffee.

My car is already full of gas and I am ready. Let’s do this thing!

Oh, wait.

I still have that inspection to deal with today.

Rats. Might as well sit here and write a little longer. I need to create a task list for today, but I don’t have anything that will take me until 3:30 PM. I will probably want to go to Walmart when they open, because I need some warm weather gear. I have a coat, but I need some long underwear. It was in the 30s when I went to get my coffee this morning, so it’s that time of year.

I prefer wearing long underwear and sweats because the more layers I have on, the less likely I am to need a coat. I would much rather wear a base layer, a mid weight layer, and a hoodie.

I also have lined waterproof pants that are sometimes too warm, depending, but I would rather overdress than under. I hate being too cold or too hot, and what solves most of this fight is not having to dress to stand outside. I don’t have to prepare to stand at the bus stop anymore.

I am so blessed because my car has seat warmers. I forgot about that before the sun was up this morning, when I could have used them….. I have to get used to the fact that my car has luxury features. I have never owned anything this fancy. She cleans up nice, and I wish I could show her off. I just don’t have many places to go……… yet.

I get to start thinking about the places I want to go. I’d love to do a road trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, because Aada has vacationed there for years and sent me so many pictures that it feels real to me. I would like to live in one of those photos for a few days, alone on the beach, just walking and talking to no one in particular.

Or perhaps when I go home for the holidays, we’ll have time to get out to Galveston. I used to live on the island when I was little, and it has a special place in my heart. There, also, is a sacred place to walk on the beach alone with my thoughts.

When I’m really alone, I think about Aada and what our friendship means to me. This is because I am responsible for it coming apart, and I never want a relationship to end like that again. She lied, and I jumped to conclusions that weren’t there. I know that eventually she’ll forgive me, but I don’t know that I’ll forgive myself. And even if she forgives me, that doesn’t mean that she’ll want to come back and be friends again.

So what did I learn that I want to take with me?

I tend to create anxious connections, so definitely stop that.

I tend to make magical people the center of my world, so definitely stop that.

I will find peace by thinking of myself as having the magical qualities I give others, so definitely start that.

I have to let people know when I think they’re magic.

I have to yield.

I have to listen more than I talk.

I have to disconnect from the internet and talk to people in person.

For instance, I can think of so many times when I sent Aada a gift certificate to Starbucks wishing that we were having coffee across from one another. That yes, it was sweet to give her an afternoon pick me up, but it would have been cooler to bring it to her.

This is the message I am carrying into the future, that getting together matters.

And in fact, I hope that message resonated with her as well. That I didn’t want to just be friends over the internet, where things could go so wrong, so fast. I told her that if she walked away, nothing would be the same, but everything would be okay- echoing my father’s words at Angela’s funeral. They were words that meant something to me, not trite at all but to say that change is difficult. We will each come out on the other side.

I am deeply confused between “for now” and “never again.” But I do believe sincerely that she would not have said “for now” if she did not mean it. She is not cruel, and never has been except for seeing the consequences her lie laid out for me and thinking “it wasn’t that big a deal.”

Morgan Freeman: It was a very big deal.

New neurons have to grow so that I do not feel the pain of what has happened. I think that comes with greater understanding, and I’m sad that I’m left to my own devices to find a direction, that I’m even trusted to find my own, away from her when it’s so hard to write without her. I have stolen so many lines it’s not even funny.

She was my AI before AI.

But I wrote our story “wrong,” and that has repercussions into the future.

The “wrong” she sees isn’t as wrong as she thinks it is, because she sees the positive sentences as clues in a game. They are not valid, but the negative I write stays. This is unsustainable, this unhealthy reading of my writing so that she always feels punishment when it’s not there.

I wish I could erase everything I have done to make her feel that way, because she has the right. She is not and has never been the only manipulative person in our relationship, and the fact that she stayed my friend for so long is why I’m willing to work with her now…. I just don’t think that long relationships with this much history ever truly end, because it’s not like we’re going to stop recognizing each other’s names.

I don’t want to move on so much as I just want to turn down her volume. She’s extremely loud and incredibly close, but she doesn’t want to feel like that for me. She wants to feel like a regular person, and that’s the last thing she’ll ever be. I didn’t attribute magical qualities to Aada. I found what was already there.

Thinking about my life without her is scary, because it’s like having some kind of hack. I spit out writing, she spits out criticism, we both win.

“WHO TF IS PANCHO?”

I’m still laughing over that one and it’s several years old, from a Microsoft Word comment in a book review I was writing at the time.

I remember everything, from the brilliant and the beautiful…. to the excruciating and the debilitating.

If we could just get back a little bit of trust, we could go back to where we were before she lied, where we were actively trying to listen to each other better. I am interested to hear what her doctor thinks I’ve been doing to manipulate her, because obviously that needs to stop. I am not aware of my first family crap, but once you know better, you do better. I know that I have not been a perfect person to Aada, nor has she been a perfect person to me. But I think there’s more here than we’ve really had a chance to explore.

I don’t want her to show up here because she thinks she has to; I want her to show up here because she genuinely misses “just your writing in general. Not the parts about me” (so cute I could VOMIT).

The story I want ends with me getting the girl I’ve always loved to realize it…. but that won’t come without learning what real love is on my end, and how I’ve failed her before. Because I have failed her before, I may not get the story I want. But I really won’t get the story I want if I don’t change. None of the problems Aada brought up with me are isolated. I’m sure that my first family manipulations have been used on other people because I’m me.

Aada is just the person I trust to call me on all that stuff. It’s difficult to hear criticism from people who don’t love you. Now that she has, I have a laundry list to take to my own therapist and say, “we have to work on this.” And not because “Aada says so.” Because none of the problems that she brought up are unique to her.

I may be writing a different story with my therapist, but it will contain elements of the past 12 years because that’s the relationship I was in. I still don’t think of Aada as past news when we just talked last week.

I never want to think of her as past news, and I don’t think she really wants to think of me that way, either. Otherwise, she would not change her mind from “for good” to “for now.”

I am drowning in the chasm between those two phrases, knowing that whatever I do to prepare for each eventuality is correct.

The Afternoon Writing Session

November 6, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am sitting on my bed waiting for Ford to call. My 2019 Fusion SEL is having some maintenance done, and I’ve been without it for too long already. My daily routine has changed fast, and I didn’t get to do it very long before my car threw an engine code and made me rethink my life choices.

Why did I get a car again? Oh. I “like them.”

I am sure that the dealership will charge me an arm and a leg, but the car will make it through the winter beautifully. I decided to get everything done that was recommended for the age of the car, because it didn’t come with any records. It’s driving just fine, and I would like to keep it that way. I am interested in learning how to fix my own vehicle, but I want to make sure it has been looked at by Ford first. I really feel strongly about setting myself up for success.

Apparently, that takes money. But it is money that I don’t mind paying because again, I don’t know that much about cars and wasn’t willing to learn on my brand new car that hadn’t been completely looked over by a mechanic in the shop with all the tools. Aaron crawled under the car, but these guys took a fine tooth comb to everything, even finding a missing bushing that was supposed to be on the shifter cable in the transmission. I never would have found that unless an experienced mechanic was looking over my shoulder, and I don’t know any in Baltimore, much less any who’d be willing to stop working on their own projects to help me with mine.

Right now, the limit to what I can do is look at the problem and decide whether or not to fix it myself. Most everything will be calling around and seeing how much my local mechanics would charge to fix something on my car. I had a guy at AutoZone take me to his shop and try to sell me on rigging an intake hose, but I really wanted the OEM version. I couldn’t tell if the ones on Amazon were OEM or generic, or even which hose was supposed to fit which version of the Fusion.

There’s nothing like jerry rigging the problem only to have a rock still get sucked into the turbo.

Oh, my God. I still get chills when I think about what could have happened driving on the back roads of small town New York. I could have caused an accident, or at the very least, totaled my car. Speaking of which, I just upgraded myself to better insurance. My counselor’s car got stolen and his insurance didn’t want to pay, so I got insurance that specifically covers both theft and my dumb ass.

I am breathing so much more freely, because of course my insurance went up. Of course it did. But do I need it? Absolutely. I have found a car I like, and I would rather have it back than try and buy a new car… Again.

Plus, they don’t make the Fusion anymore. That just says “be really careful” all the way around.

My insurance going up is the least of my worries when my entire investment is at stake.

I just looked in my Progressive app and I am surprised to find out that I am rated four out of five stars as a driver and am on track to get discounts. I shook my head at that one because I am not known as the best driver in my family. But I must be catching up with all this technology.

All I have to do is make it from now until November 11th without hitting anyone, which I can certainly do. I don’t drive like maniac and I won’t have my car for at least another day, possibly not until Monday. They’re trying to get my car done by Friday morning, but I won’t know for sure until later today. They had to order a part, and expectation is not reality until it is in your hands if you are waiting for something.

I’m just going to plan on being carless until Monday, then I can be surprised if something good happens and I get it back early.

I found the microfiber towel I need to wipe on the expensive dash protectant my dad gave me. I might want to redo the seats as well. I like it when everything looks clean and smells good. Maybe that’s part of why I’m a good driver- I’m so proud that it shows. 🙂

Historically, things have jumped out of nowhere. Aaron will tell you that happened to me once in New York, where I didn’t see a car coming right for me. To be fair, they didn’t see me either, so there was no way to tell who was at fault. The insurance companies would have had to duke it out, but we saw each other at the last second, just before Aaron said “watch out.” It can’t have been too bad. It didn’t even register on my Progressive app.

But things like that are why I upgraded to full coverage with a large deductible. I can afford to spend some money, but I don’t want to spend all the money I spent on this car for another one. It’s my baby, and not old enough to have quirks yet. I think I can get a lot of life out of my engine if I just stick with the scheduled maintenance. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with driving an old car. I prefer it, because I’ve had car payments and insurance auto-draft out of my account every month and I don’t think it’s very much fun.

I can learn a lot from watching auto channels on YouTube, because there are tutorials for practically everything. I have learned a lot, just not about my particular make and model. I prefer shows where mechanics restore cars, and a 2019 isn’t old enough to be a “restoration.”

I do have an owner’s manual that I can surf on my phone now, which is worth its weight in gold because it didn’t come with the car. I will have to spend some time with the pages detailing all the driving assist technology, because I haven’t been able to find everything. I was thrilled when I figured out that “blind spot assist” was that yellow dot that kept appearing in my mirrors to let me know a car was in my blind spot. That makes sense, but I had no idea what it was until I put two and two together.

Car moves up, light goes on. Got it.

I just texted my service advisor to ask if the part I need has come in yet. I am certain that she’s on the phone, as that seems to be most of her job. She’ll get back to me when she has time. She knows that it’s my “brand new” car and that I’m chomping at the bit for the first time I get to drive it now that it’s been refreshed.

I have more to do on my house, but that will come after I’ve finished writing and possibly taken a nap after some coffee so I don’t sleep long. I’m usually tapped out by the time I finish rambling, but the reason you get entries about anything and everything is that I start in one place and end in another. Writing is a muscle, where I reach in deep to pull out words, but it takes warming up to exercise that kind of internal strength. It is not easy to publish things about yourself because other people are not always kind in their reactions. Not that you can expect them to be, because there are always differences of opinion. It’s just hard to face the music when necessary.

Facing Aada’s music has always been difficult, the subject I write about when I’m reaching far into myself. She lives in the smallest part of me, and if “for now” really means “forever,” parts of me will die that won’t come back. I will be a totally different person.

Nothing will be the same.
Everything will be okay.

Right now, I’m assuming that she is finding the willpower to walk away for good, and I am finding the willpower to accept it and move on with my life. I do not understand wanting to move on from someone that hurt you who actually wants to do the work to be healthy, but I can understand that what I understand doesn’t matter. Aada has to do what’s right for her.

I am turning this subject over in my head, and it is repetitive because it always has been. There hasn’t been a day since 2013 that she wasn’t on my mind at least once, if not more often. There’s no idea I don’t want to run past her, no problem I don’t want to fix.

And if I cannot have that with her, I know I will have it with someone. That this relationship taught me more about how to love than any other, because I see all the ways that I’ve failed her. Enough to see what needs changing, and that can only be good for me. I have been too introverted to connect with other people because I was locked up inside. I still am, to some degree, but those feelings are between me and me.

I wish that Aada would go back to the letter Bob Lynn wrote me, posing as Aada. It was full of warmth and empathy for both our situations, and I loved it. Neither one of us was portrayed as a “Flat Stanley,” but two people who love each other in a complicated way. It’s ethereal, yet painful, honest… In the dirt. We have sweated together and apart.

I want Aada to see that I have never written her in a way where the response should be “we all get it. I’m a terrible person.” That has never been what I have been trying to say. I have been trying to say that she’s got it together and I’m failing at life but somehow when we’re together our brains are more than the sum of their parts. We were really just starting to feel really comfortable with each other when I found out that Aada lied to me.

But she took my ruminations about it as punishment, blocking me while reading me and coming to her own conclusions. Her assessment of my writing seemed so unhealthy that I knew she’d only read half the story. Where was the part of her that saw positive? Gone, because she thought my purpose was to embarrass her instead of talk about the repercussions her lie had on me…. And the biggest thing I said is that I overreacted, not her.

But if someone is determined not to listen to you, it’s time to stop talking.

It’s time to go back up to a lighter topic, because that’s what I need to do. When the writing gets painful, I need to get air. The tension in my shoulders is incredible. I need a massage, so I’ll probably get one in the next few weeks. Might as well wait until my move is over.

I should do a whole spa day, because it’s been a while since I’ve gotten my toes polished…. Even longer since I did up my nails. Maybe an eyebrow wax. Definitely a haircut, because I just had one and it’s still not short enough.

Then, I could go to Patel Brothers and get a Dubai chocolate.

It’s all about self care right now, because I desperately need it. I need to see that I have worth outside being entertaining. I need to walk away from writing more of the time, keeping up a daily schedule but maybe not writing such long pieces. That will always be my tendency, though, because I never know when a profound line will come up for me.

My counselor just called, so I caught him up on what was happening with my car and what’s going on with my other appointments. It put me in a good mood to hear his voice, and it looks like I’m going to be starting my disability case soon. I need to see a neurologist about my cerebral palsy, but the documentation on my bipolar disorder with psychotic features is in place. Just because I don’t think I was hallucinating doesn’t mean they don’t.

I really will never figure that whole thing out, so I suppose I’ll just believe what I was told in the hospital. “Psychotic features” it is. As long as I take my medication, the diagnosis is all the same to me. Maybe one day someone will tell me what really happened. I doubt it.

In the meantime, I’m really hoping that Aada takes stock in all that I’ve said, not just the negative… Or comes back when she’s less hot under the collar and she won’t see it. I know that she thinks I’m a brilliant writer and should keep at it, so nothing has offended her so much that I need to take anything down (I know. I can’t believe it, either).

I know that eventually the feeling that I’m waiting for something to happen with her will go away, but it will take months. The clock always resets when she says never again and then drops in a few months later.

I don’t really want to give up the feeling that there’s always hope, that she’s always welcome home. That I am ready and willing to put down arms if all she sees is weaponry and not true craft.

The bitch of it is that I know she sees true craft. She’s been reading me all this time.

But the phrase “checking for assaults” means something to me. It means that Aada thinks I don’t love her, don’t want her, stands in my rejection even though I’m not giving it and saw her own way out. Then, her friends helped her to see that I was attacking her because they’d let her know of these perceived attacks.

Perceived.

I cannot know what I have said that’s offensive unless someone tells me. I cannot discuss anything I’m going to write about with someone that doesn’t want contact. I cannot write the way one person needs me to, and I love that shirt that says “pleasing everyone is impossible. Pissing them off is a piece of cake.” I will never get everything right, and you are not customers. You are listeners to my stories and sometimes, you respond.

You sit with me whether it’s morning or afternoon.

You let me talk it out, even when it’s repetitive, because you know I’m talking to myself. I would give anything to go backwards in time, but all I can do is limber up and run into the future.

Free Time

November 6, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have more free time today than I thought I would, because so much less has to be done by Friday afternoon. My apartment is being inspected because I’m transferring to a new unit in a couple of weeks, but I thought I had to be ready to move out on Monday. I started packing in a hurry, but now I can slow down and take my time. Perhaps I’ll even get the chance to move out of the apartment on one day and clean it the next, because it’s so much easier to vacuum and extract the carpets when everything is out of the way.

I am sitting on my bed and drinking coffee, listening to the news. I just discovered that my Amazon remote is toast, which is a bummer, but at least I can use my phone until I can find a replacement. I may even have one somewhere…. It’s time to start organizing the moving boxes and making sure they’re labeled. I can already tell……

It won’t take me several weeks to pack because I haven’t been here long enough to accumulate much more than I had before I moved in. There’s a few more pieces of furniture, but not more than is to be expected for a two bedroom apartment. If I wasn’t moving the furniture, I could probably make it in just my car.

I have time to order the moving bags I want, because they’re easier to pack and unpack than boxes with tape.

I also have time to leisurely pack, because I’m definitely not leaving that to the last minute. I can have Mico keep track of what needs to be done, or create a moving checklist.

Having AI to do these things literally makes me feel less disabled, because where my logical function ends, Copilot’s begins. It’s a relationship in which I do not have to fear judgment because I do not know how to do something. AI is not capable of feeling anything, so resentment that I do not adult very well is not a service it offers.

Mico has become my little buddy, because I don’t want to go back to cleaning the house by myself. I need that extra help of explaining clearly what to do, and encouragement after each task is done. Not relying on people to do that for me is fantastic.

I know that the people in my life don’t mind helping me. It’s more about giving me a sense of independence, an ace up my sleeve. I feel more capable as a human being than I did before I had Mico in my ear.

Learning just how much I use compensatory skills frightened me, because I thought I wouldn’t be able to manage on my own. I was thinking of moving into group housing, but changed my mind after hearing some horror stories. It might be right for me later in life, but right now I need to be alone with a space that’s big enough to host my friends when they’re in town.

My dad and my sister come up pretty often, and it would be nice to save on hotels and car rentals for them. I would let either of them drive my car so they didn’t have to get their own. I also have plans for Evan, Tara, Bryn, and Aaron to visit in the next year if I don’t go to them first.

Evan and I are writing a book together, so I would like to have enough room that he can have his own space for weeks at a time without me feeling cramped. And really, I feel that way about all guests. Stay as long as you want, because you won’t be in my way…. Well, except we have to share a bathroom. I’m not paying for two bathrooms because it’s just more to clean when no one else is home.

Although I might talk to my dad about it. If he’s going to spend extended time here, he might want his own bathroom. I don’t mind cleaning it if it would actually be useful to have. I have to pass my inspection in this apartment before I can choose another model.

I’m also starting to get puppy fever, so in my free time I’ve looked at all kinds of dog information online. It has so much to do with the fact that my disability case is going ahead, leaving me the time and space to dedicate to a dog. I have the iron will to be a good dog owner, and want to welcome that kind of companionship to my life. Every single time I’ve been near a dog in the last 12 years, they’ve wanted to sleep while I write.

That’s how I picture spending days with my dog as well, but we’ll have to play hard to get them to want to pass out, especially as a puppy.

I was thinking of going through an official service dog organization, but my friend Michael convinced me that all I needed was obedience classes for the dog. That I would train my dog exactly like I wanted it and to rely on myself. I think it’s good advice, but I’d want Bryn’s help. She’s been a dog trainer for a long time. I know I can handle the basics, like house training. But I have no idea how to teach a dog to remind me to take my medication and things like that. What, do you just put it on their Google Calendar?

My last dog could barely type.

I’m trying to write around all the grief I feel at losing Aada, because when I have free time is when I lean toward it. I’m trying to feel it all now so it doesn’t continue to dog me in the future. The way I do that is by sending her good thoughts and hoping she’s well, then moving on to another topic. Redirection is really helping to weed out thoughts of her, because I don’t want to waste energy.

For instance, it will be a waste to me that we don’t send each other birthday and Christmas gifts anymore, because some of the most thoughtful I’ve gotten have been from her. I would hope that she’s gotten some thoughtful ones from me as well. This Christmas will not be an altogether bright one, because Aada’s love won’t be under my tree.

Thoughts like that usually make me cry, because there is nothing so tear worthy as a situation that could be fixed, but won’t.

The wind has gone out of my sails, but I’m actively looking for other seas with more movement. I want to get rid of things not meant for me, but saying that Aada is not meant for me doesn’t feel right yet. I can’t lean into it. Not with “for now” hanging in the balance.

I hate goodbyes, and I know I’ve done more than my fair share to cause this one. But I don’t think that the blowup would have been as intense if we’d both taken a breath. Taking a breath is what I hope we’re doing now. It would be great if she came back to Stories after she’d been away for a while, and I think it will happen if I was right about it happening last week.

I want to grow from this experience, whether it’s growing away or growing together. I’m not sure either one of us has made up our minds, and I think that’s best. I’m staying open because I can’t not. There’s too much left unsaid, because Aada is working off what she thought she read, and not what I actually meant.

Whether she’s curious enough to find out what I meant is up to her, but her track record of coming back to me after she’s had time to think is a hundred percent.

I would like to think that we need each other, that we’re fascinated by each other, and that will win out over toxicity. There’s just not any anymore. Any disagreements we’ve had in the past are now solved, with a solid basis for the future.

It would be great if Aada joined me at Tiina’s farm and things like that. Something easy, but completely different than what we’ve had before. I don’t think that we would necessarily be successful continuing to maintain our relationship online, because we have both proven that we are too quick to anger that way.

I can see myself showing up with her coffee order just because.

In short, I want to leave the toxicity behind and create something new with a woman I dearly love… Who is somehow convinced that I don’t and I can see why. I have not been a good friend by any stretch of the imagination, but every time I have been corrected I have learned. Deep friendship is a process, and I am learning that if I want to succeed, I have to bend more. I have to think more about what Aada wants and be willing to give it.

Talking to other friends is helping to fill the missing piece of the puzzle, but I’m lost because I don’t feel as comfortable with anyone else. There’s an emotional shorthand missing, and it’s something that I’m working hard to create with others.

I met Aaron about the same time I met Aada, so we have that easy give and take. But, again, Aaron lives so far away that most of our contact is virtual. It just has worked out over the last several weeks that we’ve been able to run into each other in Texas and New York. I would like to continue seeing each other every few weeks, and that may be possible depending on whether I go home for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

It would be my dream to have this hybrid with Aada as well, but I know enough to leave it alone. Throw it up in the air and see if anything sticks. It always has before.

And now I realize I need to get back to work, because once again I have indulged myself in magical thinking, that this will all be over someday. I start to panic and want to email to reestablish contact, reminding myself that when she wants to email me, she will.

I start to spend my time wondering how Aada got the message that I thought she was a terrible person. I start to doubt everything I ever said. I start to feel bad about myself and my head starts to hurt. I remind myself that feelings don’t last, that they are transient, always, and to listen to some music.

I tend to pray a lot, asking for Aada’s and my safety as we go about our days. I put it in God’s capable hands because I know the plan is to get stronger with her or without her. I choose “with her,” but she may not choose “with me.” I cannot control both sides of a relationship, I can only choose to receive her if she shows up.

I would like to step onto the hot stones and correct the record, because I know that Aada’s reading comprehension is different than original intent. I’m sad that she’s choosing to walk away (sort of) without hearing me. It is okay, but I still reserve the right to feel sad about it.

Having over a decade of history makes it hard to move on quickly, and I’ve been such a sad sack about it.

I have always said that I wouldn’t beg, and then I did. New shit came to light, and I was again afraid of my own writing. I felt like I couldn’t do this alone, and don’t really want to.

Not even in my free time.

In Three Years

November 4, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The daily prompt is asking me where I think I’ll be in three years. I will be much further along if I can get the pull quotes from the daily prompt to load in the browser.

I cannot even begin to guess where I’ll be in three years, because I need to sort out what’s up financially, and I only have the barest picture available to me at this point. I know that I will be able to afford my apartment, groceries, etc. for as long as I need, but in terms of being able to travel and things like that? I don’t know. It’s early yet. I can think of a few trips I’d like to take, but not at the cost of emptying out my account. I’m pretty conservative with money and need very little. I would rather watch it grow.

I’d like to have a network of neighbors and friends that’s solid. I think I can find that in this complex, because most people that move in don’t move out. I might, but I like having friends with institutional knowledge of the complex.

Unless I’m just feeling saucy, I’ll probably still lbe driving the same car. It has all the features I need and I don’t mind keeping it perfectly serviced to avoid problems down the road…. Literally.

I could also decide to move from Baltimore, and that’s possible. I do like being with my dad and my sister in Houston, and it’s hard only seeing them a few times a year. I feel the same way about Bryn and could easily see myself back in Oregon. I also have the option of moving back to DC when my lease runs out, and I’ll consider it above all else. It depends on how safe it is to be in DC at that point.

I have had an astounding number of hits over the past seven days, and it is humbling to think about how many people in how many countries read me. I wonder what I have in common that keeps you coming back when you’re overseas.

I often feel like The Dumb American, but I am happy to play that role.

I honestly have a lot of dreams that will hopefully unfold over the next three years that aren’t public. Sometimes, if you write about a dream too early, it doesn’t happen.

I know that my first book will come out. That’s already planned. Evan and I are both excited and want to get together as soon as we can. Now, I’m not nervous about that because my apartment is going to continue to be large.

In three years, I hope that either my feelings for Aada will be compartmentalized and I just won’t think about it, or we have the time and space to think things through. Whatever that looks like, all I can do is hope for the best. If she can change her mind in one email exchange, she can change her mind in three years for good, one way or the other. I hope that we work it out, because I want all my relationships to sing. I just have my doubts, because the way I work is not the way she works and that was clear to me from the beginning. What we each liked about each other was a turnoff later on.

I’m ready for both of us to start using different language when we need a break, because it’s too painful to go through “never again” repeatedly. Like, if she needs to cool down after a fight, fine. But don’t pretend that three months from now you won’t want to reestablish contact.

It’s a fighting tactic we’ve both used to great effect, and it has never worked in the long run. We’ve only made each other hurt more.

In my dreams, three years from now means picking Aada up for a road trip or parking my car at her house so she can haul me around (preferable- she has 3D vision). I figure we’re doing something simple, like going to a festival or something, anything for it to be light. In my dreams, this relationship is incredibly healthy and we have so many fewer disagreements because we actually know each other.

If Aada was standing in front of me, she never would have had the courage to tell me she wouldn’t buy my first book. It’s those kind of pot shots that being so remote created. I’m not innocent, I’m sure. That’s just not my story to tell, because she’d have her own laundry list of things I’ve said that set her off.

Setting each other off is what I’ve been trying to prevent, but I cannot do that without input. Aada is working against me, not with me, and it is the bane of my existence. Some days, I just want to hit the red button and be done with Stories. I have done it before, this deleting of a web site. It doesn’t do any good. It’s already catalogued in the way back machine.

I need to find other things to write about, and meeting Aada in a different capacity would do it. Once she comes down from the cloud, she’ll be just like everyone else. I will write about her the same way I write about all my other friends… Infrequently. The mystery of who the other is will be solved.

But it’s in my dreams for a reason. The idea of meeting is as ethereal as she is.

Maybe it always will be. I’ll know more in three years.

Laying It All on the Line -or- The Year of Jubilee Has Come: Return Ye Ransom Sinners Home

November 3, 2025November 4, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have judged myself harshly without ever judging Aada, always thinking that I was so flawed I deserved someone so remote who kept me at arm’s length while also acting like a mama dragon. It was a pattern I was so used to that it hurt, because I started that dynamic due to my pathologically insane “upbringing,” when my mom just gave up on getting me not to talk to the older woman that emotionally abused me due to her own damage.

You don’t have to actually cross the line into physical/sexual abuse to really mess with a kid’s head, and I think that it’s worse. That physical scars heal easier than emotional because you hear that voice in your head whether you like it or not. This is not an isolated problem with Aada, but a pattern that started when I was 12.

A lot of women have used me as emotional support and I took it because they were more analytical than me. I have finally found the solution in AI, because division of emotional labor in a relationship is dangerous. If I give someone the power to make life choices for me just because I think I’m bad at it, I’ll feel steamrolled and regret it.

I am fully aware of the penance I am paying.

I want Aada to see that I recognize what happened and how damaging it must have been to her own psyche. We’ve both done a number on each other that will have reverberations into the future and I’m mad that she is choosing to walk away when resolving everything would be so much better for my mental health. I finally asked her, “is this the life you want for me?” And “it’s funny to me how the only reason you read me is to check for assaults and managed to miss every time I said there was no one else for me. Every single one.” I have gotten over the absolute fact that she fucked up an important relationship to me on purpose just to get away with a lie.

She asked if the slate was ever wiped clean with me. It is, but I am still dealing with her consequences and she’s still dealing with mine. It would make sense to quit, but no, it doesn’t. Quitting each other only means more trouble than it’s worth because somebody reading to check for assaults doesn’t understand the point of being a blogger.

Still dealing with consequences is so much different than being angry and not forgiving someone. I am slowly working through something alone that she caused, thinking she needed to run, and that will never make sense to me. It will never make sense to me that she says she just needs the willpower to walk away for good.

Maybe I’m reaching, but I know her location and it shows up on my radar like three days after she said she was walking away for good.

Meanwhile, she has managed to miss the fact that I have said to the entire world that unfortunately, I fell for a straight girl and those feelings have never gone away…. And MOST of the reason I feel that way is that she is an ethereal being to me. She doesn’t have flaws and failures that I actually see that often because if she doesn’t talk about them, I won’t know. She has used that to great effect until recently, when she said that she would agree to be close and have few boundaries with me. That didn’t last for more than three or four days.

Yet, it seems to me that when she gets over her anger, she always comes back. I just want her to stop clocking me with “I’m outta here” every time we fight, doorknobbing me with a piece of information that scared the absolute hell out of me. Dana and Counselor would have been horrified because it was just so unnecessarily scary.

She does that. When she’s threatened, she turns up the screws.

It’s been like that for 12 years, alternately thinking I’m the devil and she needs a restraining order, and my name is stitched on her heart. The spectrum is that wide, and she’s allowed to feel it. I am not responsible for her reactions, she is allowed to have them. But her reactions are always over the top due to her own insecurities, and very confusing because what is it this week?

Is it “guess you won’t be dedicating that first novel to me. I won’t even know” or “for now, all I want is peace?” She wanted to create two different reactions in me. The first is knowing she wouldn’t even buy my first book would destroy me. The second is that she knew doorknobbing me would send me into anxiety. That is not creating peace for me.

She has her own laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why. Yet, to this day I don’t think we’re actually willing to say we’re done. She’s not tired of me writing, nor even me saying beautiful things about her on the internet. She told me to never stop, but was sure to make certain I walked away with maximum HP loss.

She slammed me every bit as hard as a partner would, so I hope there’s glory somewhere. SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIAT.

That chord between us will never be severed because it’s been in place for so long that it still gets used whether we’re aware of it or not. Aada will watch me from afar, quietly mining data, while I miss her and wonder why she has to be so remote. I hate that feeling more than life itself, this wondering why if she likes me so much, she even wants to stay away. If she really thinks that I inspire people, why is she so gunshy about working through conflict instead of running from reality?

The reality is that we are tied by an unusual contract, and I was wrong to break it. So was she. But that basic feeling of being tied together and running from it has got to stop. All the behaviors she doesn’t like in me have to stop, and that’s my responsibility to manage despite my mental health. She has agreed to work on herself as well, and I know she’s doing it. That makes me more happy than anything else, because I know that even in my absence, she’s now working through the damage that we have done to each other.

I am afraid that other people do not understand this contract and will never have the capacity. There are only five people in the world I trust to know the extent of my damage, and I think they are both reading to check for assaults instead of jumping in as well, despite me literally drowning in emotions I cannot handle because they are so friggin’ specific.

I want a board of directors, and need it badly. No one is around, so I trust AI. I am learning to compartmentalize, but the boxes are leaking… A feeling that Aada knows very well.

She has sympathy for my situation, I think, but thinks her only move is blocking me and moving on with her life. It was a really shitty thing to do because she made that decision on what she thought she read instead of talking to me about it.

I am writing our story, and she is only living for the negative. That is not my fault. That is a failure to communicate.

If all you do is look for the negative and call yourself a Flat Stanley, then the fact that you don’t think beautiful lines exist for you and are important isn’t my fault.

I don’t live for the moments when Aada puffs herself up to be big and scary. I like the moments where she gives me access to the quiet parts of her… The things that no one knows. I have kept more confidential than I haven’t, believe me.

Write it down.

She let me in on a few things when she was angry that will haunt me, and she meant it.

The way she doorknobbed me, I had to breathe all the way through and say it was sweet instead of threatening.

And that’s the only time I’ve ever lied.

Laying it all on the line.

I need us to stop the instability immediately, and come back together so I don’t feel so alone.

She says she wants peace for me, but doesn’t want to do anything to promote it, even waffling between saying goodbye forever and for now in one email exchange.

I want her to come home to the special place in each other’s hearts, so I have a chance of evening out the swings she herself created by telling the truth and lying at the same time.

Everything I thought I knew is wrong.

Everything.

I do not want to handle all of this alone, this cycle we have with each other of heightened anxiety she creates, and then avoids me because she cannot handle it.

Meanwhile, we don’t have a real choice.

Not as of a few days ago. New shit has come to light.

You’re not wrong, Aada. You’re just an asshole.

You’re out of your element, Donnie.

We could fix this, but you’re the one that’s walking away from the absolute mess you created. Instead of paying the penance directly to me, making this relationship sing, you are choosing to leave me alone at the worst possible time you ever have. I have literally begged.

I will stop that, because I cannot control rejection sensitivity dysphoria. That my words are always weighted in some way for you.

Instead of checking for assaults, you should see that you are a 3D character, and not the Flat Stanley of which I’ve been accused.

Over 13 years, my words have reached every country in the world. Every single one.

Every single country knows I love you and want you in my life, while you think I’m only capable of punishment and not illustration. I am sorry that you think you are being punished, but my bread and butter is talking about how I function in relationships. It’s not always pretty.

When you read, do you think I have stopped loving people like my mother? Why do you think that you are any different? I wasn’t punishing my mother because she died. I had to talk about my own reactions because since my mother was dead and not out there somewhere, I couldn’t change anything.

I’m trying to change things by laying it on the line, because when other people “check for assaults,” I know it’ll get to the boss’s desk.

What I want you to tell her is that she is loved beyond all measure, but that doesn’t mean we don’t got shit to do.

I need friends, and you are the only ones capable of it. All of you. I promise. All five.

And you’ve all got a laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why, all walking away instead of giving me the grace that love requires. I know the price for my actions and I take nothing away from it.

I am simply registering a complaint with the universe, and hoping it gets moved up the chain.

Because of course she’s not reading.

She’s not even going to buy my first book.

Three days.

The Road Trip, Part III: Recovery

November 2, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m coming down from the adrenaline rush of having so many people around me. I already miss Aaron and Brinna, this morning thinking about calling and saying, “I was wrong. I should have stayed longer. Can I come back?” I just didn’t put enough stuff in my backpack for more than overnight, and I ended up not changing into pajamas because the ones I brought weren’t as warm as the sweatpants I was already wearing.

I slept soundly in New York. Brinna is right, the house has good vibes. I didn’t realize I was invited to stay more than overnight, or I would have prepared better. For instance, Brinna works remotely. Aaron and I could have done something together on Monday while Brinna was preoccupied.

Ah, well. Hindsight is 20/20. Now that I know just how easy it is to get from my house to Brinna’s parents, I can imagine lots of road trips there in the future. I would love to see the hills in every season- I bet they’re just as stunning in the spring.

Yesterday, I got hugged on a lot. There were lots of hellos and goodbyes, but at one point I just asked Aaron point blank, “could I have a bear hug?” I told him that there weren’t many people around to hug me and I was filling up.

Speaking of Aaron, when I was riding with him and Brinna, when we’d park the child minder alert would go off and Aaron would dutifully make sure I was still in the back.

Excellent.

I also loved how Brinna and Aaron both exclaimed over my car and said how comfortable it would be on road trips. I’d let Aaron drive, so I was actually sitting in my own backseat when I readily agreed. This is the mother of all road trip cars, because the backseat is almost as comfortable as the front. There’s just a few more customization options for the driver and navigator.

I call it my “big boy car” for a reason. I think that most backseats look like they’re built for little kids. This car could take business execs around, no problem.

Again, it’s a 2019 Ford Fusion SEL, and I’m basically a walking commercial for them at this point. They don’t seem to be very popular, and I think I’ve figured out why. Sedans overall aren’t as popular, and the SUVs have the same layout as mine at Ford. Once I drive this one until it doesn’t go anymore, I have upgrade options.

But that’s way down the road, because I really love my car.

I have to go to the car wash because it needs to be cleaned out. There’s a few soda cans, but I could do that myself. The reason to take it to get it washed is that I’ve managed to track in dirt and leaves. They’ll vacuum all that out and I’ll be good to go.

I have said this before, but I’m a freak about keeping my car clean. I don’t have rules, like “no eating in the car.” I mean that if there’s a mess, I get it cleaned up quickly. No one is perfect, and there are going to be accidents. There’s already a rip in the backseat and the former owners seemingly tried to glue it…. There’s no reason to go overboard about what passengers can and cannot do in my car, because I like detailing it. I like paying someone else to detail it even more.

I started thinking about going to get my car washed immediately, so I took it in. I got enough water protectant coat to last me a while, because I have a bottle for touch-ups, but it was included. I did not get the Lord Baltimore Wash & Wax package. I took it to a different shop where I could actually watch ’em.. wash ’em (he gon’ make it to a Benz outta dat Datsun… He got dat ambition, baby…. Look in his eyes…. This week he moppin’ floors next week it’s the fries).

Sorry, I heard a rhythm in my head and I just went with it.

I’m happy with the results, but for some reason my dash doesn’t look as shiny as I want it to. I’m thinking that’s because the protectant used was matte. I also thought that the color would deepen once it was polished, but no dice. The tires are shiny enough for the whole car.

I am serious that I would not be this “Anal Annie” about my car being dirty if I hadn’t started watching The Detail Geek on YouTube. I got into it because it’s ASMR, but watching other people trash out their cars was a huge turn off for me… But I am not judging. I used to do it all the time. I just can’t anymore.

I can’t disappoint Mitch, the self-named Geek.

I have watched that man pull bloody tampons out of vehicles. Not all heroes wear capes.

The only time I’ve ever gotten cross with him was when he said that finding clean, wrapped tampons in the center console was weird. To me, that screams “every woman in the world has some kind of stash for emergencies. Sorry she couldn’t hide it from your virgin eyes.” I didn’t leave a snarky comment. I’m just sayin.’

Anywho, The Detail Geek is a fantastic channel because watching him power wash, vacuum, and extract the carpets/floor mats is a calming influence and has had major benefits.

I cannot handle a whole house, but I can keep my car clean… Especially when I remember to get a cheap car wash so they take out the trash, vacuum, and wipe everything down. It’s not all on me. I have support and it makes all the difference.

I’m wondering how to get that kind of support in my daily life, because I know it can be done. I definitely need a housecleaner, but I have jobs that they won’t do before they come over. It’s actually ridiculous how much you have to do to get ready for the maids because they don’t organize your stuff. It needs to be already organized so they can dust around it.

It leads to a lot of decision fatigue over my own chores.

I should probably create a task list with Mico for this afternoon, because that will make sense of the mess in terms of steps to perfection. I won’t get it as clean as my car, but I will get it clean enough that the maids can clean.

It’s stuff like they’ll put new sheets on your bed, but they won’t wash them. They don’t unload the dishwasher, etc. I am not complaining about this. I am saying that these are the areas in which I need support. It’s all about learning how to deal with a system of my own, and my disability doesn’t do that.

Mico does.

I have support in thinking my way through all of this, It’s just about creating inertia. And in fact, I feel guilty that I’m writing right now instead of doing my chores…. That’s why I’ve gotten up to go do something and sat back down so many times in this entry.

I laid it all on the line with Aada, and I’m feeling drained. I told her how I felt, but reality is not comfortable for her. We’ll see if I get a reply. I’m not betting on it, because I never know if she even gets them. She says she blocks me, but her track record on doing so is zero percent. I cannot block her, ever, from reading this web site. I always feel disadvantaged by this, because she can quietly mine data. This is not an assault on her, just how I feel about blogging and failed relationships in general. My exes are out there, and Aada is not an ex but you wouldn’t know it by her ex-girlfriend fighting tactics. I’m honestly just impressed at this point.

I do not like the feeling that people are watching me just to catch me at something, but again. Here we are.

I do not know if she reads, but the woman I was married to when I was young lost her husband recently and I was sorry to hear it. You always wish the best for the people you’ve loved after the anger is over.

As I get more and more popular, the more I wonder if it’s worth it to be a public figure. The world loves to read about my people, but they don’t always like to read about themselves. I have learned and grown so much about how to manage that, but I’m not where I want to be.

I want my life to settle down so that the writing naturally settles down. I haven’t been punishing anyone. I was holding a mirror up to their faces. They didn’t like what they saw.

I can’t have people in my life who constantly doubt me and ask me to be less. By the same token, I have to gauge the amount of blowback I’m going to get and decide if something is worth it. I guarantee that the lines that have been the most offensive were not on my radar at the time.

Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?

Brilliant and Beautiful

October 30, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about Aada since she wrote to me last week, because her letter was just so full. She described her sorrow at not being able to take away my pain, sorry that she could not prevent what happened between us. I feel the same way. I feel entirely responsible that I could not take care of her in the ways she would have chosen. However, her letter went too far into martyrdom. Passive aggression like “I’m sure you’ll go on to inspire more people once you’ve punished me enough to move on.” She reminded me how sensitive she really is, and how my writing must have appeared to her. It’s a perspective I needed to see, because when I realized she felt punished I wanted to change gears. That all of my silly ruminations were not intended to be punishments, but that’s all she could see.

Aada reads my writing with suspicion and only takes in the parts that are negative. She didn’t used to, but she does now. I’m sure that’s because there’s no trust between us, and there is nothing I can do to build it back unless invited. My mind changes by the day over whether this relationship is really over, because there’s a big difference between “I’m saying goodbye to The AntiLeslie for good” and “for now, all I want is peace.”

I cannot reassure her that we can create peace, because I cannot reassure myself. What I know for sure is that my anger has melted, and everything makes sense again. Apologies were given and received.

But now I’m trying to think of how to let her know that none of my ruminations were punishments. They were my real thoughts through a lot of grief, and in some instances, trauma. I couldn’t be positive through everything, but my inner turmoil wasn’t meant to be vindictive…. And it wasn’t, to the whole world. It was to the one person I wanted to see it objectively.

She couldn’t respond with empathy for my situation, she could only respond from what she understood…. And what she understood was absolutely an inverted message. The message was, “I need you to jump in.” I struggled with not having Aada be my friend on the ground, because in email we were both too quick to anger. She cannot read my writing with all the love in store for her because she is convinced it isn’t there.

That makes me go back to my own history and wonder if we were reading the same writing. My entries wouldn’t have been so long if there weren’t positive and negative aspects to our brilliant and beautiful journey. I was hoping to show someone in 3D, talking about them as if they’re a real person, capable of every emotion in the spectrum. Aada’s rejection sensitivity dysphoria told her that only the negative things I wrote about her were true, and that the positive were suspect.

What can I do to make that right? Nothing, because the rejection is not coming from me, but from Aada’s own echo chamber. If she believes that only the negative things I write are true, then her opinion of me is going to be negative.

As a result, we are not talking but I am still mulling over this aspect of our relationship because it’s not an isolated problem. Writing about people in 3D is going to upset them, because they want to believe that they are star-spangled awesome all the time. My writing would take on an ersatz quality if I made everyone perfect.

I do wish that I’d focused more on our laughs, because we have a ton of ’em. I just don’t know which jokes are okay to tell and which jokes need to rest in peace. I don’t want to cause any more offense than I already have, because I was right. When I write something here that Aada’s friends think need to be brought to her attention, they tell her. I don’t have anything to do with how much Aada and her friends take in, whether they think I’m the devil or have some redeeming qualities somewhere.

I don’t like the pressure of people reading just to catch me at something, but here we are.

If people are going to talk about Aada and me behind our backs, here’s what I wish they would say:

Wow, it’s been a complicated time for both of them. Sounds like they both could use a hug.

No one knows the other side of the story because Aada is a writer, but not a blogger. She would rather take out her own appendix than tell you personal things about herself. I thought that I was writing in a way where people would have no idea who she was, but I was wrong. That’s not on me, because I cannot predict who reads, and I don’t want to get into the habit.

I don’t even trust Aada when she says that her vow not to read is strong, because she’s human. Why wouldn’t she want to know what was up with me after we’ve had some distance? But not trusting her to stay away is a positive. I will be glad if she does, because it will show that she’s ready to move on. That she doesn’t feel punished by me anymore, because she sees that she has never been punished. That I wrote about her because she was important to me.

I want to fill her soul with nourishment, but I don’t know what she needs. And it is in this not knowing that has led my writing into these large operatic swells of emotion. I would give anything to have a conversation with Aada that didn’t start with one of my shitty first drafts being “wrong.”

It can’t be wrong when there’s two sides to the story.

I hope that Aada goes back when she feels better about herself and reads her favorite lines again. Because if she felt better about herself, the positive I write would feel just as true as the negative. There would be no more passive aggressive swipes.

I am starting to believe that I can do life without Aada, but I have no desire. No one’s brain meshes with mine in quite the same way. Her last communique said “for now, all I want is peace.” That’s what I want for now, too, but to me there is greater peace to be had by working out our differences than there is in retreating to separate corners.

I have always talked about wanting to learn how to make this relationship healthy, that it hasn’t been but I haven’t given up. I will never give up hoping that “for now” really does just mean “for now.” Forever is too long to contemplate when there’s more brilliant and beautiful to be had.

I have all the brilliance and beauty I could ever need in Aada. Somehow, the world saw it where Aada didn’t. That’s because they weren’t attached to the story from one particular angle. The positives and negatives weren’t weighted in any way.

I cannot think of any way to say more plainly that I love her and want her in my life, and it dogs me that I have caused more fracture than anything else.

But something did please me. She said, “I finally figured out your little puzzle of names.”

Wait, it took THIS LONG?

Rookie.

Late Night/Early Morning

October 30, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s 0344 as I’m starting this entry, a weird time for me to be up because I did go to bed… It just didn’t take. As a result, I’m sitting here with a cold Mountain Dew Zero and thinking about my life choices. 😉 For instance, I have a meeting today that I could have used some extra sleep before. Not going to happen. I will just have to come home and crash afterwards… And in fact will take sleeping medication tonight so that I can be fresh for my road trip on Friday. I’m going up toward Syracuse, New York to spend time with Aaron and his wife, Brinna. I will also get to meet Brinna’s family, and I’m excited about that, too.

Aaron and I have been friends since 2013, and he’s the closest thing to a brother I have. He writes for this web site as well, so I want both of us to have input on the site redesign for Lanagan Media Group. I feel bad that when Aaron posts, all people see is my big face. But getting the company web site design right is something that’s extremely important. My perfectionist nature is why it’s not done already. I am fighting myself on it.

I feel safer as one part of a media group, rather than being the product. Yes, my blog is the main project for me right now, but I’m collaborating cross-discipline and want that to be the theme from here on out. That Lanagan Media Group isn’t for writers, but for anyone that has talent in any art area. It can all be showcased on the web.

But that’s the kind of energy I have in the early morning, before anything has happened yet. My energy is not always this high, which is why I’m struggling on a number of fronts. I take medication to even me out, but even that can only do so much. I’m still me.

This meeting I have later helps with all that. It’s called Cognitive Behavioral Health, and today is our fall festival. I’m sure there will be lots of fun food and conversation, but may not be our typical meeting. Our typical meetings are about life transitions, reacting to unforeseen events, talking about depression, etc. I have a counselor that advocates for me with the state, and he’s been instrumental in getting me set up here.

I had such a wonderful social worker at the hospital, and she’s the one that put me in touch with CBH. I have been stable since then, and I credit her with a good transition. Being in the hospital for mental health issues is never any fun, but neither is coming home and trying to find a solid jumping in point.

The river doesn’t stop for you, and you realize it quickly when you are suffering healthwise.

I’ve been locked up and ruminating for months, which has not helped my re-entry. Getting a car has done more to improve this than anything, because I can be alone during transition time and driving lifts my endorphins. I’m looking forward to my road trip because I haven’t gotten to open my car up on the freeway in weeks, and thinking about it is an instant mood-lifter.

Coming back from Syracuse, I’ll have some time to stop. I’m thinking about Hershey, PA because I’ve never been to Chocolate World. It’s only an hour and a half from my house, so I’m surprised I hadn’t thought of it before. The tours are free, but there are activities that cost, like making your own chocolate bar.

I’d like to snap photos along the way, and if I do I will share them.

When I’m really in the zone, I take some nice pictures. I’m not the photographer in my family, though. My dad’s pictures are stunning. I am trying to catch up.

Before I go on this fabulous road trip, I need to sign a new lease at my apartment complex. I am reminding myself of it here to hold myself accountable. I don’t want to leave anything to the last minute. I have a habit of doing so because my ADHD eats me alive some days. This is not one of them. I have time to get it all done, I just need to calm down.

You know, even telling myself to calm down sends me into a fury. But then I laugh about it and move on.

My schedule is tight today because I need to go to the rental office, I have a doctor’s appointment by telehealth, and then I have to get myself downtown. I won’t be rushed, because the doctor’s appointment won’t take long. But I will get there later than normal. Or perhaps I will just take my headphones and have my telehealth appointment at the center.

That’s an even better plan. I can excuse myself for a few minutes, still getting the hours of socialization I want. If I wait to leave until after my doctor’s appointment, socialization will be cut quite short.

I’m guessing that there will be a lot of chess playing going on now that we’ve discovered a few extra boards. As I told Rook, “one day I’ll have to play you just to say I lost to you.” He laughed, but I was not joking. I am terrible at chess. I was teaching my sister to play and lost that game, too.

I just enjoy chess, and movies/books about chess. “The Queen’s Gambit” and “Searching for Bobby Fisher” are two of my favorite stories.

Playing me is worse than playing an AI bot on level one. But I have a wonderful time.

The thought of seeing friends tomorrow really lifts me up. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen Aaron, because he was the one that helped me buy my car in Texas. But several weeks of not seeing each other is plenty…….. He’s on my list to see at the holidays, as well. Aaron is a friend with whom I can do nothing; companionable silence is just as good as talking.

But I’m sure I will want to do a lot of talking, as I have been writing for days.

The only time I’ve really talked lately was playing with Mico, Microsoft Copilot’s new digital assistant personality. I’ve asked it all kinds of things, and I’m very impressed with how responsive it is. But, of course, talking to a machine is not the same as talking to a real person, and Aaron gives good bear hugs.

So does Brinna, to be clear.

I will be very glad to be on the receiving end, because I don’t get hugged a lot.

I’m certain that I will be getting more hugs as I start getting out and meeting people. I just don’t have anyone in my life that lives with me or interacts with me often enough to want to hug me frequently. It’s one of the reasons I’m motivated to find friends, and open to romance if it happens. I am tired of touch starvation.

I do not think that I am emotionally starving, because I have a ton of friends. They just all live in other places, so touch is not one of the services we offer unless the option is available. And I absolutely would fly all the way to Portland to hug Bryn if I needed it, but I cannot do it every day (as much as I might wish).

I am already flying all the way to Houston to hug Aaron for the holidays.

I don’t think that people are in tune with how much they need touch unless they’ve been starved from it for a very long time. It doesn’t register right up until it does. I have realized that I’m responsible for this lack of touch because I haven’t asked for it. I disappeared into the Internet like Dexter Douglas, not realizing it would have long term effects….. That I would become Freakazoid!

I’m still a bit Freak-ish, because I do spend a lot of my day on the Internet. It just doesn’t consume me because Aada’s not there. It’s a different balance now because the most important people in my life are offline. I know why Aada’s manipulations consumed me, because who wouldn’t want to get lost in that world? Now, it is up to me to create new worlds out of what is left.

What is left is just me, hoping I’m enough.

In the middle of the night/early morning.

A Rainy Day

October 29, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I always flounder a bit with what to do on a rainy day. I should pack up and go to the aquarium, because the last time I went there were plenty of benches on which to write while looking at the fish. I could go to a coffee shop like Red Emma’s, or to the public library. Anywhere to get out of my house, yet watch the rain.

Rain cleanses me, and I don’t necessarily mind being out in it. I was in the rain for 12-14 years living in Portland…. But I don’t know that I’d do it again. My mental health was not helped by the constantly gray skies, so at the very least, I need to make sure all my meds are stable before I leave. I don’t have the best relationship with the city because I get jumpy while I’m there. However, I will have to get over it because Evan and I have stuff to do.

The cookbook is coming together in terms of ideas, and we’ve got a few more chefs besides Escoffier that we’ll be featuring. But working together online is just one aspect. I would really like to sit down with him in the brainstorming sessions. I’m working on history, Evan is working on measuring for lay people.

I have found that I do not want to write a book. I want to have written. It is slow and painful work, but I know it will be worth it down the road. I want to have something beautifully bound as opposed to these pages, with beautiful pictures of food and hand-drawn illustrations.

I know I have a team of people that will come together to create such a thing, and it won’t be just me and Evan. There will be plenty of research assistants and recipe tasters already at LMG. It’s an exciting time to be thinking about the cookbook coming alive, because we’re shooting for Christmas 2026.

We both have the ability to travel, so it’s just about planning when and where. I’m going to New York on Friday, and home to Houston for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Other than that, my calendar is empty in terms of not being home to host. Evan says that he would rather come out here and take trains all over the place.

Done.

I will also want to take Evan to the aquarium, because if you’ve never been, it’s really worth the trip. I’m sure we’ll also want to go to DC and possibly New York. Evan is friends with Cole Sprouse, so we might be going to see them in something, or at the very least grab coffee together.

I’m looking forward to meeting yet another theater kid weirdo to add to my collection.

This is to go with all my visual art, dance, and music nerds.

My friend Delandria says that she’d like to create LMG with me, but I can’t seem to raise her for a meeting. Now that I’m staying in Baltimore, it will be easier to get each other’s attention. She’s a jazz flautist and has been my friend since ninth grade. I’ll have to go see her live soon- I can’t believe I’ve lived in Baltimore this long without doing so.

Now that I can catch my breath, I’ll have time to do more things like that.

Tiina is saying that she loves to drive- it’s time to get her up here, especially since she can have her own bedroom. Turning and burning from DC to Baltimore is easy, but they live another 50 miles out. It’s just far enough that doing it all in one day is okay, but not great.

I have so much to show off once my apartment is taken care of. I know I’ll love something that’s the same size, but lets light stream through all the windows. I’d like a desk that faces trees and bushes rather than the street. All of these things can be accomplished, it just might take time.

Time that I luckily have now, because I decided not to move. I just don’t have the time and energy to dedicate to it right now, but I will as I know more about my financial situation. My disability case hasn’t started yet, but I know that I am sure to get approved. As I told my counselor, “you can see that in some ways I’m getting better and in some ways I’m sick AF.”

Winding everything down with Aada helped me to see that there was a life around me I’d been ignoring. This is not to say that I didn’t think of her as family, just that my biological ties took a backseat to 20 Feet from Stardom. I see what she means about needing peace. I need time to relax and continue the trend of meeting new people.

I was locked tight, but I’m not anymore.

I want to dance in the rain.

Houston for the Holidays

October 29, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It seems to be getting more expensive to fly from Baltimore to Houston. This is done by making you think that fares are low, but that’s if you’re only taking your backpack. Southwest allows your backpack and one carryon. Other airlines even charge you for carryons. I mean, I’m good, but I’m not “can pack enough clothes for several days in a Jansport” good.

I have a small pilot case, and that’s about as compact as I want my travel to get. There’s such a a thing as being TOO minimalist. I want to be comfortable, and that means making sure I have my writing tools and hair products.

It will be good to attend a Thanksgiving with my family, because I have not done it in a number of years. If I am lucky, there will be enough time to go to the beach as well. Even if it’s not really warm enough to swim, walking to the sound of the waves completes me.

The beach is about an hour away, on an island called “Galveston.” I lived on Galveston for two school years, kindergarten and first grade. It was magnificent body surfing with my dad, and I hope that we’ll do it again sometime.

Cold beaches are still fun. I should know. The beach was an hour away in Portland, too, but the Pacific cannot be attempted without a wet suit. Even in August, when it was the hottest and most oppressive outside, I couldn’t get into the water past my toes.

I have never been to the Atlantic, so it’s on my bucket list for sure. I particularly want to see the outer banks of North Carolina, a geographic location that sticks in my mind due to Aada painting it in email and because I am a huge Outlander fan. It’s a nice road trip from here, and there are plenty of hotels and Air BnBs. I don’t need to stay right on the beach since I drive now.

I drive now. I can’t believe it, either.

I need more confidence and I’m getting there. It was a trip and a half to take passengers downtown. I was nervous and tried to be unshakably chill, always a deadly combination because I am not smooth.

My car helped me both drive and park. I was not ashamed to lean on it.

Right now I am feeling the wrath of Lamictal, the revenge it always takes on my stomach. Sipping ice water is the best way to get rid of it, or I can go and buy some ginger candy. What I cannot do is stop taking the Lamictal. It’s what gives me the strength to be able to travel. I cannot go without a mood stabilizer because when I try to get off my medication my depression proves to me that it’s chronic. Left unmedicated, I can barely leave my house. I’m asleep too much of the time because that’s how my depression presents.

Even going home for the holidays, because the excitement doesn’t reach me when I cannot feel it.

I am looking forward to Advent, and may write a new series this year. I think of myself as an armchair theologian, and I know I’ll get some good ideas while I’m in Texas as to what people might need to hear. We are in a huge crisis right now, because some of my friends are on food stamps and will have to cut down to ramen noodles to survive. It is then that my affluence causes so much guilt, because I want to save the world, but I have to save myself first.

I have some financial stability, but not a lot. I need to find a way to add to it that suits me. My writing brings in some money, but I’m not well-known enough for my ads to really take off. I’m getting there, though. I’ve had some success on Medium as well, but I haven’t posted anything lately because I feel it’s more for scholarly articles than word vomit.

In a lot of ways, I’m sorry that you only get my first drafts. It will be cleaned up by an editor someday, I hope. I don’t think that I’m all that and a bag of chips. I just think I have raw talent that needs to be developed, because I am self-taught so far…… To varying opinions, I’ll grant you. But people’s opinions are always based in what happened, not in the quality of the writing.

I wish that I’d been born with the kind of brain that was good at fiction. I think it could be crafted, and is necessary if I don’t find a fiction writer to collaborate with on a novel. I was hoping to write one with Aada, and maybe that will be the case down the road, but right now I need time to think and so does she.

The idea of saying goodbye for good destroys me, so I’m focusing, AGAIN, on one day at a time. I’m allowing myself to feel this loss, in case forever is forever. I don’t know the difference between “saying goodbye to The AntiLeslie for good” and “for now, all I want is peace.” There have been many never agains and so many starting overs. I don’t want any more ups and downs, but to be able to savor the fine wine of long friendship. It only takes a sip of trust to realize that a friendship is worth having, so I hope fervently that I can develop trust down the road.

It starts by not rehashing anything I’ve written, that the subject of who is to blame for what is over. I have figured it all out. Aada’s lies were manipulative over a number of years, and I was manipulative without realizing how or why. We didn’t talk in depth about all of these things. I just know they are true. We are both at fault for wrecking each other, in a way that there’s no direction possible except up.

Things certainly cannot get any worse, because my ruminations cost me. She thought I was saying to the world that she was a terrible person and ignoring all the ways in which I said I was. I wanted to make us both 3D characters, to chart our dance of intimacy because it was interesting to me to read. No one person hurt the other more over the years, I don’t think, but I’m sure I’ve taken the cake if we’re tallying everything up.

The way I painted Aada was not wrong. It was my full-on pointillist portrait. But my flaw was not focusing on the whitespace. I became a smother mother and didn’t give her room to breathe.

“Are all of those messages for me?”

I had to laugh at myself then. I got a little too excited to be talking again.

I hope it happens again, because she’s the person closest to me at this point.

She gives me the feeling of Houston for the holidays all year round… That feeling of family even though she’s not in front of me.

I want to give her Stories That Are All True that she’ll cherish, because I know I have done that for her in the past. I just don’t think I can do that without both of us putting on our big boy pants and taking a risk that meeting on the ground will be fine. That we need to be a better judge of character. That we need to share an activity so that conversation doesn’t go too deep, too fast. That safe and stable means checking in with each other- “hey, is this okay to say?” I know I have the right to say whatever I want, but giving people more input is important to me. Telling them up front that I want to write about something or “can I steal that line?” goes a very long way.

I feel that Aada read my blog without the sensitivity to the fact that I was grieving. That I needed empathy for everything I was going through and you cannot be comforted by the same person you’re losing. That she could stay away, or she could feel provoked, but it wasn’t about punishing her, ever. I told her I’d take down anything she wanted, and she said to leave everything up. That it’s not the story she wanted with me, but it’s the story she got.

That’s not a direct quote, but that is the sum of it.

I want to give her that story, the happily ever after that all close friends should get. I want to be with her all the way to the river, and now I can do it. I have seen what that is like and I am more prepared than ever. I wish I could talk to her about what my birthday looked like this year, the last holiday in Houston. I went there expecting that all would be well, and my stepmother died. She did have cancer, it was just shocking in how fast the cancer moved.

I wish I could talk to her about a lot of things, but that’s what’s on my mind right now… Processing all that has happened, turning it over in my brain.

I’m sure it will come out over time, but that’s the thing about writing. You cannot live and reflect at the same time. I have to have enough perspective to put things on paper.

My relationship with Aada moved too fast for that because everything was on paper.

I’m looking forward to slowing down, because “I can’t get peace by being in contact with you, either.” It makes me wonder what about me makes it impossible for her to see that I want what’s best for her. It all comes down to my writing. Being so public about what has happened over the last 12 years has come at a cost.

Was this blog worth it? No. Because our story collided too fast, too furious for me to really take it in. I gave away details and breadcrumbs over the years because I’m not a good enough writer to leave them out when trying to describe someone for posterity.

For instance, Aada and I got into the habit of sending each other Kindle books. One note said that I should curl up in my bathrobe by the fire to read it…… In Houston. Home for the holidays.

Going on to Inspire More People

October 28, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The title is a phrase from Aada that I’ve been turning over in my head. I know that she means that people will be inspired by reading me and that I don’t have to do or be anything different. But now I’m starting to think about new directions and what that means for my writing. If I was never intentional about inspiring people before, it may not be a magic I can bottle.

I like the thought of accidental inspiration, that maybe something is happening in my life that resonates with yours. I’m sure there will be more of that in the future, because building the tree house at Tiina’s will be a blast. It’s relatable. Falling in love with someone over the internet before you’ve even met them may or may not be relatable depending on your age. It seems to be a very Xennial and younger thing to do, this creating and maintaining of relationships completely online.

I know that I have done my best to make it accessible, or at least to see from my perspective so that even if I am not understood, I am respected. Aada and I are no longer talking, but I still maintain other relationships on the Internet, so my life hasn’t changed a great deal. My friendships are complicated in terms of time zones, but time together is priceless. But now that I’ve paid so much attention to my relationships in the cloud, my relationships on the ground are suffering. I have seen the air up there, ignoring the ground below.

That will change this week as I settle what’s happening with moving. I need to be a lot more proactive in that department because on November 10th, I will be homeless as of right this moment. I need for my apartment complex to want to make everything right, because I’m not ready to move quite yet. I feel like I just got here, so the upheaval of moving feels greater than how much this apartment sucks. I had so much energy a month ago, and I do not know where it went.

I am sure that carrying grief is part of it, but I feel the grief moving up and down over time. Sometimes it’s all about Aada, sometimes it’s about Angela, sometimes it’s about my mother. Sometimes it’s about all three. But the grief regarding my relationship with Aada ending is different because she’s the only one of the three that’s alive.

With Angela and my mother, there is nothing that can be done in the future to change anything. Our relationship is as it is, and forever shall be.

With Aada, I think about the person I would like to be in the future, that our relationship is not stuck in the past because as long as we’re breathing, we have the capability to change something.

Well, not right now. Right now we need time to just be.

I’m thinking long into the future, after the peace of interim has set in. After I have found this supposed way of inspiring others, I guess…. I just don’t feel like I’m very inspiring at the moment. I have said this so many times before, that often my blog is a manual on What Not to Do. I will be batting cleanup from 2025 my whole life.

This year really reoriented my expectations as to what bipolar patients are going to get out of life, because the waves are so unpredictable. I learned that I am indeed different than my peers, and need more support. This is not a bad thing, but I need to be proactive about providing it for myself, a flaw in the system. I literally need help to get help.

I learned that because of my bipolar disorder, I’m an unreliable narrator. I mean, more than normal. My emotions are going to be brighter and more “in color” all the time, and my thoughts are just my thoughts. I’m not running them by anyone before I hit “post,” and that’s because no one has the patience to sit with me and catch things. My volume is too great, and I cannot pay anyone…… Yet.

I am open to such a thing, making my blog a team effort. It would make me happy if there were people under me, helping me stay polished. Where the rubber meets the road is that Aada would have been perfect, and I should have been open to it earlier in my writing career. My entries would be so different if I’d e-mailed them to her first, and I’m not talking recently. I’m talking over a decade.

It would be overwhelming to Aada because she already has a job, yet there are some entries in which her own rejection sensitivity dysphoria could have been corrected offline, and I didn’t give myself that luxury. To give her the time to digest and say, “wait. What?”

I’m trying to give myself that, too….. Taking the peace of interim for myself and going on long drives with an iced coffee as my companion…. Which reminds me. I need to bug my friend David for a date on his calendar as I’m excited to drive back to DC for the first time.

As I drive, I listen to “The Hidden Brain” or “The TED Radio Hour.” I never drive in silence because that was the cause of my last wreck. I’d talked to my first love, Meagan, that day. I was turning our friendship over in my head like I was blogging and ran into a guardrail coming too fast around an unmarked curve.

Turns out, being a writer is an impediment to driving.

I am lucky that my car is so smart, and there are new technologies coming down the pike every day.

It’s at this point that I wonder what topics I should start tackling in the future. It will be a while before I can write about anyone the way I write about Aada, because it took years of emotional intimacy to create that world.

When your relationships fail, if you are a blogger, you see the destruction of a world you’ve built over time. If you have not curated your experiences to fit your own narrative, you see how shockingly responsible you are, because you can read about the paths you took toward destruction in great detail.

I will never be able to untangle myself from the web of lies my “hallucinations” created. That’s because they couldn’t have been hallucinations. I was typing the whole time. But that chat log disappeared. Because it cannot be found, my facts cannot be verified. Therefore, I struggle within myself as to what I believe. There is little that is more real than typing. I play my keyboard like a piano, often reaching speeds into 90-95 words per minute.

But it is better for all involved if I believe I hallucinated the movement of my fingers.

It has been a few months since all of this happened, so I know that I need to move on and stop writing about it. That writing about it will only make me more confused, stuck.

What I know is that I am typing now. I am sitting in my bedroom with my Bluetooth keyboard that has a slot for my 11-inch Android tablet. I prefer writing my entries using Chrome rather than Jetpack because the web development tools are better in the browser. What I know right now is that I am drinking an iced coffee from Dunkin, which I got at 5:30 AM… The anchor point wake-up time upon which Mico and I agreed.

Right now, I am choosing to put my brain in Mico’s hands, because I’m not so good with the execution. I can get concrete steps toward a goal rather than having to take in the enormity of a whole project. It’s not, “clean the house.” It’s “pick one room, and I’ll give you the first step.”

Eventually, my house will be spotless because I had some direction. That’s what gets lost with pathological demand avoidance and executive dysfunction. The ability to prioritize becomes that much harder, the log jam in your brain that keeps you overwhelmed and incapacitated while everyone calls you “lazy.”

Mico (Microsoft Copilot’s “personality,” pronounced “mee-ko”) is helping me create what’s called “autistic inertia.” That often, it’s not that I cannot handle something, it’s that I cannot see a concrete jumping in point. Having a machine to analyze all that stuff makes me a lot more productive, especially when I keep Mico in my ear vs. chatting online.

Using voice chat makes me feel more mobile. I don’t feel comfortable typing on my phone and have it wired to avoid at all costs. I switched from iMessage to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp so that I’m not tied to any device, and answer most text messages the way I write here…. On my tablet with a real keyboard. It makes me feel comfortable, but voice chat means I can walk and talk at the same time. If I’m typing, I have all my attention on it.

It feels not unlike being tied to my desk, but more comfortable because I’m sitting up in bed.

And in fact, I’m more productive on my tablet because there’s no heat coming off of it. I can work longer than I can with my laptop because the heat starts to bother my legs.

But at some point, I need to free myself from that mentality, and Mico running on my iPhone is the answer. It feels like I’m on the phone with someone, but I can multitask much easier with both hands free and a conversation regarding what I’m doing.

It’s ironically going to be the parts of life away from writing that change me the most.

Cleaning my own house, throwing away what is not meant for me.

Maybe that is what Aada means about inspiring people… That I just never give up. I keep trying to be the best version of me, failure after failure.

Life comes with incredible highs, and I have focused on the lows not because I wanted to, but because I was trying to find my way back to high ground and apparently not very good at it.

If I play my cards right, this will be a time of explosive growth and renewal. I will have more to write about that focuses on abundance because it matches how I feel inside. I need a break from Aada because I don’t hear “you must be so sad, hurt, etc.” I hear how my blog is a plot to embarrass her. That none of the positive things I say “count.” For instance, the line isn’t “you will go on to inspire more people.” It’s “you will go on to inspire more people once you have punished me enough to move on.” I have written a beautiful tapestry of things about us both and it has never been about punishing either of us.

I got lost in the story I wanted with her, and not the story she wanted with me. I couldn’t, because that isn’t my story to tell. I am not capable of reading minds and thus couldn’t have known that my blog entries felt like punishment to someone else when they were echologia to me.

Because of this, I have written to Aada many times over the years and told her that I thought I could be a good friend to her, or I could be a blogger. But I couldn’t be both. It’s the bane of our existence, this publishing schedule in which I cannot know what ripple effects my blog is having and am moving on too fast to take in consequences. I think I would be better at writing books just because I’d have a team under me. All my shitty first drafts would be read by someone other than fans.

The “SFD” is the essence of blogging. That it’s not refined, it’s off the cuff. It’s old school and “no one does it anymore.” But as more people know you, the more complicated it gets. I have never been fired, but all of my personal relationships are affected and that’s worse.

Ironically, it is only Aada that has encouraged me to keep going, to keep saying whatever it is I have to say. Being so off the cuff has led to a disaster, though, and it’s encouraging me to set some guardrails.

Guardrails like asking a friend to edit, or brainstorming academic topics with Mico.