I may have accidentally gotten myself married off this weekend. Of course it’s all in jest, but I did make a genuine friend. It all started with an in-group chat re: a woman saying that she had just been on her first date with a woman, and was already sweating bullets over what to do next. Here’s my reply:
She’s a woman. She’s on pins and needles. Text her right now before she has a heart attack. And yes, I’m kidding. But trust me when I say that most women who date women are not direct and it’s confusing AF. You’re lucky you knew you were on a date and so did she.
And then I said, “and if you post in two weeks that you’re getting married, SO HELP ME GOD.”
It was then that the real conversation started, because I hit a nerve I knew I would. It’s just too easy, because what I’m talking about is fairly unique to women loving women and common in every country/culture. It has become a joke over the years, so much so that I’m surprised U-Haul hasn’t built an entire ad campaign around it.
So, anyway, a woman replied to me with a gif of a woman driving a U-Haul and I said “we need to focus on her right now. Stop flirting with me.” She thinks that’s funny and we keep talking. We have someone ask for a wedding invitation and someone offer to plan it for us- in “colors that are bold, yet somehow neutral.” I don’t think I’ve laughed harder in months.
We ended up friending each other because of a different part of the conversation. She says she’s an introvert. I said, “I was going to tell you I’m an introvert, but it’s so much worse than that. I’m a writer. And if you really need an excuse to poke your eyeball with a fork, I’m also a novelist.” Her reply? “Omg. So am I. Jesus. We’re already married.”
It was then that I knew she was a keeper. 😉
Well, in terms of a professional contact. I really don’t have many writer friends, so I asked her if I could friend her to talk shop. What started out as a joke turned into a genuine connection in the span of a few hours…. even if we don’t end up getting married in two weeks.
Here’s how my old life influenced my new one. For the last 10 years, I have had a boss ass bitch in my head giving me confidence. I am no longer one of those women who can’t be direct and just goes with the flow right up until they can’t. I wasn’t treating women like I had to be afraid of their opinions. It is not my job to be likable. It is my job to be myself and to let the right people gravitate toward me. It’s not being mean. It’s being in charge of my own vibration and making it loud enough that people either boost the signal or walk away. They have control over the amps, not my volume control.
So now, when I think of the perfect house, the only thing I require is a space that is totally and completely mine. Reflection is what I need to decide whether a problem does or does not go to 11.
As for decor, I haven’t even finished planning my “wedding” yet. Give me another two weeks. 😉
Being raised as a preacher’s kid caused me to alternate between carrying my heart on my sleeve and shutting down so that my real emotions remained hidden. This is due in a small way to my dad’s congregation and trying constantly to be the one who doesn’t need anything from anyone. I was actively trying for perfection in this area, because according to my mother, I needed to be the perfect child. But she didn’t say that in words. It was more that we had a job to do. Stiff upper lip and all that. It was bonkers, because my dad was the one with the actual job and he never expected any of that crap. My mother was the puppet master, and I don’t know that she knew that, but we did. We all lived in fear of rocking the boat.
This is going to sound horrible, but you’ve never known me to do anything but tell the truth. I never told my mother to shut the hell up and get with the program, and I desperately needed to do it for my own sanity. And, of course, she’s not here to defend herself, but on this one, she really can’t. It’s the one time in my life where I thought, “I will never forgive her ever in my lifetime.” I was just angry, of course. I did indeed get over it. But it took a very, very, very, very, very long time.
When I came out, my mother cornered me in my room and told me “I will not embarrass this family that way.” There’s more to it than that, but thankfully I’ve blocked it out. Only that one line remains, a scar on my skin healed over with time, but never forgotten.
Here’s what she never really took in:
Everyone already knew and talked shit behind her back. They knew before I DID. People with eyes recognize baby queers, even if their parents don’t. When I was 14, they thought I was being molested and at least two people cornered her and told her she needed to get me the hell out of that situation. It was too late, because I was already gone. It was a Supergrover kind of love at the wrong place and wrong time. However, if that hadn’t been a factor, I do think I would have been stuck in a miserable relationship considering how I think marriage is working out for her partner. I wouldn’t be her for cold hard cash. I am sure that she professes her love to everyone no matter the case…… because she has more in common with my mother than she would ever admit. She’s the puppet master, and I don’t know that she knew that, but we did.
Actually, that’s bullshit. Of course she fucking knew. I had all the rights and responsibilities of a partner, listening to all the crap going on in her life that was wildly inappropriate for a teenager. But I didn’t have her. She wanted me to be the one that wanted her while she played blissfully ignorant. I didn’t get laid, but I was well and truly fucked. The situation didn’t have to be romantic for it to be terrible. Supergrover is actually a tiny, tiny bit older than this woman, and I’m picturing her at her age when I was 14, and that was my BAZINGA! moment. I couldn’t picture her telling me jack shit for anything in the world….. to protect me, the very thing that I thought was happening and it turns out it, in fact, was not.
At some point, I’m going to go see about a boy. He’s already married, so it’s not like that. It”s that he was my boyfriend before Ryan, so, seventh grade, the one that was there every single Sunday and could probably tell me a lot more than I could tell him about what was going on if he remembers at all. It’s not that I was insignificant to him, it’s that it’s been 31 years now.
If he doesn’t remember, his dad could have written the dissertation. He was one of the ones that really saw through the bullshit, and he didn’t stop anything, but he was really the first person that made me absolutely lock down.
Unfortunately, the F is no longer with us.
Contrast my mother’s reaction to everyone else’s, including the actual pastor in the family.. My dad told the United Methodist Annual Confereence to shut the hell up and get with the program. Very politely, of course. He went to the floor, where there were hundreds of his colleagues gathered to vote on whether “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” You could wake up a Methodist in the middle of the night and the only thing they know from The Discipline is that one line.
I would have been an incredible Methodist pastor. The best, really, because I learned from the best. I would have brought something new and completely different to them if they hadn’t taken me out like it was Trash Day in Harris County.
Here is a paraphrase of what he said, made all the more brave, crazy, and stupid because it was 1995. The other thing you should know is he did not tell me what he was going to do beforehand. He didn’t tell anyone. He stepped out on a ledge, and he flew:
“It’s really easy to say that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching…. to group everyone together and call them ‘the homosexuals.’ But it looks different when it’s Carol’s niece. Bob’s nephew. David’s daughter.”
The vote did indeed pass, but it was closer than it had ever been.
I went to the church that day seeking God. They weren’t there until my dad finished.
The Bible says in Matthew 18:20 “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them.” In that moment, no one else was in the room except my dad and me. It wasn’t the first time I had a spiritual experience. Life is full of them. But that’s the moment “Jesus wept” became extremely loud and incredibly close. The church itself was just an expensive building….. as if no one had bothered to invite him. He wept in sorrow for some of his followers, and elation for others.
Jesus wasn’t crying because I’m queer and therefore bad or unworthy. He was crying because these supposed “fishers of men” were trying to lift the net after they got into it. But they will certainly spend queer money……. because they love you…….. when you tithe. Otherwise, good luck. You can belong to a church for 30 years and give them millions, but they still won’t do your wedding or ordain you.
When I could have been a “contenduh.” I know I talk a lot of shit, but not about this. When I’m on fire, I’m unstoppable. It just doesn’t happen all the time…… but that’s not being a bad preacher/pastor. That’s being a perfect human.
My dad didn’t quit his job because of me. He acknowledged his divinity and his humanity. It is both too complicated to explain and above your pay grade to know why. But on the way out, he raised hell in front of THE PEOPLE WHO FUCKING DESERVED IT.
Not me.
But everything was fine.
You can completely ignore me and I will be totally fine until I explode, angry at the world because NO ONE IS PAYING ATTENTION TO ME. It seems so ridiculous on my part to feel like a toddler, but sometimes I do. It’s okay for no one to notice that I’m sad or hurt or depressed or whatever… but if they love me, what should happen when I fade into the woodwork and am not noticed for years? I can keep it up flawlessly right up until I can’t.
How I have turned needing other people into not needing them at all is knowing that everything in the world would disappear and it would take a lot for me to notice if I was in the middle of an entry. I am now in charge of taking care of me, and I am much better about expressing a full range of emotions, especially when I am sitting alone and writing here, because nothing is directed. It is not my job to have a reaction when I’m finished.
Again, I don’t need friends. I want them. I cannot be dependent on them for validation, however.
It is to acknowledge that writing itself is a spiritual experience, and you (plural) becomes you (singular) in my mind…………
Where two or three are gathered, and Christ walks into the room.
If I know Christ as well as I think I do, here’s what Jesus would have said to the Annual Conference that day, actually the words of “Paul” in the second letter to the Corinthians:
You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts. known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant- not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
Homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.
The letter of the law killed me…….. and resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.
There is nothing more responsible for that rebirth than you are.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Coffee and doughnuts will be served in the Fellowship Hall. 😉
Today’s writing prompt was a waste. Something about interviewing someone. I am not calling someone at 0700 on a Saturday for anything, a lot of the time because my friends live in other time zones.
I call my dad too early a lot of the time because I’m high energy in the morning and it just does not compute sometimes that not only is it early, it’s an hour earlier for him. I do not feel as bad about it as I probably should, because when I lived two hours behind him, he had no problem calling me at the ass crack of dawn. I wish he’d call me at dawn here, because as a restaurant employee I was not as flexible about it as I could be now. 😉
Making an interview a daily writing prompt is just not that great because I am looking for a jumping off point inside my own head without making me dependent upon waiting for other people’s input. It’s standing there in front of the “pull” door and pushing with all your might. I mean, this prompt does have some barrier to entry, anyway. In order to get it done, I need two things. The first is the courage to ask people if they’d be willing to be interviewed. The second is waiting for them to have time. I need this blog to run on my schedule, which is why I turned it around on my audience. The comments section will eventually become the entry, because maybe someone won’t comment for five minutes or five years, but it will be *something.*
I am sure that Bryn would have picked up if she heard the phone in her sleep, and she’s on vacation so she could just roll over and go back to sleep once we’re done, but it’s 0415 in Oregon. I am going to go out on a limb here and saying that moving on to a different thing to write about is actually saving our relationship. 😛 However, she will attest that among our mutual friends, she would have the least offensive reaction to being woken up. I’m the best friend, and she has priorities. I don’t think I’m the be all and end all for her, I’m just glad to be 1 or 2 on the call sheet, depending on the situation. If the problem is with me, she calls Dave. If the problem is with him, she calls me. Dave and I are all good. I love him because she loves him and that will never change. However, make no mistake. If Bryn decides Dave is out, he’s out. It’s not that I don’t value him as a person, we just haven’t known each other since 1997, so that boundary is pretty firm. Besides, Dave is a good guy and I don’t see it happening. I’m just saying Bryn is my ride or die and Dave gets a seat in the car as long as she’s navigating and controlling the music.. 😉
(In olden times, children, the passengers looked up directions for the driver. It was very 20th century of us.)
If I was really going to turn this entry up to stupid o’clock, it would be contacting Supergrover after many months and being all like, “hey, I know you’re probably mad af, but inquiring minds want to know.” She has absolutely no idea how much people love her, because even if she doesn’t think I write her in 3D, no one else does. That’s because they aren’t taking anything personally.
I think if there’s anything I could ask her, it’s “could you speak more to being written as “Flat Stanley?” This is because what she has said already is that I alternate between lifting her up for being her and excoriating her for being her. I honestly laughed at that slightly, because I thought, “what does she think being written in 3D actually is?”
I think that she thinks me acknowledging there’s a problem means I think less of her when the opposite is true. My love for her runs deeper within me than any river. When we met, she immediately got under my skin. Just made me explode into growth after years of being an arrested teenager. My response was to blow up my whole life because I could not stop vomiting emotions about someone else and say married. This is not limited to emotions about the friendship/relationship in this thing we’ve created and managed (now that I’m over it, “this thing we’ve created and managed” has become stupid funny. If it’s funny once, it will still be funny a hundred times later. Welcome to the Lanagan family, where our motto is “if it’s funny, run it into the ground.”). I was recovering from emotional abuse as a teenager, and picking out all that shrapnel was best done on my own. I should have recognized that and got out of my marriage quicker, because I needed to be introspective and it naturally pushed everyone away, anyway. I could have avoided all of that, and I didn’t.
I don’t expect anyone to forgive me, but I forgive me. If I can’t have compassion from others, I will have compassion for myself. It’s the only thing that matters, in the end. They don’t have to live with me, but I do.
It was really difficult forgiving myself for something entirely relatable when you live in my body, not so much to people who can’t see the thought processes zinging around in my mind. I was too green in a situation I didn’t understand and didn’t handle it well….. immediately. Within a couple years, everything was back to normal on my end, but not hers. She emotionally shut down and blamed me for painting my feelings as fact. I was not trying to be an arbiter/dictator. I was trying to reach common ground and I got tired of doing it all by myself.
I shut it all down for my own sanity, but at the same time, a decade of love tilted at a hundred and crazy percent doesn’t calm down overnight. She is my personal forest fire, and cleaned my clock with it. But it didn’t burn everything down for malice. No. By the time the fire ended, the slap bracelet was an empty field of ash enriched earth. Ripe for planting something self-sustaining when previously the growth stopped in its tracks when I felt anxious and overwhelmed.I also didn’t have any love or forgiveness to give myself before it happened, and afterward it became my mission. My beautiful girl said many times “why do you expect everyone else to fix you?” Two things about that. The first is she was right. I did need to develop inner strength. The flip side of the coin is that if she needed me to step up, there wouldn’t even be two seconds between “I have a problem” and “what can I do?”
If it were in my power to do so, I would wrap her in foam rubber and make everyone keep a six foot distance. That’s not your badass out there in the world.
That’s mine.
People get tripped up on love when there are problems/issues because I am trying to be objective and they think it’s a referendum on them. I’m actually saying that I would love them like a house on fire no matter how many issues there are. We are too old not to believe everything will be perfect for all time. We just have to make our quirks line up. I can do that because she is a 3D character.
As I told her, “Flat Stanley” has a history of exquisite topography.
It reminds me of a scene from “my so-called life.” Rayanne’s mom is talking to Angela’s, and Angela’s mother is not so sure about Rayanne. She literally looks perturbed when Rayanne’s mother says that for Rayanne, the world is black and white. Angela is the only one in color. It’s such a good line that I’ve remembered it since it aired. This is because if you have an emotional connection with me, you become the only ones in color.
Years and years ago, before my handwriting turned into a carpal tunnel pile of garbage, I collected fountain pens. It was never about the pens. It was about bottles of ink from black and espresso to peacock (favorite) and purple. Green, never red. When I changed moods, I changed colors.
But I didn’t change muses.
She is black, espresso, peacock, purple, and pink. Green, never red. She lives in every color.
I didn’t start my day writing because last night was date night with Zac and I’m staying at his house until Tuesday morning; he’s going camping and Oliver isn’t. Oliver would love to go camping, but he’s just not wired that way. He would deal perfectly with the nature aspect, he’s just not friendly, Bob.
Oliver, for those just joining us, is a dog. He loves being outside. What he does not love is strangers. I cannot trust him on a walk, and I appreciate the HELL out of people who ask me if they can pet my dog, because I can tell them ahead of time that it’s not a good idea. Oliver is a pit bull mix, so other people seem to innately understand without pushing. It’s not just people. Oliver is not friendly with other dogs, either, but not in an aggressive way. He’s basically me with two extra feet. I, like him, choose a few people to love incredibly intensely and ignore the outside world. I absolutely adore days where it’s just the two of us. We should call Bryn later. I love talking to her while I’m curled up with him…. almost as she loves talking to me while curled up with her dog, Pippi.
Zac is currently getting ready to leave, not imminently, just puttering about the house trying to make sure he’s got what he needs. I find it best to stay out of the way, because I can’t help him unless he tells me what he needs, and his brain is too scrambled to do that. My way of helping is limited to pithy comments.
I love this relationship so much, because I can be all of me. I was just thinking this morning that I am way less Zac’s girlfriend than his twinkie bitch boyfriend…………….. I love that I don’t want to be anything but his twinkie bitch boyfriend. Neither titles really apply, I just don’t have a better word for it. Neither one of us want anything more than we have, and yet our relationship is not insignificant to me, either. It is very much how I saw much, much older people dating when I was a kid. If a woman becomes a widow, in my experience they look at how hard being married is and think, “nope.” I feel that way and nobody died.
I joke about being Zac’s boyfriend, but there’s an element of truth to it. I’m genderqueer and nonbinary, but it’s not a 50/50 split. I don’t have a male side and a female side, just like being bisexual doesn’t render me half gay, half straight. I still use she/her because it’s the most apt description, but it’s not the only one, either. Genderqueer and nonbinary are similar terms, but the way I’m using them here is that my appearance on the outside and the inner workings of my mind aren’t all cis. I know I would never change a thing about myself, that I am not giving you new information. I have words for the confusion now and can move on to bigger things.
The most interesting discussion that Zac and I had yesterday was about my writing. That it could be seen as problematic because places like CIA would want to know why I was a drooling fangirl (Zac’s words, but he’s not wrong), and might want a background check to know that I’m not just with him to pump him for information because I’m not who I say I am. I’m not worried if such a thing did come to pass. You’d only have to talk to me for five minutes to ensure I’m actually an idiot about all this stuff on purpose. I don’t want to know what’s going on in Russia and China because that’s not what I’m looking for. I am looking for things that are far more granular.
I want to know about the people, and not even certain ones. My alternate history covers military and intel, so it isn’t about learning facts. It’s about learning what it takes to do the job, what kinds of personalities are in the room, what they eat, drink, wear. I want to know everything CIA wouldn’t care that I know. Lots of things are classified, but I’m betting that what kind of cookies Carol made Tuesday isn’t. Now I’m picturing a meeting minutes document with “chocolate chip” blacked out.
CIA gets really fucking funny when you look at it like an episode of “The Office,” even funnier now that Jim Halpert is Jack Ryan. I love things that are humorous more than serious- for instance, one of my favorite intelligence movies is “Burn After Reading,” because you don’t even know how bad you need to see CIA written by The Coen Brothers until you do. Every bit as funny as Intolerable Cruelty, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Raising Arizona. It’s just not my favorite movie because Argo is just as funny and packs a more serious punch now that I’ve actually spent time talking to Tony Mendez’ widow, Jonna.
It will always be a regret of mine that Argo lit my fire to learn how to write stuff like that and not making it to DC before Tony stopped doing public appearances due to his Parkinson’s Disease. It was a glorious moment when Jonna told me it was a shame I never got to meet him, because he would have really liked me. She also told me that she loved what I wrote about us meeting, but there’s no accounting for taste. 😉
Part of what drives writing about intelligence is where I live. I have loved spy movies since childhood, but in the way that a casual observer would. Like, they’re cool, but whatever.
This is how it works in my family. You’re just going about your day and then you see a movie that speaks to you and then it becomes part of your personality. For me, it was Argo. For Lindsay, it was Jurassic Park…. and My Girl…. Pretty sure Lindsay will never leave her Ellie and Vada phases behind, just like I’ll never leave Tony. It is just a bonus that he is not fictional. I even have a picture of him wearing “my shirt,” the one that says Argo @#$% Yourself and has the museum logo on the sleeve.
I picture working with CIA to create things, not working against them. Homeland was brilliant, and they had a hand in it through their Hollywood relations board, or whatever it is they really call it. Yes, I’m a drooling fangirl, but it’s also part of my job as a writer. I cannot write things I don’t know, so I study a lot. That’s because all I can do is study. I would have had a great career at CIA had the random dice of the universe not rolled “mental illness.” I write about spies because I am not capable of being one.
Accepting that I cannot do everything, but I can write about it has made all the difference in the world. I see my position as truth teller about lots of things as valid….. keeping in mind that it’s only my truth.
It’s not just acceptance. It’s feeling settled and happy living with purpose. It’s creating character, both for me and the fictional ones who live in me. I am liking spending time with my characters more and more, because I don’t feel responsible for them. They do and say what they want and I just write it down. It doesn’t even matter if I like it. It’s their conversation.
Most of my audience is overseas, so they actually wake me up most days now. That’s because my watch starts getting notifications before my alarm goes off, generally regarding the entry from the day before. I sometimes start writing right away, sometimes I go downstairs to grab a cup of coffee first. But this audience is my first thought of the day because the Pavolvian urge to grab my tablet and keyboard when someone likes an entry is ingrained. I’ve been on WordPress a lot longer than I’ve done Facebook, but it’s that kind of vibe.
This morning, I wrote out the title of the entry, then promptly decided I needed something to drink and by the time I got back around to picking this back up, hours had gone by. It’s ADHD in a nutshell. Every new promise in the morning must be followed, even ahead of the five promises you’ve already said you’d explore. I have a lot of new beginnings because I have trouble finding middles and ends. ADHD is particularly talented at making you feel like a dumbass. and being a writer is a way to cope. Having a record of what’s happening is a way to keep track of progress… or not. Writing is such a wonderful tool to give yourself therapy when you can’t afford it or can’t get a doctor right away. Even when you do get a doctor, they still can’t spend more than an hour a week with you. Getting better takes so much more effort than that.
People wait to do therapy until they’re in a couple, and I had a thought about that. “If you don’t have time to fix yourself, why do you think you have time to fix someone else?” I’d rather be healthy before I get in a relationship because it keeps conflict to a minimum. I don’t have a problem saying what I mean and meaning what I say. I can give what I require.
I don’t have time for people who don’t have time to fix themselves, because it makes them want to fix me. If there are problems in our relationship, it’s not always going to be 100% my fault. I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who is so defensive that they think it is because they cannot acknowledge their own humanity.
It’s good now that I know what I’m looking for, because maybe I can avoid that trap in the future. I seem to enjoy people who don’t emote, probably because I don’t want to deal with it….. while also being frustrated that they can’t deal with my emotions, either.
Looking for healthy patterns in which we both have each other’s backs is very important, as well as taking all the lessons I’ve learned over the last 10 years and not making the same mistakes. I have a clean slate in this regard. I am no longer holding onto the past as if I can make it better for the future. I am realizing that those are going to be two very different things and the trick is not to be threatened.
I am threatened by everything, to a certain extent. I already know I don’t fit in most places, and I am sometimes fearless, sometimes a wallflower. I make room for all of those moods, but I don’t expect everyone else to do so…… which is mostly why I write my reflections here. Then, they’re just an open secret because if the people involved want to see how their characters are playing out, they’re welcome. But they’re not required, and I will write them out just as easily as I wrote them in.
The writing reflects life, not the other way around. When I talk about knowing where I’m going on this web site, I’m talking about knowing what emotional changes I have to make within myself because so many times I’ve reread things I’ve written and thought, “that probably sounded better in my head.”
I’m still reeling that my beautiful girl thought I wrote her as a flat character, when I can see every emotion I’ve ever had about her in these pages, more in the words you don’t read.
The urge to write about her has faded except for batting cleanup.
I never could get through to her that her good parts and her bad parts come together to make her the purest person I’ve ever met. That I didn’t hate her for what she’d done, I made my life bigger to accommodate her. That I was in it for the long haul if she was, because I had prepared.
She thought I was saying that I wished our relationship never happened, and I cry at that thought even now. In trying to make it better, I made it worse.
That doesn’t mean my thought process was wrong, it means that she didn’t get the intended message. I’m not sure how it got turned into the complete opposite, but that’s not my call. I don’t have to love it, I just have to live it.
What does feel good is knowing two things. The first is that I cannot un-know or un-say anything. It might lead her to look at my writing in a different way when temperatures aren’t running so high. I do love her in a way I cannot even understand, it runs so deep. But I will have that whether I have her or not, so I have not lost anything in the transaction.
I told her that I poured my love into the character because I could not pour it into her. She has said too many times that she does not accept it. She doesn’t really accept that I have a different reality than her, so I cannot expect her to understand her way around the whole problem. I cannot even do that.
But what I can do is make sure that she knows I was never coming from a place of destruction. That we had to be in the shit for a little while to create something new that we both would enjoy. Like, why should she be the only one that gets to make fun of me and Michael? I am sure that all three of us could make each other laugh with witty retorts.
I just don’t hold out hope for that dream anymore. I told her that if she started acting like she actually forgave me, then she’d be allowed back into my circle. If not, I will know I just chose the pattern I love the most. That it was always about trying to find someone to please. I know that is true on my end, and she has a choice to make as to whether she tells me how she feels or not. So far, the answer is “not,” but I do not think this is a permanent state. Mostly because life is long and it isn’t over. I know that if I’ve been able to keep up these wild and crazy feelings for 10 years, it has never been a game to me. I do not believe it has always been a game for her. I believe as she does that no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. We just have different ways of getting there and cannot seem to jump into the chasm where objective truth is found.
But there’s another part of our relationship that has nothing to do with her at all. Over the last 10 years, she has not only become my real friend, but the one that puts me in the mood to write. When I say she’s my muse, it’s that she’s the one that when she says it’s a good line, I can take it to the bank and cash it. She’s gotten me published professionally by being my editor for the last five years. She’s told me that she’ll edit my book if I wanted, and I know it was a bad career move to walk away from that, but there was so much more to it than that.
It’s because editing my book is her love language, and that part of our relationship is as strong as epoxy. That glue holds us tight. Where we fail is speaking in my love language, because communication is a two-way street. She thinks that I’m the only arbiter of what friendship is and isn’t. I don’t think of it as that at all. I think that I lay out my thoughts and feelings and she thinks she can’t argue with me, get me to see things differently, change me as easily with her words as I change her with mine. I just didn’t think it was fair that we always spoke the way it meant the most to her, and not the most to me.
I think she thought that I needed her to do something so far out of her comfort level that she just didn’t have time and didn’t want to try. The opposite was true. Could you just change how you talk to me when we do interact? I am tired of you thinking that I am goading and provoking you when I am asking for your input? You think I’m asking for too much when you don’t understand the question.
Because she lives in my ink and talks inside my head, echoing in my chest, she’s part of my lifeblood now. I can feel her words coursing through me when I receive them, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re sweet or angry. They are all small pieces of artwork in a tapestry…. or one of those landscape photos made up of individual faces.
She has a beautiful face. It’s the one I look to for love, and have for years. I cannot do that if she doesn’t want it, so my work now is to take everything I’ve written about her and look at what I do want from it and what I want to leave.
What I know is that you can’t change anyone else with your own words, and you need to be prepared for relationships not fulfilling you and not worrying so much about getting out of them. Yes, everything feels new, but in a good way. A life where I am free of past mistakes in their entirety, and not because I wanted it that way.
As Kristina Mahr has said, “I took the tags off this love before I knew I was sure I wanted it. No, that’s not right. I took the tags off this love before I was sure you knew you wanted it.” I know for sure that even if my beautiful girl was interested in women, we would make horrible partners to each other. We cannot even make our love languages work with deep female friendship. I do think we could make friendship work, but because we have distance from each other. I can’t tell a partner to go home, but I can tell her. 😉
That’s because she would understand implicitly that we are both interested in socializing until the battery is dead. Please leave by nine. A group of people is a “no thanks.” We joke that I am the president of Overthinkers Anonymous, and she is the VP because president is a public-facing office. I still can’t get over that one, it’s so funny.
My last witty retort to this was “what a day. Need to find a meeting except there’s only one chapter and it’s really only us. We’re not friendly, Bob.” I said her real name, but “we’re not friendly, Bob” is a quote from my favorite Robin Williams movie, “RV.” You just have to see it to believe it.
Anyway, if you are also a member I will be holding a drive in late September. We’ll pass the hat for dues and coffee. No Folgers, and I get to make it before every meeting. “Leslie, you have one job.”
The point in all of this is that I learned a lot, and God I love her more than anyone or anything on earth, mostly because I’ve had 10 years to get used to the idea. She knows she’s it for me, in some sense, because even when she’s not in my life, she still lives in my ink.
I will look forward to the day when I can take all these life lessons and pour them into someone who wants them…. including her, but she has to show up. I’ve learned to celebrate the people who do. It’s why I think of Bryn and Zac as my partners in crime, both of them, because they serve different roles and I’m happy this way. Maybe it will change, maybe it won’t, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
I feel that it’s important to take guilt off of everyone when they don’t show up, and just do my own thing. I cannot make other people’s calls for them, especially on the telephone.
Anyone who actually knows me knows two things. The first is that I don’t have any recipes, and the second is how much contempt I have for the phrase in the title because it is emotional shorthand for a whole mood…. the Karen special.
However, I do cook well. I can’t give you recipes, but I can tell you how I do things and you can cook like I do- I became a professional cook by tasting every step of the way. That’s why we don’t use measurements. We add until the gods have let us know that they are sated.
So much depends on what kind of technology I’m using. Cooking over a fire is different than gas and electric ovens/grills. You also cannot ignore the part of cooking that involves feel, because I get why we need to wear gloves. I believe others underestimate why it’s important not to wear them and just wash your hands constantly. A grilled steak or chicken breast will have a certain feel to it. Wearing gloves dampens our ability to detect it. Moreover, an open flame grill often made mine catch on fire and fuse to my skin. On an open flame, you really have no choice but to touch it because you cannot be certain that the heat is equal everywhere you place it.
To combat not trying to touch things, we risk presentation because we’ll have to cut something open to make sure it’s done in the middle. I do not want anyone to get served pork or chicken medium rare.
These are all of the things that run through a cook’s mind before we even start thinking about ingredients. You don’t buy the ingredients for the technology, you work with what you have.
I saute most things. I even prefer it to the microwave and toaster, because I would rather toast bread in the skillet with butter. I make a mean cheese toastie (grilled cheese). 😉
I start with lots of butter and herbs in a skillet on very low heat. Most of the time, it’s Montreal Chicken Seasoning or herbs de Provence. While that’s warming up, I butter some bread and add hot sauce, pico de gallo, or black pepper, along with two thick slices of cheese. I set the sandwich in the pan and it takes time. You don’t want the toast to be black and the cheese to be unmelted. Putting the lid on the pan for a few minutes during cooking will help the cheese melt with steam, but you don’t want to leave it on too long or the sandwich will be soggy. Low and slow is the name of the game. You can use softer cheeses to speed it up, like Gouda or Jack. You cannot increase the heat. You’ll know it’s time to flip when you see the edge of the bread turn the color toast you like. I prefer to get it very, very brown- almost black- because I think char stands up well to cheese.
To really up your game, make caramelized onions beforehand. Caramelized onions take a lot longer than you think. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever achieved perfection in under 45 minutes. That’s because caramelization is a process. If you help it along too much, they’ll have charred edges and not done enough in the middle. You have to put more butter than you think you need into a pan with way more onions than you think you’ll need (just like 20 pounds of spinach is almost enough to feed one person after cooking it) and just leave it on low heat. Don’t stir it as much as you think you need to, because the caramelization happens when onion touches metal. Think about how often you’re interrupting that when you turn things over.
Touching the metal is what cooks mean when they say “respect first contact.” That means put it on the grill and step back. Do not adjust, do not do anything. The process of caramelization has already started and moving it will rip the crust that has begun to develop immediately. If you respect first contact, the caramelization process will have created a crust so thick that the meat will lift off the grill on its own….. same for pancakes. I know to flip mine when I can lift up the skillet and the pancake slides around independently. I still use a spatula to flip, though, because generally there’s so much hot butter that it would splash in my face. Besides, I like to make my pancakes really thick and it would ruin them to be flipped with that much violence. I save that kind of movement for foods that can take it, like eggs.
Eggs are there for you when no one else is. I swear it. You can add an egg to anything and instant meal.
Eggs are another food where it’s best to respect first contact, but hold the butter to a manageable level. You want enough to coat the pan, but not enough to splash in your face if you’re trying to be me, the home version.
You can flip an egg in any frying pan, but I find that the smaller ones are easier. Not the ones marked “egg pan.” Those are so tiny it’s like playing with Barbie cookware. I mean the smallest normal-sized frying pan because it feels balanced in my hand. If you’re 6’6 and 280, you’re going to have a different favorite. Choose the one you like based on how it feels to you.
When I say respect first contact, I mean that the same thing will happen with eggs that happen with meat and pancakes. They’ll stick to the metal and develop a crust, lifting independently. When you can move the egg in the pan on its own, it’s safe to flip. How long you leave it after it has flipped determines whether it is over easy, over medium, etc.
I find that flipping eggs is infinitely easier than trying to guess when sunny side up is ready. It helps to put the lid on the pan for those, too, because it ensures that the bottom and the top cook evenly.
With scrambled eggs, I tend to respect first contact and break them up very little. I also undercook them a tiny, tiny, tiny amount so that they remain cheesy in texture. Very important sidenote: eggs don’t need anything. They don’t get fluffier with water or milk. You can add volume, but the flavor will thin out to an enormous degree. I would go with a drip of cold water before I’d add milk, but I wouldn’t do either unless I was almost out of eggs and needed to make them stretch.
Cooking is all about learning how to make things stretch, and not even from a financial perspective. It’s also learning how to make use of what you’ve already bought, because you had a creative idea for something…. where you rise to the level is forgetting everything you know and just looking into the pantry.
I always keep pancake mix on hand, as well as cheese, bread, butter, pasta, and the occasional frozen pizza, with which I almost certainly will make double cheese and double jalapeno before I bake it.
Everything I make has a ton of calories for two reasons. The first is that I don’t eat often and I walk everywhere I go. The second is that my stomach needs some help if I’m going to go balls to the wall with Scoville every day in search of relief from hideous allergies. I pad my stomach with the butter and cheese no matter whether it’s dairy or plant-based. A not dog with vegan cream cheese and kim-chi hot enough to blow your head off is just as tasty as beef or pork franks.
Another thing I do is buy spring mix when it’s on sale so that I can do warm salads. My favorite is to saute spring mix, carrots, Brussels sprouts, and kale in a combination of olive and sesame oils. Sometimes I add nuts, seeds, dried fruit if there’s no added sugar, etc. When the veggies have cooked for a little while and I can tell the stems are getting soft, I hit the pan with rice wine vinegar and close the lid.
When the veggies are entirely wilted, I push them to the sides of the pan and crack two eggs in the middle.
It’s done when the yolks are just starting to get hard. I like them best when the texture is gelatinous, not runny.
The egg and the rice wine vinegar play off each other extraordinarily well.
But recognize that there are certain things at home you cannot do well and pay the people that do it. For instance, I have no shame in admitting that it would cost me hundreds to do rotisserie chicken the way I’d really like to do it, or I could just go to Don Pollo. I don’t have to buy their sides, I can just add their chicken to what I do know how to cook well at home…. or, at least, I would if I did that kind of thing. The last time I went to Don Pollo was years and years ago, and I still remember the taste of the black beans and pico because it was served cold, like Cowboy Caviar (Texas black-eyed pea relish). I loved it because they’d taken the time to dice the jalapenos, so they were perfectly deseeded and none of them were bitter.
The other thing they have at Don Pollo that I could not do at home is fried yucca. It’s delicious and I wouldn’t even attempt it because I don’t want to own a deep fryer. I want them to own a deep fryer. 😉
If we’re talking about my personal favorite foods, let’s play the chef’s game. You’re on death row. What’s your last meal? There are no stipulations to this game. The food can come from anywhere.
I would start with bone marrow and crostini, paired with a simple red table wine.
Next, a salad filled with vegetables. Please do not fool around with an iceberg wedge and some bleu cheese. Put your back into it. I want a bright yuzu vinegar with some cracked black pepper. Heritage tomatoes. Romaine. Real food and not restaurant filler.
If John Kinkaid was going to outlive me, he’d know that as my chef, my last meal would be his. He could surprise and delight me, but I already know what he would make.
It would be a vegetable jambalaya and a Purple Haze from Abita.
Because it’s the end of the night, and I’m about to clock out.
“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today I went to the reflecting pool for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. I couldn’t hear well enough to distinguish speakers, but I’m going to use an idea from one of them and I wish I could give them credit. It made me stupid for a second as my internal computer lagged trying to process the moment.
They said, “the moral arc doesn’t bend itself.”
I was glad I was sitting down.
Raphael Warnock said much the same thing on Rachel Maddow the other night. He said, “pray with your lips and your legs.” I grew up with much the same idea… that if you’re going to pray, put on your shoes. You don’t feed people based on whether they deserve it, you feed people because they’re hungry. Then you pray about it and do it again.
Christianity at its best focuses on self-improvement, and social justice is a wonderful way to point groupthink in the right direction. You are bettering yourself with other people trying to better themselves through the common activity of standing up for minorities, both the ones you are and aren’t. Trauma has many basketball courts in one gym. All minorities have it. Jesus would have been subject to those same things, because of course he was Jewish, but his government wasn’t. The Sanhedrin was very much the governing body for Jews, but the Romans had control of everyone.
I wish more people would take in what a radical socialist Jesus was in his day and time. I wish more churches would take in how much their prosperity gospel is embarrassing. It is not what was ever intended by a group of radical Jews who went their own way. What people tend to forget if they aren’t interested in theology is that Christ would understand exactly nothing about what was said in the New Testament because they weren’t written down until 80 or 90 years after he died. The whole thing is a game of telephone. The Nicene Council approved international standards for the Bible, but Jesus still thought like a Jew. Jesus does not give a fuck about your abortion. I guarantee it. The Talmud is sane in this regard.
We were marching for all of it. Black lives matter. Female bodily autonomy. Black trans lives matter. Queer people matter.
Today, the moral arc of the universe did indeed bend toward justice.
But it didn’t bend itself.
I remembered that Laura was a preacher’s kid. What I did not realize is that both her parents are retired from the United Methodist Church, albeit a vastly different kind from my dad’s because I was in Texas and she was in New England. But, this woman catches jokes that no one else in the room would understand, and it cracks me up. I felt the same way about her mom. I said, “my dad was a pastor, but my mother was more the ‘smile and play the organ’ type.” Without missing a fucking beat, she says, “oh. That’s more typical….. as IF THEY HAD A CHOICE.” I died for a second. If my mother had been standing there, she also would have been struggling not to fall on the ground laughing.
It was great to feel at home with both of them right away, instantly translating from virtual to physical as if it meant nothing at all. I think people our age do it better than most, because we’ve spent more years chatting online than older people have, yet we’re still young enough to remember life before the Internet… we’re basically the first generation of people who have connected for years virtually because we could.
It would be impossible to keep up the rate with which we contact each other if we only had letters and phone calls. Therefore, the transition is much more difficult. It’s easy to continue a conversation when you can talk right up until you find each other in front of the Washington Monument.
Turns out, I can look forward to seeing more of Laura eventually because even though she lives in Boston, her aunt lives in Alexandria. So, it’s not impossible that we’ll run into each other, especially for days like this. In fact, Laura is only here for 12 hours, and her mom flew in yesterday. It made me feel like part of something very historic- I knew it was, obviously, but that it also meant a lot to all Americans because people had traveled so far for it.
I also didn’t hear about it, strangely enough, and I say that because I read the news all the time. Both Laura and her mom said that it was hard to find information about the event and that even they had to do some guesswork. All of us thought the crowd would be bigger, but it was great seeing everyone, including the Kings and the Sharptons.
Part of being there was just enjoying the moment, even when I left to get water and couldn’t find my way back to where we were sitting. I got lost in the moment when Sasha Baron Cohen was speaking about the collaboration between blacks and Jews. I did not know that it was historically black colleges that opened their doors to Jewish students when they were rejected from other American schools. It makes sense. Trauma sees trauma. Both have been tortured by the same people.
It’s the same type people that would torture me. Never in American history have any minorities been truly safe from persecution. Black people didn’t have rights in England, so why would they here? We forget the Founding Brothers were English just like we forget Jesus was Jewish. The Founding Brothers suffered under the weight of white supremacy Jesus and the country still won’t give it up. To the majority of Christians, what I am saying is blasphemy because the picture in their heads is as white as they are. The picture is every bit as infectious as the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, yet neither are real. The historical Jesus, in my head, looks like Reza Aslan (He’s the author of “Zealot,” about the historical Jesus).
Black people have held onto their Christian faith because they saw the real Jesus like no one else…… they saw him for who he really is.
They saw a man broken by the system who rose up and rescued himself, bringing us all with him. White supremacy will be the end of Christianity as Evangelicals drive more and more people away who leave church altogether instead of joining a liberal congregation fighting against the system. They’re so done with the hypocrisy that they just won’t come back unless a relative is singing, preaching, getting married, or dead.
If you insist on treating your very modern members like they’re failing at life because you’re making them terrified of ancient rules and regulations, you’re doing it wrong. Jesus was not a professional Christian superhero.
He was a man broken by the system, as all minorities are at one time or another.
The problem is when your church doesn’t talk about it.
11:00 on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America.
Not just by race, but also perspective. When you think of Jesus, you think of you. So, if you are the majority, so is he. You are upholding a system that has gone back thousands of years, new generations picking new people to hate. How Jesus’ message became so twisted is easy to put together when you look at it that way. As Reza Aslan said in a famous YouTube video, “God doesn’t hate gay people. You hate gay people.”
It makes the march come together, this feeling of solidarity. If we ban together and include women as minorities, the minority is the majority. We have protested in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Now it’s time to protest, and soon it will be time to vote. If you’re going to pray, put on your shoes.
The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice…… but it doesn’t bend itself.
I am motivated by the same thing that motivates all neurodivergent people….. the fear of being misunderstood. I think I’m worse about trying to please others because I was raised in an environment where it was prized. My parents didn’t have to do or say anything. I would react if I displeased anyone anywhere. I don’t think I have necessarily been good at it. Sometimes I’ve stuffed anger down until I’ve completely exploded. I’m excellent when I have no needs and/or agree with someone that what they’re doing is correct. If I do not understand you, I will want you to explain until I do. If it’s a social cue I’ve missed that isn’t written down, please be prepared to defend your dissertation. I am not going to be the cook that walks around with everyone’s orders memorized……….. anymore.
I’m not being a hardass, I’m being real with you. In order for me to comply with something, I need to know why it is necessary. Sometimes I do not feel empathy if the reason you need me to do something is “I’m embarrassing you,” because first of all, no I’m not if you’ve got good boundaries. My behavior is not a reflection of others and I resent people who treat me that way. That’s because most of the time, they’re embarrassed by the same things I am because I am trapped in this body and they aren’t. I tend to be a clown because of my cerebral palsy, because God forbid someone actually need help.
I am starting to change that internal motivation, because there are starts and setbacks just like everything else. People are quite used to me not having feelings, and therefore not having to take them into account. I am not going to be the person who caters to everyone else until I die, hoping to get some of it back and feeding the problem by not letting anyone know what they’re doing is hurting me.
I know that if I put myself out there as your friend, I will do the things it takes to keep you when you let me know what they are. I cannot agree to a deal I don’t understand, especially when you make it murky trying not to hurt my feelings. I would rather you take a knife and stab me all the way through than think that we are solid because I don’t notice all the times you’ve simply shaved a bit off the top.
I am also not innocent of these things, and am not trying to make excuses for it. I am trying to create better communication with my friends going forward. I will do anything for them if communication is clear. I will work on any problem if I know that someone wants me to work on it with them. My PTSD makes me think that every problem in a relationship means it’s the end of the world, so I don’t need conversations that allude to “we need to talk” without actually talking about whatever change it is you need.
Keeping me in that kind of limbo is not okay, and I have enough emotional fortitude not to leave someone in that place of wondering whether I’m mad enough to walk off or not.
I’ve just stopped getting angry when they don’t do the same for me. I take inaction as my answer and move on. It’s easier to do having a journal, because even when I say goodbye to future interactions, I still spend time with them in our memories. It’s not an immediate end to a story when there are recurring themes.
Recognizing that I love emotionally unavailable people because that’s the pattern of relationship I love the most was progress. I learned to stop expecting other people to express themselves to the level that I did when I knew damn well they were incapable. That’s why I loved them.
I was familiar with that pattern/division of labor. The one where I did all the feeling and the other person just told me if I was right or not. It was great because they were doing all the logical, neurotypical decisionmaking and understanding why I don’t think that way. They also did not dive into themselves and give me information based on their understanding of themselves, just what I thought. By the same token, I could have read up more on logical decisionmaking and done my own.
Understanding the ways in which I am and am not the main character in every story has been essential these last 10 years. My perspective has changed. I have become a completely different person because of writing. I know that I only have the right to this space. I am free to spread out and decorate and be my whole self. At no time does that make me the main character anywhere else.
I am trying to motivate myself less out of fear these days and more in the hope that I can write stories here that are worth reading. That’s because they are so valuable to me that it makes me cry when I take in how much other people enjoy listening…… as fallible as I am. God, it would be easier to write down the mistakes I haven’t made. But even when they’re painful, writing them down does give them a better chance of being humorous in the future. I’m not sitting there holding everything in.
Sometimes, motivation is seeing the things I write about me and wanting to reinforce them. It makes me want to live up to the character I present, to take moments of bravery and remember them so they happen again, for instance.
I cannot expect anyone else to provide me with validation, so the motivation is to find the things in life that make me feel whole so that I am not searching for anything outside my own brain housing group. It is the thing that stops fear-based motivation, and it has given me some peace that I got to these conclusions myself. That they weren’t easily won. It took decades.
I cannot always be angry at myself for my mood and behavior because a lot of the time I’m berating myself for a symptom of a disorder. I cannot expect others to have compassion for it, but I need to or I’ll hate myself my whole life.
No one else has to love me, and really can’t, until I do.
Fear is motivating me to find my people and stick with them, but it’s the good kind of fear, now. The kind that keeps you from the people you know you can’t handle and directs you toward the ones you can….. and not for any other reason than them letting you know it’s okay. Their fear is your fear, and we’ll melt it together.
I am only now learning what is within my control and what is not. It’s only been within the last year that I’ve allowed myself to have opinions. They’re not always the correct ones, but it beats searching for the right words- not because I would like to use them, but because they are the ones that will keep others from reacting. I tried so hard to need nothing that resentment built over time. 45 years, in fact. Having all of that anger rush out had consequences, but I knew what I was putting into motion.
Relationships changed when I wouldn’t let anyone run game on me anymore. Either be up front or get out. I do not want to read your mind, nor do I want to be infantilized because of my CP or bipolar disorder. It’s my job to take care of me, and I will take input, but I don’t need coddling. I need empathy, though. Caring that I’m neurodivergent goes a long way. So does compassion for my physical limitations. But if you cannot do those things, don’t be mad when I close the door behind you. I won’t lock it. I’ll give you room to grow. But I won’t let you come back until you prove to me that you can do those things. The people who aren’t my friends do it enough.
I just don’t want that temperature in my life anymore. I don’t want to live with rage, even if it is appropriately directed. No adult likes to feel parented or that other people are frightened by their emotions to the point they feel unlovable. This is not a limited to me problem. Most ADHD/Autistic people feel this way. Our emotions are too convoluted for them to make sense most of the time. As I was telling Bryn earlier, I have never met an ADHD person that could plan a goal for shit, so what am I going to write about today?
I’m going to write about how much it sucks to be neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. We are struggling to be heard and understood. We will explain until dark when the street lights are on and Mama’s callin.’ It’s an intrinsic trait with ADHD/Autism. My particular need to expound upon everything I’ve already said once is generally a reply to someone hearing my words and don’t have any idea what dog I’m walking.
It’s Oliver, btw.
So, I’ll just ruminate until people say they get it or walk off. But even when they walk off I want to keep explaining because up until now, I cared deeply and desperately about what people thought of me, and I extended that kind of energy to everyone I met instead of keeping it to the friends I loved the most. That way, I was sure to disappoint everyone all at the same time because I was so overextended.
I have made Zac, Bryn, and Oliver my entire world because that’s as much as I can handle right now. I have so much to think about that it’s incapacitating at times, so I need to be mostly single and just focus on what’s right in front of me. It’s all ADHD/Autistic people really know.
Life with no executive function leaves me absolutely brilliant in some ways, feeling like I continually fail other people all the time because my software is different and there is a huge chasm that people dismiss all the time. Even my CP is problematic because my case is so slight it’s not as noticeable as, say, RJ Mitte. Therefore, people see me as normal when I have no balance and floppy muscles. I trip through life because I can’t not.
Very few people explain the logic behind things, and that’s all I really want to know. If I can’t figure out something on my own, I will tire and confuse my friends and family… and I know it. That’s the worst part. To know you are capable of handing out that exhaustion is devastating because you can’t change the way you were made. People alternate treating me like I have the smarts of all my favorite authors and then they spend time with me and all that goes out the window…. because when people are in adoration mode, they act completely differently once they see how my mind actually works.
I think that’s why I like the book shop at the Spy Museum so much. They don’t care if I sit on the floor and get obsessed with a subject and pull out 10 books and not buy any of them. It’s the same at the library, when I used to go. I don’t have to anymore because I can borrow them with an app on my phone (Libby), cutting out all the social interaction necessary to maintain isolation.
My self-esteem has been that low my whole life. That I have to get up the energy to even leave my house because everything becomes a Dorothy Parker quote within minutes.
What fresh hell is this?
That wasn’t terrible. That was fancy terrible….. with raisins in it.
Sometimes I’m the one that thinks them, sometimes it’s another person in reaction to me.
I can’t make anything better unless people tell me what’s wrong, and even that is a common problem. Because I do most of my communication in writing, people constantly write themselves off as “not a good enough writer to compete with me.”
First of all, you’re probably not. It’s not because you’re dumb. It’s because I’m a blogger and you’re not. I didn’t get to be a good writer overnight. I got to be a good writer by taking a knife and slicing it into a vein, bleeding out over my keyboard day after day after day after day after day.
Secondly, me being a writer is a pitiful excuse to shut down two-way communication, or extraordinary if you don’t want to be in relationship with me. That’s because it doesn’t matter to me how you communicate and what your natural style might be. It’s that you think that completely shutting down your emotions is okay. That our relationship will survive despite neither of us getting our needs met.
Zac, Bryn, and I are all good writers. Therefore, no one shuts down. And if we need to switch mediums for a conversation, we do it. Bryn calls me even when she can see I’m still typing. 😉
Because I live an hour and a half from Zac (whether I was caught in traffic or taking the train), Facebook Messenger is the most awesome thing ever invented. He sends me a picture of himself every morning so that I can see how he is before he leaves for work. I don’t have to guess, I can see it in his face.
Removing all the barriers to communication with those closest to me has been a godsend.
I don’t know if it’s the best way to plan a goal, but for ADHD/Autism, it is 90% of the time “accidentally on purpose.” I’m not sure that I could do anything differently, so I’m not a Monday morning quarterback in the way most people think. My mind moves too fast to retain all the information I need. It’s one of the reasons you’ve started getting entries every day. It’s not for me to show off. It’s for me to have a place to go when I need information about my own life. Seriously, how many of you can pick a year out of thin air and remember everything about it?
In the United States, we have a tendency to focus on what we do for money, even at parties. It’s not a party conversation, but we have them all the time. Washington can be soulless like that. I have had several people see me out and about with my sister. When she walks away, they ask me how much money she makes. First of all, ask her that. Second of all, she’s a Democrat. AIM LOW.
I make Washington less soulless because even though Lindsay’s crowd is political, my words are not and they need a break. You can see the table relax when my sister says, “This is Leslie. She’s a writer.” Or “she’s a cook.” The writer thing is only seen as positive when both of us make it clear I’m not a journalist. That’s a tupperware party I’m just not going to host. The difference is that if someone knows you’re a journalist, they’ll monitor everything they say because they think you’re looking for sensitive information. Bloggers don’t do that. They’re looking for a slice of real life, and politics is anything but that.
I’ll give you a for-instance in a completely fictional example that could indeed happen the longer I live here.
If Kamala Harris and I met, I would not remember the date or time. I would not remember much of what she said. But I’d remember the way her hair sparkled in the sun, whether her hugs were memorable, whether she smelled like generic soap or a perfume I’d recognize, definitely whether she was wearing Chucks or not.
I wouldn’t even say on my web site that I met Kamala Harris, most likely, because the higher you go in government salary, the less of your schedule is published. I wouldn’t want to say that I met her on a day she was supposed to be in Ukraine. In Washington, you learn to think like that no matter who your friends are, because you know you’ll have to do it for at least one person in your life, so why not do it for all of them? I doubt there would ever be a scenario in which I met a public figure at a time where they weren’t supposed to be there, but it is the nature of living in the federal city and not watching them on the news.
If I did respect a job, it would be journalism. I am very, very picky though. I figure out my favorite columnists and stick to them like glue (Shane Harris, Greg Miller). I will buy their books (I have most of David Halberstam’s, several of Rachel Maddow’s, and “The Apprentice” by Greg Miller). As I was telling Supergrover, I like to read novels, but I do not like to write them. I find that journalism jogs my brain for blogging, and I am in a rut with fiction because I am working on my own content right now. Novels will come back soon. I have just gotten into the groove. I don’t think “let’s go see what’s on the Internet today.” I think, “let’s go make the Internet today.”
Disrespect of someone’s profession comes from years and years of being tired of listening to complaints about people’s lives. If they don’t like what they do, why should I ask them? I would much rather ask them what they love. This works with anyone, because everyone has that thing. For me, it’s writing content for the web…. but not because it makes me popular. It’s that when I didn’t have any readers at all, I changed myself an entry at a time. Just because other people read my entries now doesn’t mean that it’s not all about self-improvement. I do the same thing I’ve always been doing. I wake up, think about my life for a few minutes, and the urge to write wakes up hungry.
I want to hear about that fire in other people. For Supergrover, it was also writing, She’s a blogger and writes children’s fairy tales that I hope to God one day I am old enough to understand. She writes clearly and beautifully, but what I mean is that I do not have a child’s heart anymore……… but she does. I will never carry a tenth of her little-kid wonder.
For Bryn, it’s all kinds of things. She likes cooking, gardening, making, being outside, having dogs……. all of it is creativity she pours into her relationships with animals (and dirt).
For Zac, it’s all the same stuff Bryn does on a smaller scale. He loves hiking and being outside with Oliver. The fact that what Zac does for money is my real life interest is a new thing. I am never more interested in what he has to say than when it’s about life inside his intelligence agency. His is a generic one that collects raw data from all the others, but he has the backstage pass to places like CIA and NSA.
It’s nice to know that even if I only have lawn seats, I can giggle with Zac after the show.
And yet it’s another relationship in which our interests feed each other to an enormous degree, because what I want to know isn’t even close to classified. It’s not important to me whether he has chatter on Iran, although I will definitely be listening to that if he does. It’s that he can tell me what his day to day life is like. He tells me when he’s going into a no personal gadgets building, and because we’re both on the think it, say it plan, when I’m on a government computer and when I’m not (as in sending to his work computer). I learn what circumstances dictate being in a SCIF vs. why he’s actually there. Does that make sense? I want to know everything without knowing anything.
I’m dating the man who’s president of his queer group at the agency and it’s definitely not “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military anymore. Zac is also in the Navy Reserves, and I want to hear about every waking moment of that, too. That’s because he got to learn what it was like to walk into other countries and have people know they were talking to an intelligence officer based on past history with other people………… and being able to sniff them out so that he can deflect questions in advance.
I called him an intelligence officer, but I’m using a generic term because I don’t know military slang. He was active duty in the Navy and his job was intelligence. What that’s actually called is beyond me. Now, he works at a national intelligence agency and does his Navy stuff as a side gig. 😛
If I tell you what I love, it’s going to be reading and writing. But people vastly underestimate how much I actually write because blog entries seem like they take a very long time. If I’m going full stream of consciousness like I do on this blog every day, I type as fast as I think and generate about a page of single spaced type every two or three minutes. I have found that I am getting faster at this by writing every day, because it’s difficult to sum up a week at once. Much easier to sum up a few hours.
Even the conflict I was talking about the other day doesn’t matter now. I thought I was being told one thing, I was being told another. Once the communication freakout was over, I got back in on the ground floor of something exciting. Doesn’t mean the conflict wasn’t worth remembering in the past. Just that I’m glad it all resolved in the best way possible for all parties.
But no one takes into account just how long it takes to nurse an idea, or how long I slave over other ideas in addition to blogging.
I have also learned something important. If I want to be successful at a party, tell everyone I’m a professional cook. If I don’t, tell them I’m a writer.
So I suppose that if I admire a profession, it’s writing……. only because someone has to.
I am spread out on Zac’s bed as Oliver cuddles my feet. Zac is in New Orleans, so I’m on puppy duty. I don’t like being here while he’s not here as much as I do when he is, but Oliver is a 24 hour friend. He is just there for me and all my dog-cuddling needs.
I’m grappling with how to move on in one sense and how to stay in another. Being present and showing up, but also being sensitive to my friends’ needs as well. No one is more important, I just have to struggle with how much I’m willing to take on at any given moment. I have reached my breaking point, but it doesn’t matter that I’m here. It matters how I respond. I can’t fold into myself and be comforted by isolation. I don’t want it anymore.
I also reserve the right to stay home and lick my wounds. Balance.
I could tell you more, but I won’t. It’s sensitive and not worth the hassle of blowing everything up. I don’t want to live with it, and I don’t want to live around it.
I thought I was in on the ground floor of something, and it blew up in my face. I let someone into a sacred space, and was welcomed and rejected within hours. I don’t deal with whiplash well, and I’m spiraling out in my own head while not trying to talk about it here.
It’s the balance of being respectful and writing around things on purpose because to tell the real story would cause more harm than good. I have more experience doing this than anyone can possibly imagine. But just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean that I want to.
Living my life out loud has consequences that I care about this time. It’s what happens when you have good boundaries. You don’t let just anyone stomp all over them, but you make the agreement with people to be the one that’s willing to throw down with them when you’re in every mood known to God and man. There’s no option not to pick up the phone, because you said you’d be there. It’s not a matter of going to extremes. It’s a matter of adjusting boundaries so that everyone feels safe, even if it’s hell on earth right now.
Hell on earth is relative, because it won’t last long. It is born of confusion and grief for something I thought was solid.
I don’t want to change too much too fast, and the adrenaline of a moment comes down. It always does. It is the dance of intimacy. You get close to someone, and then you can’t handle being that intense, so you back off. That cycle runs on repeat for the length of a relationship no matter what it is. Even coworkers. Sometimes you want to be near them. Sometimes you don’t. That can vary by the day.
Life is full of those gray areas, but it’s not about whether you’re enough for someone or you’re not. It’s being clear in communication so that no one has expectations they can’t handle because they don’t know how to meet them. Figuring it out takes more time than people are willing to spend thinking about how they want to react, and not looking at their reactions after they’ve happened to make sure the decision they made was right for everyone.
Not doing it leads to nuclear fallout. It escalates prank wars, real wars, Facebook comment sections……….
No one thinks of real world consequences on Facebook.
I can say with clarity and honesty that my beautiful girl and I didn’t. Everything was a dance of intimacy that bordered on two extremes. It’s not the situation I’m talking about here, but it’s a good example of it. If Facebook messenger had been then what it is now, there would be much less of a problem. Boundaries could have been created and maintained with the button that indicates “video call.” Doing everything through writing cost us a connection and gave us another. It affected how we related to each other with HUGE differences between, as Zac would say, “meet space and meat space.”
I should have had to sit with her anger. She should have had to sit with my fear. I should have seen her eyes when we talked all that through.
Knowing that not everything can be done virtually is like breathing for me now, and I pay attention to it closer than I ever have. This is because I spend so much time in this space, the one where everything centers on writing, I am prone to forget that I need things like hugs and kisses, too.
It’s a complicated construct, and the first step to managing it is being aware. That the things you say in instant messages and e-mails matter. You are not putting on a game with someone else’s feelings. It just seems like it because the leap in someone’s head is too great. That if you feel something here, you won’t feel it in person. That’s okay.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that because I’m direct, people often bite off more than they can chew because they think they’re playing with me and they’re not. What I’m saying to you via writing is the exact same thing you’d get in person…. I would say things completely differently, but the reaction is the same. I am hearing you and adjusting everything based on what you say.
My relationship with my beautiful girl broke down because of this very dynamic. She felt threatened, like she was being scolded and there were all kinds of recriminations. In reality, I would say “this is what you’re doing that hurts me. Please adjust.” She was not direct with me in saying “this is what you’re doing that’s hurting me. Please adjust.” Instead of going toe to toe with me, she held it all in and said I was painting my feelings as fact. What I wanted her to do was paint her feelings as fact as well, because they are. I can argue logic. I can’t argue emotion. How she feels is how she feels. I think you can only paint your feelings as fact because of this.
I wanted to dive into her, it’s just that her depth was about 4 feet deep and diving requires more than that. I do not mean that she is not deep. I am talking about respecting limits on how far down I’m allowed to go and all those breathing apparatuses.
My analogy for this is that we both said things that got us to 12 feet and then we tried to take it all back and it was too late.
But I’m telling you about this relationship in order to protect another, because my beautiful girl is not the only one that deserves a hard out.
The title comes from a Doctor Who episode about The Moment. The Moment is a weapon that can take billions of lives, but has developed a consciousness and you have to reason with it and accept your fate before it will activate. The Moment stays with The War Doctor as he grapples with whether to blow up Gallifrey to save the universe from collapse. The Moment is with The War Doctor when he’s with Ten and Eleven. The Moment tells The War Doctor that this is who he will become if he blows everything up….. that he will live long enough to become the man who regrets, and the man who forgets.
It resonates with me today as I look back over 40 straight days of posting, because I talk a lot about regrets and remorse so I can change myself going forward. I forget to play. I forget to explore alternate universes and dream bigger. In my last entry, the alternate history was staying with Kathleen long enough to have had kids, but I didn’t change anything about the relationship itself. Everything that cost me would have continued right on being expensive.
I’m trying to get smarter about where my energy goes. I haven’t lost myself in new relationship bliss because I’ve stayed motivated to write to my heart’s content, which is far more than I thought it would take to keep it happy. I am relentless about self-discovery, and I truly do not love when other people think they’re the main character. They’re the main character when we’re interacting, but they do not have a lock on our memories together because we were having different experiences when those interactions occurred. How I perceive someone shouldn’t have bearing on how anyone else sees someone because they’re not going to get the same interaction I did. They bring a different set of experiences to the table.
Those are difficult conversations to have, which is why it’s easier for me to have partners and friends who either get it or don’t care. People who get it see everything I write about them. They lived it. They don’t have to love it. They know when our conflict is resolved in real life, it will be resolved here. That I do not have a preconceived notion of who they are and expect confirmation bias. I am a diarist, and the only reason I’m considered good at blogging is that it’s not very popular anymore. It’s easier to stand out, the way it was when both Dooce and I had 200 readers on a good day.
I absolutely tanked the blog that made me in a fit of rage. I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with blowback that I do now, and I couldn’t get mad at anyone else. I self destructed.
I have been afraid I would do it again, and instead of attracting people into my life that care I write said diary, I actively avoid them.
Zac only reads something if I tell him to in any kind of urgency. The rest of the time, he just surfs because he knows that writing is my interest. He doesn’t have to make it his. It just helps that he’s also a bookworm and I wake up to “Zac has gifted you” for my Kindle. He’s introduced me to writers I never would have discovered on my own. He also knows I’ll read anything, so just send me what he likes. I don’t need him to find me things he thinks I’ll like, because I’ll dig into whatever since he likes it. I’m not being cute or coy. If Zac likes something, I probably will, too. None of that classic gender role shit, because he’s fairly femme looking for a man and I’m fairly butch looking for a woman. Christian evangelicals and queer radicals all get what they want and everyone wins.
The part about Christian Evangelicals winning was way more about being afraid to walk into just any bar holding a woman’s hand than it was about hoping they ever win anything. And how it would be twice as bad for Zac to walk into just any bar holding a man’s hand.
It’s important to me not to project heterosexual privilege, and when people can tell that Zac is queer, it means something to me. When I’m not glued to his hip, there’s an equal chance that someone is going to say something nasty to us. It’s why I don’t want to date straight men again. It would be too harsh to say never, although I’ve said it. If it happens, you’ll know something extraordinary has happened and it is a flaw I’m willing to overlook. The benefit would have to be huge.
Bryn has the same outlook that I do. Say what you want, we’ll work it out. I just collaborate with her a lot so she has a rough outline of what I’m going to talk about She reminds me of past history so I have a jumping off point to connect the past to the present. Developing our relationship is the best thing I’ve ever done for myself because I don’t have many people in my life with whom I share that much history.
It’s how I would have liked my relationship with Supergrover to go, but she didn’t like bringing up the past for frames of reference and didn’t want to collaborate with me for the future. She has just influenced every single thing I’ve written here because I was workshopping the idea with her, first. She was getting the rough drafts because I wasn’t publishing my letters to her. I was going back and taking the feelings out of them that read universal. I was taking the details that made it too personal to the two of us and casting them aside. When she cut contact with me, she was no longer that internal monologue, so she wasn’t hearing my thought process every day like she had for the last 10 years.
She didn’t like the play because I stopped giving her the brochure.
I am not comparing the two women to each other, only the reason they are both so valuable to me. My history with Bryn starts in 1997. My history with Supergrover starts in 2013. Both of them have palaces in my head because they’ve lived there long enough to create them. Bryn likes hers. Supergrover doesn’t. I am not turning one away in favor of the other. I am giving my energy to the one who needs me.
I have needed Supergrover from the moment I laid eyes on her. She needed me. I still need her, but I can’t put energy toward her because I don’t feel needed. She told me that she’s read through many lines, and I think it was probably that she thought I’d found a new toy and I’d forgotten what she meant to me, has always meant to me.
I stopped responding to her because I was willing to do anything for her and I didn’t feel a quarter of that coming back at me. It doesn’t mean that she didn’t feel it. It means that I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t get her to interpret it. I didn’t want to be the equivalent of the girlfriend who obsesses over the meaning of intended punctuation……………… anymore.
I missed laughing when she flipped me shit about things, missed having make up text after we fought, missed telling her I loved her and I missed her and that being a good thing.
That’s always what I’ve meant by “showing up.” “Loving me enough to struggle.” Lay out your thoughts, fears, dreams, hopes, secrets, lies, all of it. I used to be that place for her, and I will always be there if our differences are reconciled and celebrated. There’s no possible way I could tell our story as if it was fact. You’re not even getting the whole picture in my head because I can only write one line at once. So, not only are you not getting her side of the story, she’s not correcting anything with either one of us. Your guess as to what her story might be is absolutely as valid as mine. Other people influence her behavior to an enormous degree, but I don’t write about them because I do not have a relationship with them. Here’s a big for-instance. I learned about Michael way too late for that knowledge to be helpful. But over time, he became a useful coping mechanism. That our relationship could be virtual because theirs was on the ground. I didn’t have to worry about her- he had it handled. Remember, in my head, she’s six years old with a lot of layers to cover up that fact. I needed her to have a boyfriend. I needed her to get married. I needed her to be the country mouse to my city mouse. Knowing that I would have run to the drugstore in the middle of the night if she was sick didn’t have to eat at me because she already had someone to do that.
I wish she would just take in the enormity of the things I’ve said that I don’t regret, like “of course I’ll want to be the first one tested if you need an organ. Please.” To me, that promise is every bit as real as running to Walgreens at 0300. I didn’t do anything because she needed me to do it. I did it because I saw it needed doing.
Although before I gave her an organ, we would have had a very serious conversation about the YouTube video in which she woke up from surgery queer as a three dollar bill. Just the weirdest organ rejection side effect ever.
It has been long enough since I’ve wanted to be the person that ran to the drugstore at 0300 that I know within myself just how much I am…………
I am good at a lot of things. I’m going to write until I find something real. That might be in one scene, that might take a couple. Today is one of those days where I just have to start the tap running and hope something comes out. I am very low energy today, but I’m fried. I’ve written an entry every day for over a month- today is my 40th day in a row. I know that I am posting more than normal because I can’t find things as easy when I go back. 😉 I am dedicated to letting the past stay there, so I don’t link to anything. If you’ve missed it, good luck. It’s a different way of reading the web, and it is successful. That’s because people know they’re OG and can prove it. A true Fanagan knows what my life was like in 2013 and still does, so I can make jokes about things I’ve written without all of you knowing what I’m saying.
It creates intimacy, and it keeps blowback to a minimum because if someone didn’t read something about them, they generally won’t go look it up unless someone sends them a link. Trust me when I say that no one ever lets someone know when I’ve said something glowing about them. It’s a lot to want to escape from, which is why my inner circle is so small. I cannot have anyone in my circle who doesn’t understand that they are a complete person. That they are light and dark and angels and demons and hot sauce and peanut butter. All of ’em. None of us can truly be changed by the other, and no one gets changed by my silly web site, because they don’t pay attention to it unless they want to be here. There is no requirement on being a reader and being my friend. But when I don’t have friends who care about my writing, it makes me comfortable enough to continue. My writing matters. My personal relationship with every one of you does not.
If Hottie McHotterson wanted to define me by one entry and I was happy about it, it would have been “Go Tell the Bees,” preferably the audio version as I think it means more in my voice. I’d re-record it if I had spare time and server space, because I was so emotional the first time around. But it got me where I needed to be. Full of love, anger, remorse, grief….. and also joy. In one scene I told her about the day she was having a moment and I told her that we were sitting outside with a glass of wine in the sunshine, and we worked at GEICO.
That would be a good jumping off point if only because I’ve thought about that picnic for 10 years, and have imagined it many times. However, I can make our friendship look good. I can do nothing for working at GEICO.
So, I’ll write about what I could have done had my life followed the track that most people’s do. I used to be married, and I had all the hope in the world for that relationship. In fact, I was married twice on too much hope. With one, it was that we were the wrong personality type for each other. With the other, we were so much alike that we didn’t take our conflicts as seriously as they should have been taken for far too long to course correct. I’m going to write about being married to Kathleen, since it’s the closest to my real life now. I could have stayed in Alexandria after we met. It’s an alternate history that starts in college as opposed to 20 years ago.
I am alone in the doctor’s office. Kathleen would have come with me, but she’s at a softball game. I’m flipping through a magazine when she comes in. She’s smiling.
Leslie…. it took.
I say, “are you sure?” This woman has run three blood tests, but I’m asking if she’s sure….. #thankselizabethwarren
The doctor’s glasses slip a little on her nose and she looks at me like she’s gotten an A on the group project. “Your little monsters are going to own this town.” She knows she can say stuff like that to me, that I already feel like there has been some sort of alien invasion…. one that I can’t feel yet….. but she can. There are two heartbeats, both of them strong. We weren’t trying for twins, just a side effect of the implanted embroyos. We only did two, because Kathleen is Catholic and neither one of us wanted to think about having to remove them. I just hope that they turn out looking completely different from the jump. Otherwise, I will have to write their names with Sharpies on their foreheads. If I don’t, I know myself. One baby will get fat, one will look like it’s malnourished, all because I’m embarrassed that I don’t know which child is which. Thank God there’s not a chance they’re identical. There’s a chance they won’t even be the same race, because we didn’t use one donor. We chose based on education. Both donors majored in math- if I’m going to be of help in the homework department, it’s not there.
My doctor has noticed that I have left the conversation and that I am off in my own little world….. and when I get home, I’m going to blow up someone else’s. Oh, wait. I’m not going to need to go home to blow up someone’s world.
Kathleen is at work softball, but my mom and dad aren’t.
Kathleen is at work softball, but my sister isn’t.
That’s three whole ass phone calls to jump up and down and say “it’s twins” before I go home, because I know how my parents and sister are going to react. I cannot predict my wife, and I stopped trying long ago. I’m surprised she didn’t want to quit trying to have babies at all. She’s been distant lately, but I don’t care. The entire world fits into my tiny 5’2 frame.
I’m not in it for her reaction. I’m in it for my kids.’
It’s not that I think she won’t make a good mom. I don’t think she makes a very good wife, but she’s what I’ve got and I’ve made promises I intend to keep. Besides, I don’t really have to pay attention to her if I don’t feel like it. I have better things to focus on than who she’s screwing this week. If it makes her happy to have boy toys over a real relationship, I can only go with the flow. I cannot change her behavior. I can only change mine.
If I didn’t have to tell Kathleen I was pregnant, I probably wouldn’t. I wanted the real deal, and I got it….. but having everything costs something. If I had it to do over, I might have chosen differently. Now, it’s all a matter of dancing with who done brought me. I am only asking her to hold onto more hands when she twirls.
My doctor says “you’re not even really here anymore, are you?” I apologize and say, “I absolutely was not, but I am now. How do we do this?” She tells me to cut down on the pizza and beer (I found this banana cove one out in Fairfax…) is non-negotiable. I look at her and say, “I can understand why babies don’t like pizza, but why is beer a problem?” She laughs because she knows I’m joking and we start making a diet plan.
It will all go to shit later. I know it will. Kathleen and I do not have the emotional fortitude to fight through something like this. But right now? In this moment? She’s going to hear the most important words of her life and I get to say them.
“Sweetheart, I went to the doctor today…… and we’re going to need to do a lot of shopping. I’m not pregnant with a baby. I’m pregnant with two.”
She will look at me with the same wide-eyed wonder I gave my ob/gyn.
Part of the reason my entries about the woman I call “Supergrover” is because she won’t answer a lot of basic questions about herself, and yet I have access to her heart in a beautiful and unique way. I got in through the back door in the hacker sense of the word, because nothing would ever have happened between us if we hadn’t kept to staying out of each other’s real lives.
I realized a few days ago that I had burned down the entire house on mutual friends. However, I wasn’t being encouraged to do so in any way. It was my reaction to her words, always. I cannot describe what she or anyone else went through at that time in our lives, and so far I’ve been handed more confusion than answers.
The closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling secure is “someday, perhaps” and “also. Thank you.” She’s quiet when she’s sincere, and those words echo just as much as the ones that hurt me. There is no possible way that she does not come across as a 3D character, and I will not believe it. I cannot write both the entry she referenced and a letter to her husband telling him to be good to her because she wouldn’t let me be good to her as well. If I can think those thoughts, why can she only accept the dark ones as the truth? Why can she not see that I am woven into her like The Impossible Girl, the one whose DNA is spread within The Doctor’s. I got there by only being her inner monologue as well. Our similarities show in our writing. One thing touched me deeply, and she said that I portrayed her as flat as if it’s not a wheel with many spokes. I told her that if she took every entry from March until now, she’d see the many different spokes in the wheel. That I remembered every one and wrote them all down.
You cannot think someone is worth nothing and a villain if you’re willing to go toe to toe with her husband and have it out. Who does that? Someone who thinks there’s no such thing as “the friend zone.” It’s better when we’re in each other’s lives than it is to be apart. I’ve written about that pain in exquisite detail so that I don’t forget a moment of it. There was a passion and drive within me to have her in my life at whatever level she could accept me into hers, but then it became about the cost/benefit analysis of living in so much confusion. I told her it caused anger and issues that needed to be resolved. She didn’t want to resolve them. At no time did it mean that I became that person who wouldn’t safety net her through anything. I am still her red telephone, and what I know is that Bryn and Zac would not deprive me of her, because they’re always rooting for me to succeed. I just would have to balance Bryn’s needs as well, because I cannot abandon her after the ways in which she’s made me grow. We have the ability to have a very deep and meaningful relationship because we have lived in the same place. We were raised by the same “parents.” We both lived to tell the tale. She’s my partner in terms of the one I’d want you to go to if something was up with me where I couldn’t be contacted. That’s because she’s the only one I’ll talk to when I really need to reach out. She feels the same way about me.
Just because you haven’t gotten married to someone doesn’t mean that loyalty and confidentiality mean less. That my vows to my friends are less important than the ones I’d make to a partner. I look to Bryn’s face for love because I can. I would look at my beautiful girl the same way if I thought she thought it was a privilege to be let in. But that power imbalance kept both of us from really laying things on the table.
Oh, the stories we could have told. Stories that are both true and factual. I still have the picture in my head of a photo shoot I want with her, and I hope it makes her laugh if she remembers what I’m talking about. Let’s just say it involves gender role reversal and leave it at that. I’ve checked with me and her husband absolutely wants this picture, too.
To think that I want to paint her as the villain when I’ve poured out everything in terms of how I feel about her makes me lean on the memories that make me laugh.
Here’s the best one of all. In ten years, she has never sent me a voice mail of her saying her own name. I say it like it sounds. She says it the way she likes it, but I can’t correct it and I’ve been saying it wrong the whole time.
I call her all kinds of nicknames because I can’t say her fucking real one.
Now that’s describing all the colors. She’s not a villain. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life, and I don’t understand why she thinks she isn’t.
She is my red and my violet. My whites, greys, and blacks.
I paint my feelings as fact, but never once have I used PhotoShop to make it prettier, or to crop something so that the framing looks better…. like I have that good an eye naturally.
It’s all a spectrum. It’s all an ADHD mess. The temperature of our relationship centers on hot with drive to reconnect, not hot with passion. It never will. But painting my feelings as fact shouldn’t go unnoticed here, either.
I love her, and I won’t apologize for it anymore. I don’t even care if she believes it. I know it to be true, and I cannot be held together by one entry alone. I hope, for once, she’ll focus on this one.
What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?
I am a cook, therefore I cannot afford to eat all the places I’d really like to go. Since my sister can afford to treat me, she does. But that’s not how I spend money on food and drinks. I lay out serious cash at the grocery store, because I can make food exciting by making a dish, then making a completely new dish out of the leftovers. I buy things at grocery stores that most people just think, “it’s too much work.” I will roll sushi at home. I will soak beans overnight so that I don’t need the convenience of cans. I will wash rice. I will do all the things it takes to be an awesome prep cook so that I’m comfortable on the line at home as a solo act.
The only thing I don’t do is buy meat at the grocery anymore. It’s fine if I’m eating out at a restaurant. I just don’t like wondering if it’s going to spoil, or the whole process it takes to thaw things without cooking them. I don’t want to leave chicken in the sink with water dripping down because my housemates will either get soap in it or try to clean it up. I have had them throw away things when I went upstairs to get my phone.
I think the most money bit comes from having the “keeping up appearances” marriage first. We ate a lot of money trying to be social with our ExxonMobil friends. We went to bars and restaurants that cost a lot, but we never really got anything substantial out of them. There’s only one thing I remember from that time in my life with clarity. It was a brewpub out in Fairfax that made banana clove beer. The combination of lightly sweet banana (not artificial) with Belgian spices made my palate sing. This was before I met Dana, before I went to her mini culinary school. The palate was there, I just wasn’t putting energy in to the right direction.
Meeting Dana brought a lot of things together. The above paragraph is why we would have had a lot of fun in DC together. The thing is, though, I had to get away from her to become a better person, and I hope she feels the same way about me- that we are both wonderful people, but we do not need to be together to know that. We’ve checked.
It would have seemed less weird to the outside world if we’d moved to DC together, but the plan was always to end up here eventually. It’s an adventure we wanted to go on together, and when we split, I still had fire in the belly to do it.
It made it look to the outside world that I was chasing a girl, and I did nothing to help myself out there, but I just didn’t care. It wasn’t worth the energy to figure out how to care about so many things that were beyond my control. Getting the girl in the end would have been nice, but it wasn’t necessary. She and DC are not synonymous in that if I’d suddenly taken off to a city I knew nothing about and the only thing other people knew is that she was there, I’d allow everyone to raise eyebrows at me. Clearly that’s insane.
But when you’re presented with a move that will solve every need including getting the girl? We’re getting somewhere. That’s because there was never any pressure on the relationship to succeed. Washington is big enough to hold both of us, even at full strength.
I stopped thinking about food a few paragraphs ago because I’m still reeling after getting an e-mail from Supergrover that I don’t know what to do with. I’m just spiraling out in my little neurodivergent head because she is bound and determined to wall off and let me know she thinks I’m not that great a writer because I paint my feelings as fact and everything is all about me.
This is my web site. I don’t project feelings onto other people unless they’re interacting with me and I am trying to explain it. No one else in her life has made any move to get to know me, so what they think is all her business and none of mine….. but it would be my business if I knew what she was talking about.
I am only an authority on me and what I perceive.
What I perceive is that prepackaged food holds no nutrition, and very few people are willing to create a dish without shortcuts.
Wash the rice. Soak the beans. Dice the mirepoix.
The most expensive ingredient in food and relationships is time.
Stories That Are All True 