Things have changed so much for me this year, and I’m reeling from it. I’m not sure that I meant to change this much this fast, but in retrospect things worked out. I’m not constantly worried that I’m a judgmental dickhead. I’m not constantly thinking of myself as less important than everyone else, and I’m finding out that not having interests as a child- in terms of fitting into society- I adopted a whole bunch of behavior patterns that I don’t like. I fell for everything because I didn’t stand up for anything.
I’m just a writer. I don’t know shit about shit.
The older I get, the more that lesson internalizes. What is different is that I am not constantly making up scenarios and conversations in my head to produce the least offensive outcome because I am a shell of a person. I was abused emotionally from the time I was 13. I absolutely lost everything I was interested in, favoring her interests. I think I carried around an opera dictionary for six weeks or something.
I feel like I learned how to be myself in a sandbox, that I was beta testing all kinds of things… and let’s be clear. Some of that software isn’t even out of alpha release. Keep checking GitHub. Good luck.
So, that’s what the Internet relationship was good for, if nothing else. I’m not a lead the charge into hell sort of person. But I knew someone who was. It felt like an ace up my sleeve, and it was.
And that’s why it hurts so much. I’m not disappointed that I never got to call her boo, I’m disappointed that our friendship had such promise.
You cannot imagine how long I just sat in silence, figuring this thing out. Or trying to, anyway. There was just no way to separate what I’d done from my level of trustworthiness, so I’ve known I’m a piece of shit for years. Intimately.
So, it lit me up inside that things started looking up. And then realized the swings were only going to get worse. If she’s not forthcoming, I’m not pushing. If e-mails are too big a deal, let me go.
Let me give all that love to someone else… not in a mean way, just that I hurt that I’ll never be able to make something right. I spent too long dwelling on how to fix a problem without realizing how much it was robbing me of any self respect. As I got older, I didn’t want to sit in it anymore. I didn’t want to cry any more than I already had. I didn’t want to wake up at 55 and see that I’d just kept at it.
So, I asked her what she wanted and where she was going.
Last time there was a huge break, I’d send her e-mails and get a few in return. It took a mountain of work to get where we are today, and I thought that we were in it for the long haul in a “sure, I can water the plants” kind of way. I don’t think I would have been wrong if I’d just kept my mouth shut, a running theme in this relationship for evil and for awesome.
My attention is starting to turn and it is a welcome relief after ten years of not being able to shake Gmail’s hand.
But it’s not all that. As I told her, “you’re in my head, Malkovich.” I do not know how to get rid of things I’ve thought about ad nauseam for ten years. I am making progress, but I’m not there yet. I feel like part of this is just delayed. That this is the conversation I should have been having with myself eight years ago instead of now. Except that some really good things have come in the last few years. I don’t even fucking know anymore, and that’s the saddest part.
Pretty much everything can be summed up by “I don’t even know anymore.” The difference is that I care a lot less in terms of what it’s going to take to keep me going and how other people are going to feel. I have to go hardline Lamott here. My story is mine. I’m not seeing what I want to read, so I’m creating it.
I loved loving a writer, because she could think as fast as me.
I’m remembering what she used to say about my writing, and letting myself fall apart for a minute. Just sit in it and let it hurt. It’ll go away.
My mother dying taught me this. That if I could just sit in the discomforts and not shut it away, I’d be better off because with tension comes release.
I keep seeing her in my mind and thinking, “do it, anyway.”
If I thought I could really help her, do it anyway. But make her come to you. Maybe reading my words will help, and that is the only thing I can hope for. I doubt anything will ever happen between us again and feel that our story is over. But I know I can help her just by being me. That if she wants, she has a wealth of information on what I was really saying- the answers to questions she might have, without any real desire to know whether she reads. I told her I didn’t want to know, and for now, I mean it.
She is a memory. I want to look at our entire relationship and decide what it should have taught me the first time around that it just didn’t. Mostly I learned that I talk too much, that I’m too much. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just that most people aren’t ready for what I can do, and that part can fry people’s hair.
It’s not because I’m so much smarter than everyone else. It’s that most people don’t think like I do, and it’s difficult for them to relate. No one knows anyone like me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come off as absolutely brilliant for a little while.
My beautiful girl knows she’s brilliant for a lifetime, and she’s told me I am, too. That’s enough. I am sitting in the concept of enough. What I thought it was. What it should be. How my idealist bullshit caught up to me by creating wishes with no foundation. It’s all a lot, and not a damn thing has to do with parsing out anything she did except to point out what I didn’t know for a decade.
It’s paying to look at all the things I could have given attention, I just didn’t. It’s filling me up where I’m empty, letting me have back the parts of me that were hers…. Because after ten years, I know for damn sure that there’s a lot of her that’s in me. The best part about having an Internet relationship is that the joke you made this morning will be huge this afternoon and no one’s heard it.
Today my big laugh was Bryn being stuck behind a horse trailer and several cars going 25 miles per hour going down the back side of Mt. Chehalem and I started laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. “Bryn…… Bryn…. I can’t believe you’re stuck in a hay pride parade.“
I couldn’t believe I’d made a joke that I didn’t have to rip off.
I lost a lot of myself, but I’ve regained it.
The blessing is that it is a lot of gray area. Nebulous whitespace that’s primed and ready for paint. Feeling like I’m making room for new things feels exciting, because if I’m going to end a relationship because I think it’s not working, then what will? I have ideas, but it’s about connecting with people who share them. I want to meet someone who’s excited to meet me.
Again, I do not tend to write short essays, so you’ll get more than you bargained for. NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?
This writing prompt is coming at a very good time. Today is Lindsay’s birthday. Lindsay is my younger sister. She works as a lobbyist for a federally funded clinic that does trans medicine. She lives with her husband, Matt, and her dogs, Charlie and Teddy. I would post a picture of her, but I don’t want to bother her. If I posted a picture she had not pre-approved to make sure she was looking the most fly, she would lose her shit. Pretty sure that’s a direct quote.
My favorite moment of all time that nothing can ever beat is going to see Lindsay in the hospital when she was born. It’s the most important day of my life so far. My favorite words are “it’s a girl.” We’re everything the other is and isn’t. I can say things to her that I can’t say to anyone else, and not for lack of trying. It’s just that those who weren’t there don’t have the comprehension. I’m not talking about a particular situation, just the natural ebb and flow of growing up together. Like all siblings and couples, we have our own emotional shorthand.
Lindsay is emotional about music in the way I am excited by the math. I can’t do it, but I like to listen to the outcome. Lindsay is looking for catharsis. I’m looking to set my brain on fire and blow my hair back. There’s a reason my favorite choral composer is Bach. The man was brilliant. I believe he was the first person to do mashups, because in some of the pieces, they’re in eight part harmony, then divided into two groups of SATB. They basically have individual oratorios that fit together like a long zipper..
I listen to music while memorizing rhythms and drumming my fingers on the desk trying to figure out the key and how to play the parts on the trumpet, which I don’t play now, but I reflex is a reflex for all the practicing I did in junior and senior high. I pulse my toes so that people don’t think I’m a freak show for tapping my foot. I learned that trick from my dad, another trumpet player, because conductors don’t generally want to see your foot going up and down during a performance.
Contrast that to my sister.
When Lindsay listens to music, she is deaf to the rest of the world. You’ll startle her the same way a bookworm will jump out of their skin if you touch them while they can’t see you. She wants to find comfort, and finds comfort in tracks while I prefer entries. I’ve tried to write songs before , and I’m crap at it because I’m aggressively verbal. Trying to find words that fit in a particular rhythm and also makes sense would take me hours and hours, while an entry generally only lasts one at most. The majority of the time, I type so fast it’s 20 minutes, because I’m not preplanning anything except looking at the writing prompt and seeing if it’s any good. I can do all that silently, while Lindsay does not want to be interrupted and neither do I. It’s her introvert space, because she’s more extroverted than I am, and also has to be “on” a hell of a lot more than I do. Being “on” is a reflex for us, one that was hard to beat out of me, but I would say that I have done it. It’s not that I don’t want to be polite. It’s that I don’t want to have to think of the appropriate response. I want to respond. I know I’m often wrong, but at the same time, you’re seeing the real me and not one I designed to make you happy.
I think that Lindsay is also experiencing extraordinary change in her life and trying to decide what she wants it to look like. She wants to do great things, not just talk about them. The only pie in the sky idea we’ve ever had is that we want to be filthy stinking rich. Just multimillionaires. Then, we’re gonna fix all the things Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs can’t- one because he’s dead, but never gave money to charity while he was alive…. Maybe a few times. I can’t remember. But Walter Isaacson made sure to indicate sharing was rare. The other is just egocentric. Homelessness? Not on my watch. Hunger? Here’s groceries for a week. Just everything we can possibly do to die broke.
It’s not money for us to spend, it’s money for us to give. She makes good money, I have a killer idea. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities, and not likely, either. But it was a fun conversation. It’s like that scene in The Three Amigos where they’re all lying in bed thinking about how to spend their profits from the movie and we’re both Ned Nederlander.
I don’t NOT want a big shiny car, either. 😛
I say I want a car, but I don’t. My favorite moment recently has been road tripping with Lindsay. She drove all eight hours, and I realized that though I love cars, I’d rather ride than drive. During our trip, I wrote and she listened to music, which is what I do when I travel in any way. I don’t need a desk. I’ve got a keyboard that’s pretty heavy that has a slot to hold my tablet. My lap is perfect.
I feel like it’s fancy enough that I can completely dissociate and not notice anything, because knowing my stop is rote. My attention is laser focused, and because of it, writing while riding fits my personality perfectly. It doesn’t invite people to talk to me, because I look like I’m doing VERY IMPORTANT WORK because I’m typin.’ I remind myself of Richard DeLongpre at work on the TV show “Allen Gregory.” “This is Richard DeLongpre. I’m on the phone.” This is said with no small amount of pride.
It is important work. My emotional vomit has impressed tens of you across the world.
My favorite activity is writing this blog. That’s because it’s just stream of consciousness, a literal translation of what’s in my head. The path winds everywhere because I’m interested in everything.
Today I’m sad that my favorite woodworker on YouTube lives in Portland and I didn’t know of him then. It “wood” have been cool to meet. That’s where my mind goes when I think “I’m interested in everything,” because of all the things I thought I’d be addicted to, watching people refinish or make new furniture isn’t even in the top 50. And yet, woodworking videos are my Great British Bake-off. “Did you really just do a box joint when miters are at least three times stronger?” “She’s gonna paint it…. gonna paint it….. Jesus God. I bet her next project’s a river table.” ” “You’re putting wood…. near water….. not even a coat of Total Boat. Playing fast and loose, bud.” I have nearly given up on TV. I haven’t seen anything recent. I’m just going to YouTube Youniversity. I’m telling you, though, it’s a rabbet hole. I find it so similar to cooking, because in woodworking, you also start with “the mis.” (mis en place)
Although if I have to hear another advertisement for Rubio Monaco I’m the one that’s going to lose my shit.
I’d like to make a friend who’s a woodworker, because I don’t think I’d be a very good carpenter with my vision issues I’m not the person that has the funds or the desire to get a CNC, where I could do all of it on a computer and then fit it together. However, I can stand there and hold stuff. I can do little things rather than big things to see if I’m even capable of graduating to big things. There’s lots of carpentry that can be done without measuring or math. Sanding, painting, routing finished pieces, etc. Plus, I’m knowledgeable about wood, epoxy, and metal.
Jesus, is there anything the two of us *don’t* have in common? Unclear.
The Bible is one of my favorite things, because it’s the lens through which I see everything else. Don’t freak- I’m not an Evangelical. All I mean is that I see Biblical people as human and not exalted (The Bible is an ancient blog at best. The authors of the Bible were the me of their generation. I just have less “begats.”). I see the God in all of us. Heaven and hell are created by the environments to which we belong, because God lives in the thread of energy that runs through the human race. If we count on our rewards being in heaven, we have no motivation to make heaven right now. Evangelicals are just a bunch of welfare moms in their own shitty vernacular. What makes their behavior extra hard to take is their sanctimonious bigotry masked as thoughts and prayers.
They’re the modern Pharisees and Sadduceees. You know, the religious zealots Jesus hated? The ones we’re encouraged to call out because Jesus’ law is not letters. It’s love.
My favorite thing this morning was waking up and going to drink some water and coffee. I was halfway through both before I thought about Supergrover. Progress. Generally she’s my first thought, and it’s nice to know that I’m not always going to be this sad. I’m not done with her. I’m done quietly begging for just a little bit more. If I had my way, we’d do lots of cool stuff together, but I am all about compromise. I don’t have things I need. I have things I wish for. The difference between “this is what I need” and “this is what I want, but don’t want to be selfish.” I only needed her to open up a little more, because she said she trusted me and clearly didn’t. Feeling like she was giving lip service to it destroyed me. If I’m honest, that’s the moment I was out. This is because I have an example that’s really cut and dry. I needed to go, and I didn’t want to leave.
I wrecked both of us in the process, but I do not take credit for a hundred percent of it. At ten years (really ten years now), that would be impossible. I did a lot wrong. So did she. I hurt her more, and that’s clear. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be so gunshy about talking to me about anything important to me about us. Yes, she’s married and has kids and friends and siblings and the whole nine. I do not expect her to change anything for me in terms of spending time together except for maybe a few longer e-mails, because I know she doesn’t have time for anything else. In retrospect, I should have come to the conclusion that nothing would ever change years ago. For all the joy I’ve had over the last few years, it didn’t last because I would write about anything and everything and for months I’d get three word responses. When I finally asked her to think about some things- take it away so she wasn’t responding off the cuff, she replied in about 20 minutes and said she really didn’t have time for anything but three word e-mails. She’s diplomatic, and I’m not stupid. It’s not rejection dysphoria. It’s life.
When I’d ask for the smallest things, if she couldn’t do them, she’d say something like “of course, not good enough for you.” It made me feel like a dictator I am most certainly not. I’m Type B, and and unimpressed with passive-aggressive martyrdom.
Not good enough? I think it’s crazy she believes anything isn’t good enough for me because I have told her how amazing she is, how much she’s loved, and how much her intellect feeds mine. What about my opinion says she’s not good enough for me? Or that any task she couldn’t fulfill was a disappointment? It’s not. It’s just life. She’s not responsible for me. I don’t need her to save me. She’s not the only friend I could ask for something in a pinch. She’s the one I want, not the one I need in a way that feels codependent or romantic. Just that while I’m single, she’s been my first thought. First priority. I didn’t want romance. I needed friendship on a fundamental level, and I thought we had enough history to really forgive each other and move on. I have been disabused of this notion, and it feels internally histrionic (not that intense, but I am struggling to word and the best I could do outside of that diagnosis is “extra intense.”
That’s because I didn’t give up until a few months ago, and I feel stupid. Instead of calling her out, I should have just ghosted her because calling her out has gone so spectacularly badly in the past. The imbalance was frightening because there was no direction, like being in space. I got tired of being the half of the relationship that was talking to a brick wall. You can’t wall off an INFJ. I mean, you can, but that’s not the friendship they want. I had the friendship I wanted, and I ruined it out of desperation. When she stopped confiding in me, I felt like her personal content creator….. a sideshow…. and most of all, unwanted. She reinforced that idea too much of the time, probably the same way she thought she wasn’t good enough for me and I still haven’t wrapped my brain around that thought process. We so obviously need to talk, I just don’t want to anymore. I was on hold for eight years…. and I think that’s because she thought I’d act like a man. That her worth was tied up in whether she’d sleep with me or not, because I didn’t ever think that and yet I can see how she’d get there. If she saw herself through my eyes, she’d faint. When I think of her, I blank out into complete bliss, and so does everyone who knows her. This is a stone cold fact.
I’m also not stamping my feet and asking why I’m not her favorite. What’s done is done. I am certain she thinks I’m being childish because I didn’t get what I wanted and threw a tantrum, because that’s what having feelings means to her, apparently. Feeling rejected is okay. It wasn’t her responsibility to feel guilty, just to hear me say I felt rejected and decide if she wanted to do anything about it or not. She didn’t. It’s okay, but I’m not wired for shallow. It hurt too much. Because there were no clear boundaries, all of the things we could have worked out are nebulous. It is not on her to decide when I get up from the table if love is no longer being served.
This is not to say she doesn’t love me. I don’t think that. I never could. But I think we both like our memories more, because I love the sweet things she did for me, but those also felt surface-level because I don’t trade gifts for emotions. So, I felt lonely even when we were talking. That I was sharing too much with someone who didn’t really want to open up to me, and how the amount of information I have on her pales in comparison to what she knows about me.
But now I want to talk about another favorite moment so we end on an “up.”
My beautiful girl dropped me a note out of the blue… “Argo is on HBO. Made me think of you.”
I don’t have a bigger job right now than to look at who I want to be with as much passion as I can muster. I need to release guilt and shame, and move into the next phase of my life. I’ve kept it at bay long enough. I have a doctorate in being single by now, and in some ways I’m just as dumb as ever, but the key is to always make new mistakes. I am tired of all the internal punishment I’ve given myself and am trying to work through all of it so that issues stay resolved and flashbacks can’t pop up, because they don’t mean anything anymore.
I want to be able to look at a memory without reliving it. I do this most often through this blog, because I only have to write it once…….. but I have somewhere to go to read and reread and reread until the emotions that come up for me feel very far away. It depends on the issue as to the timeframe, but desensitizing myself is much easier when I have a handle on what I actually thought instead of relying on my (very) fallible memory……. Or maybe it’s my fallible memory.
I CANNOT CHANGE THE STORY I’M TELLING MYSELF.
Do you see how it’s so much harder for me to get off track when my memory of what I was thinking during certain times in my life is infallible? Do you know how many times I’ve had to use the “Search” feature on this web site? It is so helpful that my memories do not bleed together and warp, because rereading my own work gives me a general idea of what happened when. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have to basically Google yourself because you’re so ADHD you couldn’t remember a date if your life depended on it? What saves embarrassment is being able to recall things accurately years after the fact, because I’m not speaking off the cuff, and not speaking for anyone else…… keeping in mind that this is only a record of what I was thinking, and I cannot be a fully reliable narrator because I’m only going on the information I have. Because I know I’ll never reach perfection, I strive for excellence. I will never please everyone. Fact.
Something has changed in me this year, and now I can put my finger on it. I feel more comfortable in my skin because I’m older. I do have wisdom and experience to pass on to other people who are probably smarter than me and already have this stuff figured out, anyway…… this blog is for the ones who don’t.
This blog is for readers who know they’re train wrecks and are actively working on the problem. I don’t know any perfect people, so I know I’ll never get there…. But what I can control is the amount of time I’m willing to dive into the wreck. What I have found that works the most effectively is to be present for every awful feeling you have. If you work it out in your mind, the next time those emotions come up for you, they won’t hurt as much. Lean into emotional pain like a deep tissue sports massage where you get beat up for an hour and a half and somehow feel amazing.
I’m passionate about getting enough sleep more than anything else. When I don’t give my body time to repair itself, I am worse off both physically and mentally. You won’t notice I have CP (probably) until I get very tired. The ability to hold it together is at zero. I fall more often over things I don’t see. I miss steps both up and down. It all hurts when I fall, but I’m used to it. I don’t really have another choice, so I need to come to peace. Being angry at myself is the root cause of all the negative I’ve put out into the world, another universal truth. I am cleaning out my closet. Let’s get down to business and let the real Leslie Lanagan (please) stand up.
It feels different to stand up than it did when I was 20, because if the other person was slightly displeased, I’d go right back to apologizing for my existence. Now, I realize just how accepting my friends are (or not). This is not a slam, because I’m generalizing over hundreds of people including Facebook friends. It’s a spectrum, right, because no one has the same opinion of you on every issue. I have my inner circle, and they’re signal vs. noise, a line I picked up from a web zine in the early 2000s, but I repeat myself.
It’s not that I don’t value a lot of people’s opinions. I most certainly do. I just don’t have room to take on the emotions of more than a few people at once. I have to be absolutely open and vulnerable with them, which takes a lot of stamina, but they’re doing the same thing for me. We are each refilling each other’s social battery because we’re lightening each other’s emotional load. It’s also making sure that the give and take is roughly equal, because I know I’m a handful at times. If you’re the one that’s on my six, I sure as shit am on yours. I have an immense capacity for gratitude because it fills all my empty places. I smile more.
I am passionate about making myself smile more. Pick any one of my entries in the last few months and you’ll see quickly that I’m going through it….. and keeping on keeping on. My chin is up. I just need to keep it that way. The God part of me, my third person omnipotent point of view, hates watching me go through all this- and accepts that it is necessary. That POV is also responsible for a lot of what I’m experiencing now, because I’m only omnipotent regarding knowing what I’m going to do. There are too many permutations to even guess what’s going on in other people’s heads. Heuristics come in after you’ve told me what you’re experiencing because I’m relating your story to every one I’ve ever heard on the topic; I’m hoping that the next thing that comes out of my mouth is relevant to your situation and/or emotional state. #fingerscrossed
I get so embarrassed when what I’ve said is wrong that I withdraw, but I don’t need people to tiptoe around me. I need them to give me time to digest. Your problem with me is what it is; I can’t do anything to change what’s happened, but I can change the future by being willing to talk about all the things that are bothering me…. If I know you have my back. My work to do is turning down rejection sensitivity dysphoria so that I don’t make every mistake I’ve ever made a noose around my neck.
Turning down RSD would turn down a whole bunch of things…. Mostly social anxiety, but I’m sure it would be more than that. I could stop getting into knock-down drag-outs even when no one is in the room. When I fight myself, it is gloves off. I’m tired of knocking myself out because I can’t get up as fast as I used to.
I don’t have any fight left in me, and now I’m trying to find out why I ever got fight in me in the first place. I am aware that women taking back their power always looks like rage, but at the same time, I’ve said things that took all the velvet off the hammer because I don’t react like a Southerner anymore. DC is the South (technically), but Oregon sure isn’t. It’s not that I’m equating Portlanders to being mean, just that I’ve lost the need to sugar coat any and every sentence because I’ve had too many instances of it creating chasms. I’m overly sensitive to miscommunication, so I spell out everything.
I am now trying to remember to edit. Not every e-mail has to be a beautifully crafted essay because not everyone loves to read.
I am passionate about reading, and right now I’ve got a banger of a book. It’s called “The Secrets We Kept: A Novel” by Lara Prescott. It’s about female spies in the 40s and 50s, a group of women there at the founding of CIA hired for the typing pool. They get noticed for their operational potential, and here’s the line that got me…. I love this so hard…… “We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.” They’re the original “Swallows,” which is code for women who use their sexuality to get information out of people. I don’t know of any programs in the US that seriously created these women…. It’s a novel. Says it right there on the cover. Sleeping with an asset is a fireable offense now (or maybe it always has been…. Not fact checking til the book is done), and the US has never been known for it. Russia invented Swallows.
Women, in my experience from talking to a wealth of people in the industry, tend to make better spies. Misogyny works for them in terms of being The Little Gray Man. They tend to stay more calm in stressful situations, because that morning her toilet probably broke, the dog threw up, and her finger was broken so she had to change the baby with one hand while maintaining the facade that she is completely fine. Tell me that woman can’t remain calm when the goods are military equipment and classified documents. She’s probably calm because this meeting sucks and she can sleep standing up. This book takes place after CIA was founded, so past Julia Child’s time at OSS. Yet, she’s still the woman I picture in all these stories…. Unless it’s by Jonna Mendez, because then I don’t have to put my own pictures on fictional characters. I’ve met her a couple of times at the museum, which is kind of cool because now the movies that play in my head are accurate.
I am passionate about Julia Child. I do not think that you can technically call her a spy, because I don’t know if every employee is called a case officer or whether different departments have different titles. In the movie Julie & Julia, Paul and Julia tell a table full of friends that they aren’t spies, they’re file clerks. This is untrue. I don’t know if Paul ever worked for OSS or not, because he said he worked for State in the movie. You don’t really have to be one or the other. They work on things together all the time, so it’s not really important to give everyone at CIA that works with state a diplomatic cover, because the way I understand it is that the allotment of diplomatic jobs we’re funding is set. If CIA takes three of them as covers, then that’s three less jobs that State can fill. So, even if Paul says he worked for State, that doesn’t mean he was never an operations officer. Julia worked for the Office of Technical Services, which is why I would not classify her as a file clerk or an operations officer (perhaps the same title, not the same function. Q does not leave the building.). The biggest thing she’s known for is creating a powerful shark repellant recipe………………. #foreshadowing
I would watch the hell out of the miniseries I’m seeing in my mind right now because of course now Julia Child and James Bond are the same person. She didn’t just create shark repellant, she rappelled down the side of a building before the Germans made her.
It’s so crazy it just might work, which is apparently carved in the topiary hedges at Langley. I hope their pants have reinforced seats due to all the turbulence.
I am passionate about understanding Trump’s documents case, because so far he’s making Snowden look like a rookie through the cunning use of stupidity. We won’t know for a hundred years what this cult has done, because all Russia and China had to do was send people Trump wanted to impress to his house. They don’t have to carry a single thing. Even if every document is accounted for, cameras that fit in pens are unquantifiable. When Aldrich Ames betrayed us to the Russians, we lost ten assets in one summer. I guarantee that Trump never had any idea that sharing information could cause all that, because he showed people those documents to seem impressive to them. He couldn’t care less if Russia or China saw military plans or lists of our assets in country, because what matters is Russia and China thinking he’s cool.
That’s what happens when you need desperately to fill up all the space in a room, constantly interrupting to make sure that the conversation is one-sided and all about his favorite topic…. Him.
I am passionate about using this platform to have a voice in politics and international affairs. I don’t claim to be an expert- far from it. But what I learn I pass on, and I’ve always been a news junkie. I don’t go a day without listening to Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow. So, this blog is not educational, but conversational. I am politically literate, but hold no authority. It’s the process that excites me, or it will if we ever get back to one set of facts. That’s because government is about compromise, and that isn’t even possible if the parties aren’t playing off the same deck. If people are determined to misunderstand you, they will. For instance, constituents vilifying the person designated to help them (Anthony Fauci, Mike Pence). The amount of Americans that believe Trump can do his job perfectly fine from prison if he’s elected boggles the mind.
From a historical perspective, it is not as baffling to me that Trump beat Clinton as it is Trump being the Republican nominee at all. How did he beat out Jeb Bush and John Kasich? Why is the loudest political voice in the country in need of a president to the right of Caligula? This time, it is the people fiddling while Rome burns and not Nero.
Apathy gets to me. Why didn’t more people care when Trump called John McCain a loser for becoming a Vietnamese POW? Why did so many people grit their teeth and vote for Trump anyway? Calling McCain a loser isn’t even in the Letterman Top Ten List of reasons why Trump was a horrible candidate, and people are still swallowing his bullshit filled capsules.
I think that too many people are embarrassed to admit they ate two slices of chocolate pie……………….
Meanwhile, it’s only our national security at stake. What could possibly go wrong?
I am just so passionate about learning how the world works. I am not particularly patriotic, though, because I see the US as part of a larger system. The same chessboard analogy used with states can be used with countries. Problems come in when you focus too heavily on one quadrant. By the time you’ve noticed there’s a problem, the game is over. Not going to lie, I still lose my shit at seeing the military in uniform and all the things that patriotic people do. It’s just that I’m not blind to colonialism or imperialism. We’ve participated in some very shady shit. So have other countries. Therefore, I do not hold the US in a godlike position, as if we should be the arbiter of all things right and good. I think it’s good for the US to finally cut the crap on believing in all that “best country in the world” bullshit. Some things, the US does really well. Some things are a shitshow, and that’s the bargain you make in any country. Some are absolutely more toxic than others, but people are adaptable and find pleasures no matter where they live. You have to focus on the positive if you can’t afford to run.
I am so passionate about bringing light into those dark recesses. I’d love to meet women and girls in the Middle East (we ride at dawn). I couldn’t do anything to help them save holding space, being in a room for the sole purpose of letting everyone else vent. Hopefully, they’d walk away feeling lighter and I’d walk away feeling less dumb.
I am passionate about not being dumb. I do not care if other people think I faked high school graduation, I want to feel within myself that I am intelligent, so I read a lot. It’s amazing how good reading novels is for learning about the world. Something you need to know this year will invariably be information you retained from a book you read in 1998, because the story might be made up, but the writing isn’t. For instance, I learned that Charlotte had a very small airport so I didn’t have to worry about a quick connection time because I read a YA novel that mentioned it about six years ago. Books contain random facts, whether the story is fictional or not.
I am passionate about stories, my own and everyone else’s. In the end, make it a good one. As I approach the second half of my life, I’d like to think I’ve got a better handle on craft, but diplomacy leaves a lot to be desired. The juxtaposition of how we own our stories is complicated and necessary. Relationships don’t survive if one partner is trying to change the other’s story, because no one can make another person do anything. By this I mean that too many people think partners are “fixer-uppers,” and people don’t change. They just don’t. People who want to change others hang in until their partners resent the hell out of them because they’re being controlled. If the controlling partner is willing to work on it, genuinely, then try. A narcissist will never want to work on it because they’ve never done anything wrong. Once a narcissist stops getting that dopamine hit from adoration, they wall off and escape to find someone new who doesn’t know what’s about to hit them.
I think that we call more people narcissists than actually exist. This is because sometimes the relationship can be fixed. Not all bad behavior means someone is a narcissist. Sometimes, they’re just lost in their own heads and not very other aware. The mark of a narcissist is the complete lack of empathy, and the lack was there before you met them. It’s generally caused by trauma, because part of a narcissist’s schtick is being able to control everything in their environment, so they create their own reality. Everyone knows that person around which people orbit. Lots of people have that ability, and it is not inherently negative. It depends on motivation. Narcissists have a desperate need to be liked, no internal validation at all, and they cover up all those significant fears with bravado. Anything they view as negative will be very loud, and that’s par for the course for everyone….. but narcissists will evade culpability by any means necessary. The reason human relationships are so difficult is that narcissists are hard to catch until their behavior is so outrageous that you feel like you’ve been yanked backward and dropped.
I have known so many of them that it’s hard to count, and here’s how I know I dodged that bullet. I want to hear people’s thoughts and feelings. I’m strong and definite in mine, but that doesn’t mean I’m emotionally unavailable. If I come across that way, it probably has nothing to do with the conversation, or I’m too angry in the moment. I am not saying that being too angry in the moment is something for which other people should make allowances. I am saying that is my work to do. Authentic rage is a symptom of PTSD, because it generally accompanies a panic attack. I am not making excuses here, only trying to provide context. I am not escaping accountability. I just think it helps to know why people do things, which is another trait most neurodivergent people share. We’re not trying to be threatening, we’re trying to understand.
Add that to the INFJ motto……. “I’m not insulting you… I’m describing you.” It seems so mean and yet I think of it all the time as profound wisdom. People do not like explaining their behavior….. which is of course the only thing the INFJ wants to help you understand. So, legit nine percent of the world is irritating as shit to everyone else. 91% of the world has trouble speaking in our love language. It’s gotten easier for me to think of love in Greek, because I like granularity and English just doesn’t have it. I now feel solid in philia and agape, but I’m preparing for romance in whatever package it arrives….. I’m just not there yet. I say I am, but I haven’t done anything about it. I don’t want to start another relationship without knowing whether Daniel is in or out, and I made the agreement with myself to give him time to chill, which is most probably just an excuse. Stay tuned.
I’m not averse to dating, clearly, but anything beyond that scares the hell out of me. Serious relationships haven’t gone the distance for me and I feel like I should figure out why before launching into something else and realizing that eight years has probably been enough soul searching. I don’t have to be perfectly perfect in every way before I consider opening my heart. It’s amazing how long I didn’t come to that realization. In retrospect, I couldn’t handle a relationship with a woman outside my beautiful girl because I felt like those things had to come in succession. Once I’d hurt one woman, I knew I was capable of hurting them all. I needed to know if I was really capable of resolving a conflict that large, because I didn’t think I deserved good things to come into my life after it. People have accused me of not being able to let go of the past, and this is untrue. I haven’t been pining away for a straight girl and lying to cover my ass. It’s a familiar story, but it’s not mine.
It just took a really long time to learn that there were limits to us being okay, and I have no ill will. Just sadness it didn’t work out. My perfect picture of us was blow your hair back conversations, nothing about the idea of being together a romantic fire, but an intellectual one. A brain dump on both sides because our life experiences are so different.
There was a beauty in it that is beyond words. We both think big thoughts, but never the same subject at the same time. If I had to sum up our relationship in one word, it would be “asynchronous.” Our upload and download speeds varied wildly.
I feel at peace being able to look at that relationship with a third person perspective and wonder what I would do if this was a story being told to me rather than one I wrote. It helps tremendously in the way I allow myself to talk to me.
It helps me to see whether it’s true that every accusation is a confession, and I believe it is. That’s because when I analyzed where my energy was going, I saw all the accusations between us and in each case, there was an instance where we could both say the same about each other, it’s just that the reasoning behind the behaviors would be different. If you’re in a relationship with someone and you’re both constantly doing the same shit to each other, you’re going to think what they’re doing can only explained by what you felt when you went through something similar, which may or may not match up with mine and defensiveness shuts down communication. You’re not really looking at a situation through the other’s perspective and trying to deal with your anger simultaneously. When you’re fighting, adrenaline makes you react out of fear instead of respond with grace. Being human sucks, because our very nature means we can’t avoid anger at each other all the time. It’s a hope for the best situation, but I always hope for that.
Hoping for the best in life is the fuel that feeds the other fires I feel in terms of gathering knowledge. Knowledge and I are in a passionate love affair, my one and only.
I am not sure there is a thing as overcoming a fear. It doesn’t get better, you just learn. For instance, asking someone out feels like having your guts rearranged, but if you’re lucky, you’ll be laughing and smiling a minute later. If not, oh well. In the past, I would have taken that rejection and sat on it forever. Now, I don’t care if people like me or not, so it doesn’t wig me out to say to someone that I’m interested. If they’re not, I’m strong enough to handle rejection. I have been alive long enough to know that not everyone vibes with me….. although people seem to be drawn to me initially. They don’t find out what a train wreck I can be until later. It’s all good, because I won’t find out they’re a train wreck immediately, either.
We all have too much fear of rejection most of the time, because what goes on in our heads is much worse than what happens in the real world…. with one exception, the only thing that scares me.
I need my e-mail and documents to be secure, because ideas are my currency. That means one of the reasons I don’t date much is that partners like going through your phone, as if it’s some medal to be earned. Slow it down, Buster Brown.
The thing around privacy is mystifying. When you are a couple, are you supposed to let people think that you’re talking to both of us all the time? That nothing you say to me stays with me? What if my friends stop confiding in me because they don’t like you? They don’t have to. I have to like you.
I also don’t want you to read anything they asked me to keep tight and you thought it was your right to snoop. I promise you that if I’m attracted to someone, you’ll know it. Probably because I’ll tell you that so you won’t miss who I’m seeing. Jealousy is not my bag, and pushes me away faster than anything else. I’m not going to bat an eye if you see heaven on earth, either.
I have a fear of dating anyone jealous, because that’s the shortest path to getting my phone held up in front of my face while I’m asleep. I should wipe it, but it’s so much hassle. That being said, only my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch have biometrics. I should just move all my sensitive stuff to my Android products and eschew obfuscation.
See? I’ve overcome a fear right here. It makes me feel safe that I really can lock everything down. Anyone I date from here on out is not part of The Five (the people that know what my alternate history is about…. possibly six if Dana has been paying attention, but I don’t know and can’t.). I don’t want anyone to read e-mail in my history, because it reflects a lot that’s just not me anymore….. and it does no good to dwell on who I wanted to be, because there’s just so many variables. I am doing my best to show up without fail so that I see these changes happening. That I am creating the life I want, rather than being satisfied with the life I have. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want people to come to me. This is perfect in that my sister does not live in DC, but works here. Lots of people work in DC, so I have more than just her that drop in on a whim.
It was a huge fear to move back to DC, because I thought, “what if I don’t fit in anymore?” It couldn’t have been further from the truth. I integrated into my house and community easily. I remember that on the first day I was here, I was sitting out on the front porch and Samantha handed me a Dr Pepper. She said, “I thought I’d bring you one since it’s probably your blood type.” I told her that it wasn’t sugar free, but that she was correct. I still drank it. Let’s not get stupid. I was running a quart low.
DC started feeding me immediately, because I didn’t have to save up money to go and do things. I’ve loaded up my tablet and keyboard, writing anywhere and everywhere. If it’s not too hot, I write outside at the zoo. If it is, I write at any of the museums, I just have to keep a hoodie in my bag. Don’t wear shorts, because you’ll get really hot outside and then walk into Siberia, where you’ll be stuck in shorts for most of what you’re going to do that day.
My favorite Smithsonian museum is the National Portrait Gallery, but I like all of them. My favorite museum overall is International Spy, and when I go, I usually get a membership because it’s the cost of four tickets and traditionally I spend hours at a time, going eight or 10 times for shorter periods, and it’s $25 a visit. Belonging to Spy is a trip, because you get access to all the stuff that goes on after hours. It’s also a tremendous resource if you’re like me, and have no problem browsing at the bookstore for an hour and a half. As I’ve said before, I’m not writing a book about spies, but people who have to become them under duress. I can’t think of a better place to go than a museum who’s already bought all those books.
It was a fear to become a museum member, because I’m quite shy and introverted. I didn’t know if I would spend enough time there to warrant getting a membership. It was a combination of forcing myself to get out of the house and wanting to meet people on a different level, brain-wise. I never felt like anyone was talking down to me, and I had a lot of stupid questions so that I could learn how to ask what I really wanted to know. I actually asked the museum if they’d start a class like that for writers, but I haven’t heard from them. I don’t know enough to teach it (Spy Jargon 101), or I’d offer to spearhead the program so that it’s done by a volunteer and not their meager resources. Yes, they do fantastic things. They’re also privately funded and don’t get government assistance TO MAKE EXHIBITS ABOUT PEOPLE THAT WORK FOR THE GOVERNMENT. Ironic.
If I had time, I’d stop by and see some of Jonna and Tony’s masks before I head to DCA. They give me strength when I don’t have it. I just stare at them and think, “if they got up and did what they did, where’s my excuse?” It has to stop being that I’m afraid, because I am afraid of nearly everything.
It’s why I’m the president of overthinker’s anonymous, why I spill out possibilities regarding problems and solutions…. anything to make it where I have a roadmap because I’m so likely to be distracted. I have a concrete need to know what’s going to happen, because I feel so adrift at times. It’s never a good time for a grandparent to die, but I do feel lucky in that I’ll get to see my family in person for a few days (tomorrow through Friday unless plans change).
What I know for sure is that my grandfather’s house is not near Houston. We’ll have a road trip ahead of us- at least five hours each way. That is premium time just to talk and laugh, road tripping because of sadness, but also the fact that we’ll get to see family we haven’t seen in a long time. I tend to focus on laughs and togetherness when it comes to funerals, because what else are you supposed to do? Even when my mother died at 65 and was robbed of getting to live out a long life, I still focused on the fact that I hadn’t seen my cousins in years. It kept me upright.
The fact that my mother died so young created another fear in me…. that someone would die before I got to tell them something. It made me ramble on in e-mail without taking into account how long they were. I’m sorry to people who don’t communicate like that, but I figure if I put everything in a letter, everything you need from me is probably in there somewhere. I tend to use conversations to clarify. It’s irritating as shit to some people, so I generally ask if people like e-mail before I send them. I warn them that I’ll talk about anything and everything, and so can they.
But it’s a fear that people are just being nice, and therefore I try to get together with people as often as I can. I have a better gauge of the situation, I’m not unloading information that no one needs, even if I think they do.
It’s a fear to write to other people now that this Internet relationship has just gone so wrong. Am I setting myself up for the same rabbit hole? Have I learned enough to be able to handle e-mail responsibly and not get upset and reply without thinking?
Had I thought about it, I would have said something like, “I can see that you’re going through a lot, and have for months. I don’t want to do anything that takes away from your life, only things that add to it. I really do understand your point of view, and have so much empathy for it that I’m hurting for you.” I was too angry to respond and I did it, anyway. I think the outcome would have been the same, though, because it was so clear to me that I didn’t have a place in her life that I didn’t feel like spending more energy and attention. That I could be happy with bread crumbs, or I could take that energy and use it on someone else….. because her breadcrumbs were my morning coffee. I was seeing her emotions through my filter, because she didn’t give me any.
I don’t know why. I didn’t ask why. She said something about not fitting into the mold of friend I’d made for her, and I could only agree. It was based on times past, not times present. That made the present too hard and hurt too much. I’m not even sure she remembers who she was to me anymore, or if it even matters. What attracted her to me was great writing, and, in the end, repelled her. I hope she’ll go back and read in five years….. that maybe something will jump out at her that didn’t before. I need her to see what a mutual admiration society we had, and how I never lost my awe of her, but hers of me was gone and I had a complex about it because I knew exactly when it had gone and why it would never reappear. I wasn’t dumb about this, just too full of hope. She must have been, too, because she tried so hard. We just couldn’t make it gel, and I have to believe that I was right to step back, because I needed to take care of me. I needed to lick my wounds. Every elephant in DC knows how wrecked I am, and they are sympathetic. My bees are flat getting tired of me, but they’re the ones that need to hear all this. They live on gossip, and right now I’m pathetic. I have given them more tea than they can possibly carry…… but they can hear all the things that no one else can. I imagine that they’re flying between our houses, so I tell them to tell her she is loved. That way, I don’t walk around feeling anything except relief that the situation is bad, but it won’t get worse.
I feel extraordinarily selfish and wonder what I should have done instead, because I know it’s not what actually happened. I couldn’t live with three words a month (in its extreme), and she couldn’t live with pages and pages that she thought were telling her how bad I thought she was, when nothing has ever been less true. I thought the sun came out because she was smiling, not the other way around.
I didn’t like being blown off by someone I valued so much, and not knowing whether that’s the message she intended to send…. that blowing each other off was who were now. You would just have to see what happened on Day One to see why Years Three Through 10 were so problematic. It couldn’t have been fun dealing with me, because I hated it, too. We saw each other at our worst, and clawed back up…. just not to where it was solid enough that I could say things like “I have one of those. Lemme drop it in the mail for you.” “I’m headed to Chuy’s. You guys need emergency burritos or anything?”
No one should ever turn down an emergency burrito.
I never actually said those things, just once offered to take her to a thing and realized two others. The first is that I’d accidentally offered to take her to a Mother’s Day event and she has actual children. I don’t, and my mom is dead, so I spaced it. The second is that I realized I shouldn’t be THAT nervous, and I was. By then we’d known each other for years and years. We’d supposedly worked through all our shit. I told her the ball was in her court, and it was 2017 or 18. It’s not something I put a whole lot of stock in, because our relationship has always been virtual on purpose. How do you talk to anyone about anything? Make it where there’s no time constraints. Facebook Messenger was just as real as Skype, and back then I couldn’t just hit a button in Messenger to bring up calling. We were our real selves, and ghosts of ourselves all at once. I think that because reading her e-mails and looking at her picture brings her presence close, but of course it is not the same as being outside on a restaurant patio with frozen margaritas on the way.
Therefore, it’s a fear to write blog entries as well as letters, because I come off great at first. People keep up with me no matter what………… Keeping someone close to me is hard. I seem to have a learning curve of which I am completely unaware. Getting to know an author is tricky, even if you like them. We don’t like us very much, so good luck. 😉
So, there was the pull of having that experience with her, but no passion or drive toward it. Just a “wouldn’t it be nice?” picture floating by. In fact, it didn’t even become important until recently, because I realized that the patterns we used to talk to each other wouldn’t change unless we changed mediums. We need to prove to the other one that we aren’t scary, because that’s what happens when you’ve known someone for ten years and not at all. It’s hard to know how to grieve someone you’ve loved a hundred and crazy percent for a decade, and yet can’t tell you where she keeps her cutting boards. I opened up, and didn’t. She doesn’t know where my cutting boards are, either, but I do know enough to know that her best outcome would be never knowing that. I am not being mean, it’s just that she doesn’t like to cook enough to make that fact worth remembering. She would rather read about the things I cook, if that were a thing I wrote about. People keep telling me to put up recipes. I don’t do that. I look at your pantry and decide what the recipe is on the fly.
I have been told I could get a lot of readers by putting up recipes, and to me, that is the “live, laugh, love” of blogging.
Speaking of writing and drawing people in, that’s a fear as well. I am terrified of success, because every time I’ve managed it, I’ve torn it down out of sheer unpreparedness for life. I barely manage without a partner, and yet I’m still alive….. mostly because I’ve spent so long telling myself that I can be independent, and finding out that ain’t necessarily so.
I am coming to terms with significant fears about my mental and physical health, that I’m not doing so hot on either plane and don’t yet know what it will take to fix it. Nothing is so horrible that it needs attention tonight, I’m just saying. I have a lot of appointments to sit through in which I try not to get worried as we run the numbers on treatment. Some of it isn’t even treatment. I just need to join a gym. No one would say that I needed to lose weight, even me, but I have specific needs in a trainer. I need to strengthen all the muscles that control balance.
My fear touches a little bit of everything, and I am trying to get stronger day by day. It sometimes feels as if I have a mountain to climb and no boots, but I’ll get there one way or another. I do have a spirit that leans into the divine, so right this moment it’s all about letting mystery guide me rather than fear. I want to see where I’m going, without being so impatient to get there that I repeat the same mistakes.
And now we’ve arrived at my biggest fear…. that I will stay the same.
Having a sous with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God’s great gifts. -Anthony Bourdain
Everything I know about love, I’ve learned through cooking. That’s because my relationship with Dana was very much chef and sous, without the hierarchy. We cooked at home the same way we cooked at work. “You put ’em down, I’ll pick ’em up.” I relied on her technical expertise and soaked it up like a sponge. She learned that when I said I could fix something, she could take that check to the bank and cash it. Instead of just serving me things, she asked for my input. It meant the world to me, because who even am I in the kitchen? I’ve never been to culinary school. My absolute and total belief that she was the chef made communication in the kitchen so easy, because Dana didn’t have an ego and yet there was a line, like Leo being Jed’s best friend and his Chief of Staff. He wasn’t the president, and he knew it.
Our home life fed our work life and vice versa. I couldn’t wait to be in the kitchen with her every day, and that communication made us closer in that if we could communicate under that much pressure, we could talk through anything. It gave us emotional bravery because we were pushing ourselves so hard physically…. especially me, and I’m not in it for the pity vote. It’s just that *everything* in a restaurant is heavy and she could do most things faster and easier than I could. She had more muscle mass. I lifted a lot of things that were too heavy for me, and I will be in awe forever of the memory in which Dana carries a 50 pound bag of flour down a rickety set of steps. The hardest part was not hurting myself in the kitchen. It was watching her in pain. Therefore, my heart stopped for a second at the danger of what she was doing. Then I realized how strong she was.
And if she fell, she’d have a much better survival rate than I ever would have, because I’d have tripped over nothing in the first place. It’s a miracle I didn’t die, especially during a shift, I just couldn’t lift 50 pounds while I was afraid of the stairs that rode the line between step and ladder. Because I have no peripheral vision, the only thing that happened to me that made me afraid was backing down the stairs into a stock pot of cold oil- I couldn’t see it, so I stepped into it up to my shin.
I couldn’t believe what a patient teacher she was, and I’d like to believe I was a good student. I may have gotten a job on Dana’s word, but I kept it. I just couldn’t always be on my A game because my physical limitations show there more than everywhere else. Why wouldn’t they? Cooking combines balance, timing, depth perception (particularly in plating). I had to keep track of all that and sometimes my body rebelled.
I’m proud of what we accomplished together, because combined we had a well-rounded chef. One with both a great palate and technique.
Now that I’m not married to a chef anymore, I’m not saying I want to be with another one. I don’t know what my future partner will do for money. But what I know is that they’ll have the heart of a chef. They’ll either be great cooks or willing to learn how from me. That’s because closeness comes through activity, and life happens when you’re doing something else.
I need someone not afraid to try new things, who doesn’t have hangups about a particular ingredient before they try it. I need someone who is bold and brave in their choices as to how they do life. By this, I mean that they need to have enough confidence to admit when things are wrong and how they contributed to a problem. To be vulnerable with someone is the hardest thing on earth.
When you find that person, it makes you explode on the inside. Everything looks new, even if you’ve been in love a thousand times. When your brain comes down, you think about consequences and how much you’re willing to open up based on what’s happened before the relationship started. You use heuristics to say that what one person is going to do, they all are. That comes out both in very positive and negative ways.
As an INFJ, my inner landscape is huge. I let people in, and walk away from people that are frightened by it. My mind is a very busy place, and to be let in is a privilege. I don’t trust easily, and because I’ve been hurt before, I’m not as approachable as I’d like to be. I walk as if I’m in pain and don’t want to be bothered, and I can’t find a lie.
In terms of learning about love in other ways, my beautiful girl invested so much in me that I couldn’t help it. My brain flooded at all the dopamine, because I heard a message that I hadn’t heard in a long time. That what I bring to the world is valuable, and keep going. Looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.
When my mind stopped turning a deep, platonic love into something the relationship would never sustain, I realized that even though I had been in love with her and it sucked ass carrying around all that emotion, there was no part of me that wanted to reject her. I often did when I was angry, but I was never alone in doing so. That’s because we’re a little too much alike. First children can be assholes to each other because they’re used to being the authority on everything.
She has the heart of a chef, but her passion is for different things that line up with the thousands I share. We do such different things that even if we lived a mile from each other, our lives would never cross over unless it was on purpose. We’re both introverted. Good luck. I think she’s less shy than I am, but we both have social batteries that drain vs. shyness in meeting anyone. We both think a group of people is called a “no, thanks.”
So, sufficed to say, I thought I’d found a lifemate, but not in terms of romance. My personality profile says that I only have one or two really close friends at a time because I’d rather be deeply intimate with them rather than having surface level friendships with a lot of people. It has been true my whole life. God forbid I be at a party, just having fun and not talking about anything of importance and enjoying the moment.
No, I am knee deep into all sorts of things, very few that were outside my beautiful girl’s wheelhouse. I wanted to soak up her knowledge for all time, because she cares about the same issues I do.
And yet, we fought like cats and dogs because she was everything my personality profile said I’d get, that I’d find someone willing to walk in my inner landscape with me. Why that side of me, the one that felt hurt and rejected won, I’ll never know. Why didn’t I just let it lie and stop responding? She gave me things to think about that will turn over forever in my brain. Why give that up?
It was easy when I realized that we’d never get back what we had, and I was too crushed by it. She didn’t deserve to know how I felt about her anymore, because clearly it didn’t mean as much to her as it meant to me. The reason it took eight years is that she did things that touched me deeply…. that even though there was no going back, we could move forward.
As long as we didn’t have to talk about what did happen, and it was making her reactions all the more muddled…. loving and also reinforcing the idea that I was intruding on her life rather than adding to it. Those words aren’t easily forgotten, and she said them. I just don’t know if she meant them. Was her response actually protective when it came across as angry? Why did I feel so defensive and afraid? Because I’d wronged her. She didn’t hang it over my head, but she didn’t solidify anything, either. That choice didn’t bother her, but it made me ruminate on what she actually wanted from me for far longer and with more intensity than I should have ever given it. I should have walked away sooner to protect both of us, but I didn’t because I wanted the question of how to move forward out of the way. How to navigate spiraling out because as much as we reject each other, it’s not really possible to disconnect now. We are both in each other’s minds and hearts but in different ways and for different reasons.
So, whether she shows up or not, I have to be there for myself. I have to offer myself the relief I was seeking, because relief is the only thing I wanted from her that I didn’t get. That’s why it was too painful to continue the relationship on a surface level. Not talking about the real thing led to superficial snarks, real and perceived.
So, there’s a lot in me that’s fighting right now with what is real and what isn’t. How much I should believe based on what I saw and not what I heard, because maybe I missed what she was trying to say in favor of thinking I was right. I also have defensive mechanisms and a stunning need to be correct. Thinking about it now makes me laugh, because none of our younger siblings would believe the lengths we’d go to in order to prove each other wrong because it’s good to be the king.
I feel deeply about every win and loss, because no matter the outcome, I screamed with empathy. It hurt more to watch her in pain than it did to be in pain myself, and 90% of the time I caused pain because I’d stepped on a land mine thought to be dormant. The other 10% was in reaction to feeling completely dressed down and unable to express my point in a way that had merit. I’m not the person that always has to be right in most cases. It depends on what I know about the subject, and I will defer to the smartest person in the room, always. But what do you do if your subject matter expert doesn’t think the same thing about you, or expresses that? What I mean by that is the people in your life not yielding to you at least part of the time. No one is ever wrong to the point there is no redeeming quality about them a hundred percent of the time. There is no relationship where one person knows everything and the other person is absolutely brainless and never has better sources and methods than you.
I will never in my lifetime have a conflict with someone in which I don’t have to own consequences, so I expect other people to feel the same way. I write to people privately the same way I write here- which is to say that I look at every possible combination of factors that could be going into someone’s behavior. I clearly express my 3D opinion, which is that I love you, but that doesn’t mean we don’t got shit to do.
When the response is rejection, trauma kicks in. It’s my job to stop. I can’t throw around words the way I have. I don’t judge people, I judge whether situations are fair. Just how long I’ve been feeling defensive because I spoke in a quiet voice and was ignored. How that builds up and my voice gets louder. I need to know why I’m doing it in order to change, and I can point fingers, but only for comprehension to understand the pain’s source. I cannot blame other people for my reactions, and I will not allow people to think that theirs are more important than mine. Different and equally valid.
Most of the time, I don’t understand the charge I’m leading because I don’t think the way a neurotypical person thinks. My filters are different, and the symptoms are akin to Asperger’s. I don’t process emotion like most people, so I don’t always know what to say in a way that doesn’t make them upset because I simply wasn’t thinking about it. My brain doesn’t say “you can’t say that.” Where my empath kicks in is seeing when I’ve caused a negative reaction, mostly because my calculations are foreign. I’m not running on the same operating system. There are no “things we don’t talk about.” That’s because every instinct in my body says that being vulnerable is the key to being strong. That it takes more courage to tell people how you feel when you are terrified of rejection. It takes courage to have an opinion, a right I’ve denied myself for far too long. That’s because when I began to have opinions, I rocked the boat to the point I thought I wouldn’t survive all the upheaval. That I had to fight this mental battle with my health so that I’d have enough energy to also self-soothe.
I didn’t want to continue a relationship where I thought I’d found Richard from Texas and she’d found Groceries. That’s because I made it where it didn’t feel that way and couldn’t get enough confidence in myself to give me any slack at all. I knew that my brain chemicals were beyond FUBAR and didn’t retreat the way I should have.
And exactly none of that turned down all the warmth I felt when I thought of her, not a fire in the belly but a day at the beach. I will feel that every time I think of her, which is how I know there’s no set of circumstances in which I’d refuse anything she wanted. It wasn’t a little deal to me that nothing felt solid, and the inconsistency drew me into myself. I was trapped in this cycle of believing that everything was fine and she hated me and yet still somehow tolerated my presence. Say that sentence all in one breath and you’ll get close to how I felt when you’re winded.
At the same time, I wasn’t always good about letting her know that I was thinking of her feelings because I talked about them, but she never talked about mine. Over time, I realized that my emotions didn’t cause much in her when I felt like Elvis had left the building, awakened out of a stupor caused by awe. When you love someone, aren’t both of those things true? That you can grieve what is lost and enjoy what you had simultaneously, because love and conflict live in the same house?
But if the only thing I can be counted on is saying we’re done and not done, I won’t waffle. That’s because I showed up for every holiday for nine years and wrote to her every day. For nine years. Pretty sure I can be counted on for more than a political point. When I said that it was over, we both had steam in our ears by then. I had no guidance in how much I should feel, so my attention never wavered from the first time we had a conversation. It should have been different. I should have known she was sharing my words with other people because she should have told me she was going to do it rather than telling me after it had been done. I don’t care about her sharing my blog entries, but my letters are another matter. Who knows what went on between her and the people who read them? I ruminated on that for years, because she’d said to keep things tight from everyone, and never said she wouldn’t.
I can’t do that. I can’t face a firing squad over what I’ve written, and neither can she. Neither one of us would want to walk into a room knowing that everyone there knew what we’d said, which meant that integrating our lives would have been difficult. I just would have had to sit through a lot more uncomfortable conversations because I haven’t said shit to anyone. She has a clean slate all day, every day. I do not.
He’s never known it, but I think about her husband all the time. Why wouldn’t I both love and fear him? How would I know how he felt in all of this? When can I stop shaming myself for it?
I am not pushing my memories with her away. I am letting them come and visit me in my dreams, her words pouring thoughts into my head that made me feel stronger and smaller than I ever had. But her words didn’t do it all. My reactions were often poor because my self image was so destroyed.
I do think that I’ve gotten a peace of mind that hasn’t been with me in a long time. I didn’t want to be selfish, and I waited until I was so defeated that I just slunk off into the night. That’s because she laid out everything on her plate and I couldn’t take it. I’d already spent years thinking of everything on her plate and knew there was no universe in which any one of my problems could compare. I didn’t get impatient until we’d been tearing at each other for almost a decade. I don’t know what created that push/pull…. that we could say it was over like that and sign up for more.
I think it can be chalked up to our different approaches to everything, but I never knew when she was going to see a change as positive or suspicious. When she felt attacked, she attacked me. Sometimes, I was stable enough to say “no, that’s not what I meant,” and sometimes her reaction was so fiery that it engaged my escalation mode. In fact, the last exchange we had started with “I don’t want to fight about this.” It ended with her feeling like she had to delay reading my e-mails because they brought on guilt and shame when none was meant. I am not responsible for that guilt and shame. I am only responsible for communicating my needs and hoping that they create a desired reaction because my happiness is just as important as theirs. When her response was to go find other friends, I did. I would like to believe that she popped off as much as I did, because she knows I know everything in that letter intimately. That no obligation of hers went unnoticed to me. I couldn’t believe she thought she needed to spell all that out as if I hadn’t noticed. I’d been drowning in it. I knew I was last priority, I knew why, and I couldn’t make anything better.
If I’d been the sort of person that compartmentalizes emotion, we would be in any of the situations we are now, because I could have just laid back and enjoyed having a friend that was smarter than me.
But I didn’t. I walked around hurt too much of the time, not because of how she felt about me; it was all about my emotions. The guilt and shame that was above me dripping down. I can’t speak for my beautiful girl, but it seemed like something was brewing on her end that read similar. My emotions were too big, and I knew it. I didn’t know how to tamp them down properly, and I never will. Someday a neurotypical can tell me what that’s like.
Right now, I’m just trying to turn my attention, living around this loss instead of kicking it out. Dealing with it while it’s happening so it doesn’t come up later. It’s important to me to have a verbal tapestry of our history, because even if I never get what I want again I still want to remember when I had it.
I want to cry out all the pain, and relive all those laughs. The fact that I look at this whole experience together makes me invincible, that I am not swayed into “it was always bad” or “it was always good.”
I didn’t handle it with power, grace, or style. But I felt it all, all the time. What kept me going was the heart of a chef, that the same give and take I had with food was there with all relationships…. that all of them were a balance of clutch and gas.
This blog is the beginning. I have to remember that it is not my end goal. It is building an audience, slowly but surely, for people who actually would like to see something out of me that’s not a complete mess. Plenty of people would buy it just to make sure it was finished.
The urge to blog is relentless because you and I are always talking. I say too much because I need it, not you…. And yet, you’re an amazingly kind and tolerant audience for something I thought would be maybe three people and a few cats.
It’s funny how I got the idea to blog. At first, it was writing letters to the woman who abused me, because I thought I had to think big thoughts to keep someone older interested in my little musings… When I started Clever Title, I thought of her as my blog before I could type……… but it was the same style. Just lay out all my crap, see what sticks. Her lines are housed in my head (though no longer enshrined) to this day, the few genuine moments I remember. Those words will stay between us, but they explain explicitly how a young writer could fall in love with another’s work. The way she writes is more flowery than she talks, but more direct because there’s no one in front of her. The words are smaller and carry more weight. Clearly there was something there besides us both being queer. We were both young musicians, exploring the world in secret…. And each other, but only to the extent that nothing was off the table in terms of what I could and couldn’t say. My letters ran the same gamut as five years’ worth of entries.
My second biggest influence was Doogie Howser, MD.
I wish I’d had the self-deprecating meme back then that I did with my beautiful girl…. “Sending you six unrelated texts in a row is my love language, and I’m so sorry….” She was my blog within a blog, because she read everything I can’t show you. She was the one who listened as I floundered around on every topic imaginable in order to discover how I felt to the point I could write about it. For people who garden as writers, we are discovering the plot as we go along. We don’t make an architecture. Therefore, this blog-within-a-blog was the very beginning of crafting an idea. Before I can write about it here, I have to let the raw emotions fall on the page.
What I am finding is that I was so shaken up by the experience that I thought because I’d wronged one woman, I didn’t deserve any of them until I could truly make amends with her. I wanted her to stop being sorry that she chose me to be her confidante, and I think she was trying to tell me that she was sorry for opening up to me for different reasons, but I only saw rejection and pain. So, whether I tornadoed this relationship or she did is up for grabs, because I couldn’t tell from one day to the next how she felt. It was always precarious, and I didn’t like that anxiety at all. I was given the choice- live with that anxiety or don’t. My grief is unlearning that pattern. I had gotten so used to uncertainty. I had gotten so used to not knowing because it was all my fault we were in this mess to begin with.
Not being able to move on was not about being so blindly in love with another’s letters that I was ignoring my own life… although I can see how someone would get there. It was that I was suffering under the weight of all my guilt because things would get better and worse at such a rapid pace. If my narrative was wrong, I wanted her to lay out all those feelings and let me respond to them. Let me hear what really went on in her mind so that I can take it in, bless it, and release it. So that I can clear up any misconceptions. I can explain where I absolutely was not trying to guilt her, telling her what she had nothing to feel guilty about. In fact, all I ever wanted her to do was to look at my letters as if they had more to say than she should feel guilty.
For almost ten years of my life, I got to be a part of someone’s life that I desperately needed to meet. I regret all of the bad and celebrate all of the good. Nothing in my life matters more than the gifts she gave me of self confidence and belief in my own intelligence. I have managed to fool her into believing that I am smart, and somehow she made me believe it, too. I also know that I am wrapped into her equally wild and crazy mind, but what was too painful not to know was whether she still felt the same way about me.
I don’t know why I didn’t just say “what exactly are you regretting here?”
Actually. Yes, I do.
I didn’t ask, because I was afraid of the answer.
I knew what it would be because I was focusing on what I’d done rather than what she said. However, it wasn’t all beating myself up. It was getting mixed signals that were probably caused by not normalizing having conversations on the phone or in person so that when I was reading, I heard her voice instead of the one I made up for her in my head. I also didn’t make enough effort to hear her when she did emote, because I didn’t lift myself out of the situation long enough to be able to tell her that she was focusing on the wrong thing and so was I.
Neither one of us were very good at saying when something made us feel loved and when something made us want to stab each other with a fork…. We’d both hold it in fearing the other’s reaction. I’d finally get tired of sidestepping something and then all hell broke loose. It seemed like the thing that attracted her to me was the thing that repelled me the most over time…. Being able to communicate on the Internet and yet….. not.
I think it’s because we had different ways of being in this relationship, not due to us actually wanting harm for the other. We both spoke to each other in our own love languages, disappointed when the other didn’t respond the way they’d hoped. It wasn’t manipulation on either of our parts; I think it was just plain frustration because when we thought we were winning, we were behind. I never got the message in terms of how our relationship needed to change, because I was all in and I didn’t know if she was or she wasn’t. She wouldn’t set new boundaries, new rules of engagement so all topics of conversation were so hit or miss I didn’t know where I stood. Perhaps I overfocused on the negative responses and there’s a lot I’ve missed…. But I’ll never know whether I did or not because I couldn’t sit there long enough to wonder anymore. What is real? What is in my head? What can I expect from you? What do you expect from me?
As I told her, “I am not trying to take a plate that’s been smashed into a million pieces and make it look like it never broke. I am trying to work with you to mold new glass.” The cord connecting us to each other was massive because there were no constraints and no context.
I got tired of wondering what I could do better because I’d already laid myself bare in as many ways as I could, and none of it was coming across in the way that I meant it. I spent so much energy trying to figure out what I could say and how that I lost sight of the big picture. I needed her forgiveness in a very solid and concrete way.
I needed to know that I was worth meeting, not because I am perfect and need to be gladhanded, but that forgiveness is real with no lingering aftereffects. For her, that forgiveness was given on the surface, and it was murky whether it was real or not because even though we were still interacting, the tape that I was worth nothing to her wouldn’t leave me alone.
I realized no relationship was worth that much in self esteem, because it was dependent on whether I thought I was good enough for her or not. Who cares whether I thought I was good enough for me? Hadn’t I already proved I wasn’t worth anything?
How I conflated not being worth her time with self worth is not new or interesting. I ended the longest relationship with anyone in my adult life because I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts. I’d constantly think of ways to explain something that only served to make her feel worse, when I was trying to solve a problem, not create one.
It was a weight I could no longer carry, because living on wishes was not nutritionally filling. Neither is grieving someone that I thought I knew well, and also never met. The realest thing in my life, and also the most precarious.
“Hope is a thing with feathers,” but no one talks about how extraordinarily difficult a thing it is to get off the ground. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into that hope. I wrestled it like Jacob, and my hip is permanently disfigured.
The belief in this message of hope is that I tried the best I could, and I’m sure she did, too. Being able to communicate is a rare and beautiful thing; in this case, we never relearned each other. I know I missed a lot and am personally responsible for the initial break. Feeling the weight of that pain and embarrassment consistently undid me.
I am having dreams about what I wish would have happened, because it moves the story along with a natural denouement instead of a lens cap. The thing that keeps reappearing is that moment. The one where the other becomes real…. A handshake to anchor us so that finally, we are facing each other.
And I’d get to say, after almost ten years, “Hi. I’m Leslie.”
The title comes from “Kitchen Confidential,” the Anthony Bourdain expose that set The New Yorker and then the world on fire. It’s how he describes the brigade, and how I use social media. Many people do not think of this when it comes to me, but it’s easier for people who aren’t neurotypical (ADHD, Autism in particular) to connect on the internet because we have enough clinical separation to express our emotions. In public there is no delete key. You have the option to go back and erase your angry paragraph, and it’s a damn shame most people don’t use it. Intellectuals are caught between two ideas…. the internet is a place of wonder because we can share so much knowledge, and the person who decided everyone should be on the Internet should be handed their ass on a platter.
Even the way I use social media comes from a different place than most people. I helped power the Internet. I was one of the first account administrators in the nation for distance learning. I helped professors take their offline courses and turn it into media content before anyone really knew how to do that. It was 1999. I was part of the team that wrote copy for the Information Technology Daily News at University of Houston, our journalism club of three or four depending. This was 2000. In 1999 was when I started learning unix, Linux, and VMS/VAX (yes. I had an account on jetson. Touch me. Inside joke, talk to your parents.). I can tell you why I thought Fedora was difficult and Debian wasn’t. I have slowly turned into a curmudgeon who doesn’t want to learn CentOS because I’ve picked a team. It doesn’t limit me in any way. Debian (Ubuntu) in some form is the most popular distribution. I chose the underdog (for the time) and I was right. That means something to me.
I was on IRC. I know the reasons behind what you think is funny. I was an early adopter. I can’t keep up now, but I was part of the wave of people who did it first. I read Slashdot and Kottke religiously. It’s one of the reasons I’m hardcore pro-Finland. Anyone who can produce a programmer like Linus Torvalds is okay in my book. The only thing we disagree on is desktop. I like Cinnamon and Mate (like the tea), he likes KDE. It’s all the same shell, the commands like you’d use in DOS. I don’t care if you don’t want to know computers and just want to click a button. I can launch programs as fast as I can think on a keyboard. It’s only now that I’m beginning to be irritated by it in the general sense of going the Microsoft route and choosing the option that launches slowest for everyone if you don’t have the newest and fastest computer. It used to be the best way to put life into old hardware, but you don’t know that unless you’re willing to do the deep dive on which desktops hog memory (KDE, anything but vanilla Gnome) and which ones don’t (Mate, lxde). It’s too much work. What I don’t like is that the alternative only has one desktop, so if you’re a DOS person, Windows is irritating as shit and there’s nothing you can do about it, die mad.
I don’t like being handheld through goddamn everything and not being able to turn it off without installing hacks like OpenShell. It replaces the whole Windows 10 interface with something more reasonable, like easy access admin tools and turning on old school Explorer. In linux, I am free to wipe my entire computer if I wish… while I’m still on it. I just can’t reboot. 😛 In the beginning, everyone was like “fuck it. They’ll rebuild. Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.” So, whenever Windows trys to configure things for me I feel murderous toward every single Microsoft employee who ever lived, even though 2000 was great because there was so little difference between running a web server that I could afford to be operating system agnostic. Every OS sucks, it just sucks according to your personal definition of what would make things easier… a phrase with many transitive properties.
With Windows, I’m in the place where I can’t afford to go bigger, so I have one drive dedicated to it because I like older games like Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas. I know they’re all Bethesda games, but that’s just a coincidence. I liked Fallout 3 because I could navigate without a map. It was a smaller version of DC, I just had to learn quirks instead of directions. My brother-in-law introduced me to Skyrim, but Oblivion wrecked me. The priest as Christ writ large in Bethesda-speak. The Lone Wanderer is also a Christ figure, so that’s probably why I love the game so much. I can think about that world in terms of what’s best for it without thinking of my own problems, translating interactions between personal and in-game. Communication is therefore a two-way street because it informs me about my real life, this creation of who I wish I was. I have never played an evil character. I have tried so many times just to see what would happen, and I have rejection sensitivity disorder and can’t go there. Watching people actively hate me is bad enough in real life. I choose to live in the real world instead of being the characters’ god. I use cheat codes in everything because I just want to see the story, choosing to act like an intelligence officer instead of killing everything I see. In Skyrim, I use the invisibility spells and potions more than anything else so I can steal what I need before I get unalived.
Here is the one commandmant in Skyrim that should not be ignored under any circumstances. Do not kill a chicken.
Here’s what I won’t do. I won’t kill the other Christ figure in Skyrim, a dragon, either. I have never even watched the video. I have never blown up an entire city in Fallout 3 just to see what would happen, getting to rule the violent Capital Wasteland with even bigger violence to keep things calm. Even in a video game, I can’t be that mean… unless someone starts a fight with me. I will damn sure finish it.
I have a very loyal personality, with teeth and claws. No one in my inner circle would dispute this.
I think that where I get the most hung up is with friendships with women, because to be a woman is to be a fixer/pleaser who serves at her husband’s pleasure, according to the men that wrote the system we live under today. Therefore, because I know what I want and say it, I come across as demanding. In reality they could have asked me for anything, they just don’t, and not because they don’t want it. They’ve been taught not to want anything.
I can give what I require, and asking for it doesn’t require getting it. I just might not come to you again. I also don’t realize I’m asking too much if you don’t tell me that and instead, expect that I think you’ll be what I need you to be at all times with no thought for your needs at all. In a way, that is true. I am not reading your mind and thinking of all the things in it. I am calculating my responses based on what you need, and trying to figure out how we can help each other with the least amount of effort so that neither one of us feels put-upon. We’re a team.
So whether you think I’m the holy or the moly is generally dependent on your ability to tell me what you want, because I tried for so many years to read minds and I am, in fact, terrible at it. I have had too many relationships with Type A ballbreaking bitches (in a good way, truly) on purpose not to accomplish two things… feeling totally run over in most conflicts and learning how to stand up for myself, but only after everything else didn’t work. I have managed to pick the wrong tack in most relationships, because I had and continue to struggle with rejection sensitivity disorder. Over time, the symptoms have changed. At first, it was feeling like I needed to do everything someone said to keep them happy so that I didn’t get rejected. Now, it’s shutting down emotionally and not creating new relationships so that I don’t have to worry whether someone is happy or not. My world doesn’t break apart when someone is (generally rightfully) angry with me. I either push someone away first so that the story can’t be that they left, or won’t open up at all without significant evidence that I am wanted.
I am also hugely capable of telling you what my love language is so that if you want to say something, I’ll hear it. I don’t like walking-the-tightrope anxiety in trying to figure out if something is up and when conflict is going to hit so that I can prepare for every eventuality. I am an INFJ. If there is conflict between us, it causes me physical pain. My emotions are large and I am not medicating them away as much (I still take them; just different doses). Too much serotonin and I’m not really in touch with me anymore. We just chat at the office.
I’ve been this angry the whole time. I’ve been furious since I was born, because I have not lived a moment of my life without trauma. My mother said I cried all the way through physical therapy when I was a baby and I wish I could tell her that history repeated itself when I hurt my back a couple years ago. Again. Not one moment of my life has gone without me being physically or mentally seething with rage at myself.
I had a college doc say that he’d really never seen anyone with self-esteem this low… and that wasn’t after a session. That’s after I took an electronically graded personality inventory.
Now, it’s time to take that information and figure out why, letting myself feel the anger and process it out so that I’m not constantly a time bomb. I self destruct so easily it’s like a magic trick, because I cannot navigate the system as female, queer, and physically disabled. This is not to say that I am incompetent. This is to say that my voice isn’t as loud as others. They get what they need without asking because the system is built for people who already fit in that box…. which is white, cis, and straight (most of the time).
It is hard to be a person that wants to change something and is routinely ignored. This is micro and macro. Everything from speaking my love language to minorities in the system in general.
Personally, speaking my love language is not giving me gifts. They’re great, but I’d rather hear about your emotions. If we are in conflict and you send a gift, it’s not that it doesn’t matter. I just won’t connect those two things and automatically infer what you were trying to say. In my world, only the words “I’m sorry” actually mean you are. If you treat me differently after a conflict than you did before, I’m going to sense it before you even say anything because I’m excellent at reading body language. I’m good at inferring things from text…. and you can only push me away emotionally so many times before I decide that when you say fuck off, you mean it.
Equally easy to let go when you’re the one I go to with issues, but you’re not the one who comes to me. I don’t divine problems, but I feel when there is one. For instance, saying that you’re exhausted by what I need when you’ve never given me a chance to refill your energy stores so it doesn’t feel like that. If you handle conflict by saying “I’ll deal with this on my own,” how am I supposed to know that I’m doing anything wrong?
Additionally, freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. This is with all my friends, including you (plural). I don’t think I’m untouchable. I think I’m being honest about what is true according to the filters in my brain. It is entirely subjective and doesn’t take into consideration anyone else’s feelings because I assume that if you have a problem with me, you’ll say what it is and we’ll work it out.
By far the biggest reason that I won’t work things out (generally) is when we are in conflict and I have heard you, but I don’t agree with you. Generally, when people disagree with me, they turn very pedantic. There are many things I need explained to me like I’m five, but emotions aren’t one of them. I’ve been feeling the emotions of the whole world since I was born. The dark side that no one will tell you is that INFJs are very, very prone to addiction, because they’re trying to numb out everyone else’s feelings. I absolutely feel your emotions that deep, I’ve just learned how to handle it (most of the time). Handling it comes from saying the thing I’m most afraid to say, because when I set boundaries, other people do, too.
It’s a negotiation, unless I feel that the conversation will end with only you being happy because I gave up everything. I know what that looks like and I become a shell of myself. I will become frightened of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, breathing the wrong way. I will bleed internally so you don’t have to, which has been great for my partners over the years because they never had to figure out how they felt about anything.
That is doubly problematic in close female relationships, because both halves of the relationship do the same thing to each other unto time immemorial.
“Being Loud on the Internet” is just my way of having a voice. Spilling out how I feel about relationships so that hopefully it accomplishes healing my flaws and failures while pointing you in the right direction of finding yours. I don’t need you to try and make me happy. I need you to make you happy so that we can stand in each other’s stage lights.
I have an international audience, so trying to think about this question on a global scale is intimidating. I’m not sure there’s anything I would say “most people don’t understand” with a sample size that large. So maybe bring it down a little?
Or perhaps make a large, sweeping generalization?
Neither seems like a good idea. In terms of a writing prompt, though, I’ll “dance with them what brung me.” I will say something that I think is true, and then in the comments you can tell me I’m wrong. There’s no way I won’t be, because again, too many people to think I have much to say on this subject.
Most people don’t understand their personal history and just how much it informs their present and future. There are callbacks of enormous proportion, themes that run through your life, even thoughts in your head. I was reminded of this in “Spare,” by Prince Harry, just in the way it was written. He’d explain something, and there would be a line in it that would connect to something else, and when that memory came up, he’d use the same words.
The most touching was “I will keep you safe.”
The funniest was, “a Biro… wow….”
Now that I’m 45 and my friends are all over the map, older and younger, these callbacks occur daily. With some, it’s recalling things with people who were there at the time the words/thoughts occurred. With others, it’s that they weren’t there and saying those words is a way of including them in an inside joke… especially the stories that aren’t really letting them into something funny. It’s explaining a piece of history, local or global.
So many things in life follow you, whether as friend or enemy.
For me, a big one is homophobia. If you say something homophobic, you didn’t just say it to me in that moment. You’ve unleashed the holy hell of every time it has ever happened, no matter how benign or traumatic. You are tapping into my memories personal and institutional.
Most people don’t recognize the patterns their family uses to cope. They’re not all dysfunctional, and I would never say that all patterns are bad. It’s just hard to do a thing and see its effects later and want a different outcome while also not changing any of your behavior because it will rock the boat. So people don’t think about their families in the third person omniscient. They don’t rise above the minutiae and look at the larger picture.
I am making a generalization about the world, but through my own experience of being the interrupter of those patterns, whether I wanted to be or not. I’m just the girlfriend/wife. I am automatically the problem because I’ve asked questions that interrupt the thing they’ve been doing for 25 years…. And it is deeply problematic because it doesn’t matter whether those patterns are hurtful to me or not. I’m not “really a part of their family,” so what if I’m hurt?
After all this time, I can say that homophobia and “not really being a part of their family” was inextricably interrelated. I didn’t have the clout of a husband. If you’ve ever dated me, this still doesn’t out your family in the slightest, because it’s happened every time I’ve ever dated a woman for more than a month.
I see what happens when other spouses in the family speak up, and realize that my position is secure. Nothing is ever going to change because I said something. Fathers and mothers in law will respect their daughter’s husband a hell of a lot more than they’ll ever respect me. That’s because they view our relationship as a continual sleepover…. But of course, that’s not what they’d say in public, because that would be homophobic.
In private, it’s things like “you guys can stay at our house now. We have a room with two twin beds.” This was from a father that was very concerned that we weren’t married and didn’t want us sleeping in the same bed because of it…. Even though we were domestic partners- at the time, the closest you could get to marriage. It was a slight we didn’t deserve for something we couldn’t change.
So, after I’d stuffed all that down for years and years, I went off at said parent because I’d tried everything else. It wasn’t my finest moment, but it wasn’t theirs, either.
This has also happened more than once. With one, my wife was in lockstep with me. With the other, it was their whole family against me… even though my problem with them was how they treated their daughter and I was trying to stand up and protect her.
Sometimes people don’t recognize patterns.
I am not Jewish or Catholic. I don’t try to guilt people into anything. If you’re reading something I’ve written and you feel guilt, that’s on you. I lay it out there and I’m not shy in doing so. What you do with “my intel” is up to you. I have what I hope will happen, and the solid knowledge that people rarely react the way I think they will.
Homophobia and family dynamics conspired to make me want to be quiet about everything. It was probably the whole goal, to make me scared enough that I’d ruin a relationship… when in reality, a relationship that makes you constantly afraid to be who you are doesn’t deserve to survive.
My callbacks are now making me stronger. I am old enough to have an opinion, and mine is just as important as yours. I will not let people tell me to do less, think less, feel less. I’m just not capable. I have to find friends who just live and let live. They don’t feel the need to save me from being me, and aren’t threatened by large emotions coming at them.
There’s also something to be said for relationships being work, but not like sticking a round hole in a square peg and hoping it will miraculously fit if you just beat at it long enough.
You step outside The Matrix when you realize that not wanting to give that much energy to a problem is valid. For instance, floating above the argument and watching it, seeing if the same one comes up over and over and over, and how many of your solutions work and how many are a stopgap to kick the can down the road a little further.
Not wanting to give energy to fixing a problem, for me, is seeing that the other person is either minimizing a problem or refusing to acknowledge there is one. I am also the person that gives a relationship time to grow and mature. Not giving energy to a problem is not something I’d say about a relationship that was a few weeks old. But if you’ve had the same issues for ten years, that’s a different thing altogether.
I also don’t start a relationship seeing red flags, ever. This is because all people have problems, large ones. Why should I expect you to be different from me in that regard? The thing I love so damn much about Daniel is that he knows he’s a mess. He laid it all out there. The only thing I count as a red flag is what people don’t tell me and I’ve had to find out on my own, worse when it’s a conversation that we needed to have in private and another sprung it on me at a party.
If a person is open, honest, and willing to learn, there are no red flags. There’s only a set of problems we need to deal with together. But that’s my perspective, perhaps not yours. Some people do want to weed out what they think is troublesome ahead of time. It’s valid for them. To me, no person is irredeemable if they are aware that they have huge flaws and are willing to do something about them.
If you are certain that getting help won’t do anything for you, then that’s when I’m out. It’s not my job to fix you. It’s my job to hear you say you need help and to support you while you’re getting it.
In effect, exactly what Daniel did.
He knows USG (United States Government) fucked him up, and to an extent can point to exact dates and times. He gets my respect for being that self-aware. He doesn’t have red flags. He has trauma reflexes that people see as red flags.
I suppose if there’s anything I could posit as “something most people don’t understand,” it’s them. Most people aren’t willing to sit in the discomfort of self-discovery. It’s not comfortable learning that you are judgmental, selfish, angry, or capable of hurting others. It’s not comfortable thinking about how and why you do it so that it doesn’t happen anymore.
It’s the whole reason why people ignore their callbacks.
If I had to choose one word that describes me, it’s chaotic. I can’t control my feelings, my attention, or my outward emotions. It’s all on display, all the time. If I’m hurt about something, you’ll see it written all over my face because I wear my heart on my sleeve, always. It gets beaten up that way, but stronger for the long haul because scar tissue is a beautiful thing. It makes what was once weak strong again. All of the sudden, your heart has more tensile strength than it did previously, and you can handle bigger emotions without exploding emotional landmines.
It’s a hard thing to explain to people, handling large emotions. Most people just want me to be less. I encourage them to take a right and surround myself with people who think I’m amazing no matter what. And not in the way that says “praise me.” In the way that says “even when I have to kick your ass, you’re the love of my life.” Believe me when I say that’s a two way street, and I’ll always allow it, especially if you throw in jokes to release the pressure valve of being really, really uncomfortable.
Some people are better at being uncomfortable than others. I am actually pretty good about it, but there are caveats. Make everything clear, especially if you don’t have a timeframe for our next interaction. Ask for what you want, and don’t make me divine it. A guessing game pushes me away faster than anything else, because I don’t have the mental capacity to work in grey area 100% of the time, and shouldn’t have to do it at all when it comes to friends’ needs. My partner as well, I just don’t currently have one. I have ended a lot of romantic relationships due to the same problem. Yes, I can prepare for what you’re going to need later, but only up and to a point. Grow with me, not against me.
I can sit in cognitive dissonance for years on end if people let me know when we’re going to work on resolving it. I walk away when there’s an unwillingness to figure it out…. even when all of the nastiness is familiar and none was ever meant.
Unless someone hits a trigger, and then I will go scorched earth because I have to. It hits several things at once. Making me mad enough to walk away because I couldn’t do it otherwise. Realizing that there are very few people who actually listen to me the first time and don’t second guess what I’m saying, so keep those friends close and the other ones can take a right. In my haste to protect myself, I piss people off. It’s my superpower, apparently. The J part of INFJ is judgment, the opposite of perception. I call ’em like I see ’em. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong. I pay those taxes all day, every day. What I don’t do is let people walk all over me, because they have forever and I’m done.
Being a preacher’s kid was amazing and a rough gig. I don’t want to live in a fishbowl. I don’t want to care what other people think of me. I don’t want to dress appropriately, whatever that means. I don’t want to wear make-up because “it always looks like you don’t feel good.” And for the love of God, I do not have false eyelashes, especially when I was in seventh grade. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, thank God you were there. Jesus has always had my back. We’re basically the same person. If you don’t think I would go after tax collectors with a whip, apparently you have not seen me in mad sprite mode. I have this image in my head of my anger reflex going off and having someone pick me up, put me on a shelf, and walk away.
“Angry sprite mode” will burn the whole world down, and has stopped caring. This is because it means something to me when someone hits a trigger if they’ve been warned over and over where it is. I would never do it to someone I’d just met, but if we’ve known each other since my original hair color, you probably know where all my landmines are. When you intentionally step on one when you’re in combat mode, I will end you. Just not physically. It’s much worse than that. You’ll hear me in your head forever, because my trauma reflex is a very good writer. It remembers what buttons to push so that if you hit mine, turnabout is fair play.
Rarely do I go off anymore, which makes the swings even bigger. It’s not that I mean more harm. It’s that I care so much less. Either you’re important enough to me to fight until we’re through the worst of it, or you’re not. You’re important enough to me to hash it out, or you’re not. If you don’t feel the same way about me, that’s fine. Just don’t expect me to be happy about it. I rarely leave room for grace because so few people are that precious to me. It’s seriously the most Jesus part about me, because he was so human. As I have said before, “we were never meant to be Jesus. Jesus was meant to be us.” And by that I mean that Jesus loved his friends with an intensity that’s unusual (he’s an INFJ. He gets it.), but it didn’t mean that he didn’t kick ass when he thought people deserved it. Jesus’s righteous anger doesn’t make me feel good about mine. It makes me feel more human, the experience Jesus was supposed to have in the first place.
I made a blink decision to cut someone out of my life because I needed them to leave me alone. I needed them to stop hurting me. I have a feeling they would argue that I should have stopped hurting them, and they’re not wrong. I am sorry. Just because I have trauma reflexes, that doesn’t make my words okay. It also doesn’t excuse anyone else for their bad behavior. It only apologizes for my part, because no problem is 100% all me or vice versa.
I also cannot abide people who think that working on issues is always bad. That I am only dredging up the past, not trying to clean the “junk drawer of the soul.” I am not putting out “nastiness.” I am saying “here is the problem. Here’s how I think we can fix it. How do you?” And, of course, when someone has hit a trigger, that reaction is sometimes accurate and sometimes buried under a lot of rage.
Rage is not my favorite emotion ever. It only happens when my trauma reflexes work faster than the others. If you say you’re out, I will HELP YOU PACK. Good luck moving home. In most cases, you’re just another person I don’t trust/respect/like because I don’t feel safe.
This is because like I’ve said before, if you agree to be a friend, you agree to be a lockbox. Once I don’t feel like you’re mine, bye Felicia…. Bye.
I wish I could be more loving, more open, all that. I just can’t until my trauma reflexes calm down, and that will come with time. It’s not that I don’t know there’s a problem. I do. I just can’t do anything about it right this moment because reflexes are ingrained. They will never change all at once. It’s a process.
Impatience will always eat my lunch, but only when I don’t know what’s going on. But do I regret throwing an actual emotional bomb that was meant because of it? No. Because their way of dealing with a problem was to not do anything to change it. Then, when I realize I’m giving too much energy to a problem and you seem uninterested, I don’t want that problem anymore because it takes two to fight and two to fix.
I am not going to fix anything anymore. I’m not going to do other people’s emotional work for them. I have before and haven’t regretted it until now, because what I realized is that I was taking on everyone’s pain and no one was taking on mine, but not in terms of everything everywhere all at once. In terms of defining the problem and the priority.
I don’t expect any of this if you’ve just walked into my life. I expect it from people who have known me long enough to see me.
The last entry was about catharsis, but I didn’t put it up for that reason. I put it up because it shows a very specific pattern, common when both people have trauma reflexes. Here’s why. Some people react by feeling. Some people react by thinking. One or the other is attracted because of something I learned from my friend Donna Schuurman. Google her. She’s fantastic. Basically, the connection to each other is that one person is doing all the thinking and one person is doing all the feeling. We have compatible wounds. I know it to be true because every woman I’ve ever been with save Dana was the thinker. Dana was just as much a tenderheart bear as me, and we didn’t divide up emotional labor.
Relationships like that are amazing, but only for a short while. Then someone does something emotional or logical that makes the other one mad, because either one person didn’t think about it and one person didn’t feel.
I have a feeling that the reason I’m attracted to women like that is because they’re the other side of me. I have something they lack and vice versa. Everything goes great until one of them does something stupid and/or hurtful and the thinker can’t get over it because the feeler has no frame of reference for what that’s like, especially if you have ADHD and therefore no executive function or impulse control. It has to be managed.
But I’m not saying my friend participated. Maybe it’s something I did to myself based on past history, but I don’t think so. If it wasn’t my sexuality, it would have been something else, and I’d be stuck in a fixer/pleaser relationship where neither of us were happy. When you can’t share emotional labor, it gets old fast…. for a normal person. For an INFJ fixer/pleaser, that feeler goes to eleven.
Because my friend’s huge time commitment, I noticed that sometimes, she was the complete version of the thinkers I’ve either been friends with or married. Sometimes, she was tracking with me like white on rice. So I don’t really know if my analysis of the problem is correct. I only know my perceptions of what happened. My truth and and NOT Truth Almighty Amen, Spectacales, testicles, wallet, watch.
I can only speak to what I’ve been told, and it’s not like there’s magic tricks to find out what happened. I have to find my own closure, because I have definitely done enough to push her away, because I couldn’t stand being constantly in the dark for no reason except time. Thus, waiting it out unless either one of us were triggered by something that the other said, and we would inevitably fight about it, because I have never been invited to talk about anything. If there’s a problem, don’t even think about saying it. Once trust is broken, it’s always broken because both of us (the feeler and the thinker) turn on each other. Two things about that. If someone is determined to misunderstand you, they will. If someone is determined to be unwilling to accept love when it is offered, they will.
I said “I would bet dollars to donuts that you’re never going to like me, because I like you so much more than you do.” It’s true for some people, it’s not true for others, but when someone is hiding something from you, just run. Get your own closure. Leave room for grace or don’t. Hold them to your standards, and let them hold you to theirs. If they’re different, the pattern will never change because according to my Facebook wall, “don’t spend a lifetime translating your soul.” Therefore, I was constantly confused and left out, because I never knew whether she was trying to push me away or protect me. It was always up for grabs. If nothing else, it was unfair; a game of dirty pool I didn’t want to play.
Even if she didn’t see it, I felt it. I can believe it was all about time, or it might have been covering up a deeper issue. I have no idea. But what I do know is that it’s over for now. That’s solid, and I needed a break. We’re both too much for each other, and nothing will change until she does. It’s not because I blame her for what happened. I was telling her my perception of what was currently happening.
It bothered her that I gardened. It bothered me that I would get two or three words responding to a paragragh, and I didn’t know if something applied to one question or the whole thing. Automatically assuming often went sideways. But I had to guess. I didn’t have any information.
To me, that said more than anything else. I don’t like being treated unfairly, and I don’t like being confused. It didn’t bother me that my friend was straight and married a man. That’s a non-issue. It was that I got left out of everything, and I didn’t know if it was because I’d done something wrong or not. Again, when trust is broken, it’s almost impossible to win it back.
I tried so hard, but in the end it doesn’t even matter. Finding my own closure was better than being quixotic about everything. I don’t feel like I’m fighting a brick wall anymore, because it would have done as much good.
This is because I couldn’t get her to stop sugar coating and be out with it. Do you choose me as being your friend or not? What are the limits, what are the rules of engagement, anything that would have been helpful to know. Again, I will wait forever if she’s willing to lay it out, but I don’t think she’s capable, and not because she’s a thinker. I really think she doesn’t have time, and maybe she’ll come back and say what she meant and maybe she won’t.
Based on past history, though, I can guess that it’s over. That’s because traditionally it is either a PowerPoint presentation on what a judgmental dickhead I am, or three words I can’t understand if I speak in her love language. I don’t know if it’s an emotional or logical problem, or whether my gardening was such a problem that she ran. Traditionally, because of her determination to think that I am being an asshole to her when I write, she ignores me. I also know that she doesn’t have time to play games and wouldn’t, it just feels like it when the responses reading me the riot act are so long and the ones that love her up are so short.
What I know for sure is that I can’t make sense of it, and I’m done trying because I’ve offered all sorts of solutions to the problem, like creating a Google Docs folder instead of writing letters so that she could see what I was up to on her own time.
I also don’t think she knew that she was getting the first draft of something, and that I would pick and choose lines to publish from it later, but only from my work, never hers. If you agree to be a friend, you agree to be a lockbox, and that’s why I felt left out.
I never knew whether my words were being shared with other people or not, and she did until Dana and I broke up. I can only hope that I’m so uninteresting that it’s not worth it to her to talk about it.
Here’s the last two things. First of all, the answer we were looking for is “I’ve had your food” in terms of trading dick for a live-in chef. Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. Secondly, if her husband is reading, the only thing I want from him is “man, does she ever have you pegged.” According to Facebook wisdom, we’re in this together, boo. I do…. whether she ever chooses me or not.
I’m just not hoping. I am just ready to say “welcome home” if she’s willing to do the work. I need her to go from A minor to C major, but it’s ok if the chord is suspended or diminished. The resolution is the best part.
I have no idea why all of the sudden SoundCloud isn’t embedding correctly. Probably some IT voodoo shit or something. I was going to write, and then I realized the story would sound better off the cuff. Also, Sam Smith is going to get an OBE. Bet.
Staying silent is like a slow growing cancer to the soul and a trait of a true coward. There is nothing intelligent about not standing up for yourself. You may not win every battle. However, everyone will at least know what you stood for- you. – Shannon L. Alder
There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis. – Malcolm Gladwell
“Blink” was a craze when it went it was published, and everyone got on board with the book’s philosophy. That given a second chance months later, you wouldn’t regret having made the decision you did. Sure. Hard data says that. When you actually put it into practice, though, people are concerned that something is wrong with you. In my particular case, people assume I’m on an “up,” and I’ll just regret things and apologize later.
It is my feeling that “blink” doesn’t work if you don’t know yourself as well as you possibly can. It’s a disaster to blink on no information. It’s another to have 45 years of heuristics first.
I have only had one time in my life where the decision to cut someone out of my life has gone so poorly that I was miserable over it for years. So, the concept of a “Blink” decision is not foolproof. But my track record on good decisions for me is about average with everyone else who lives, works, and functions just like I do… which is in fact one person. Except without mental illness, but the part she gets, she gets hardcore.
Hypotonic cerebral palsy is a rough gig all on its own. We don’t have to talk about mental illness at all to say my life is hard. People punch down at me all the time without even thinking about it. I can’t change how my eyes work, especially on the fly. I’ve tried for years, and the closest I can get to 3D vision is that I can see both sides of my nose at once. Any further away, and things get messy fast. “What are you even looking at?” gets old very fast.
I don’t have an easy time of not looking like a crazy person with the way I move and watch, both from the outside in and vice versa. People think I’m staring at them all the time, but just because my eye is pointed at something above your head doesn’t mean that one of my eyes won’t drift. It happens in a way that I can’t even pay attention to it, because then it will take minutes to make myself look like I’m focusing and no one has the time for that.
Besides, people will fix it in PhotoShop if I’m ashamed of how I look. Except I’m not. They automatically assume that I would want it fixed. I don’t because I don’t want to present a curated version of who I am. It has made the price of entry into my circle of friends very, very high.
My mental health treats my body like crap… it’s really all the side effects of the medication I’m taking. I choose physical illness every day.
I choose physical illness every day.
I make that joke all the time, that I choose between sick and crazy without letting it affect me like I just did. I was diagnosed as Bipolar II/ADHD when I was about 21, then as PTSD set in a protocol was added for severe anxiety. I have been taking a pure, refined version of crystal meth for 20 years, and I have also tried agonists like Stratera and Cymbalta, which mimic the norepinephrine boosts that methylphenidate gives, but again… different med, different side effects. I was jumpy and nervous, heart rate sky high, couldn’t sit still. It was a worse ride than even an extended release dose of methylphenidate had ever given me, and I lived that way for six weeks until I gave up.
I was disheartened. With my medication, I had no appetite and a quiet brain… but it meant being on meth to cope.
Between it and my mood stabilizer, I have caused enormous damage to my physical body to remain sane to everyone else. This does not mean that I need to go off meds to get a baseline. That’s pretty much the worst idea anyone has ever had regarding my health. I just need better generics. Fewer side effects. A better understanding of the human body so I know that opioid agonists work on me and methamphetamine don’t. Why is it the same delivery method and two different results?
One chills me out like a Tylenol with codeine, the other makes me look like a schizophrenic heroin addict.
Here’s a joke I told Daniel that my medical people will get:
Is this a __ thing? Let me guess your diagnosis before you even say it…….. “It depends.”
In my experience, this is the correct medical diagnosis for everything. Every time. That’s why it’s called “practicing medicine” and often referred to as an art. It is still a better educated answer than you’ll get from someone who didn’t go to medical school, because what the doctor is really saying is “I need a whole lot more information, but if you can just give me your Google Search Terms I have like 50 things I can rule out that won’t kill you before you go on WebMD and scare yourself to death.” Doctors can only do “blink” decisions when they’re sure. It’s different when you’ve never seen a case before, what in med school would be a “fascinoma” and in law school would be a “prima facie” case.
Shows like “House” are built on doctors being wrong, and it happens all the time. I don’t mean in an intentionally malicious way, though you can find enough of those if you look for them. I’m talking about people going to doctors that have diseases so rare that it takes a detective years to figure it out, because the natural order of how something is supposed to go, well…. It isn’t.
It’s not even idiocy. I couldn’t have told the doctor on her way into a patient room that I thought a patient had shingles if I hadn’t seen the pattern in a book somewhere. It’s the same with an MD as opposed to me, a lowly MA (from whom you should never take advice. I’m a moron. And I know enough to tell you that). They’ve just seen thousands more patterns the higher you go up in terms of specialists. That’s why they’re specialists. They don’t necessarily study harder for anything. It’s that when they hear a herd of something coming, they know when to guess “horse” and when to guess “zebra” because they’ve seen enough to know the tiny, tiny, tiny differences, maybe down to one. Additionally, in those cases, a blink guess is necessary. Try Occam’s Razor first. If the patient gets better, don’t try anything more extreme. If the patient is worse, they don’t have what it’s most likely to be.
That’s when you get more eyes on it. People can go 15 years without an official diagnosis, and that’s what teams of doctors like the one portrayed on “House” is accurate. You also need different types of doctors, because rheumatology isn’t that different from endocrinology, dermatology, and oncology. You could argue that oncology falls under rheumatology, because cancer is also an autoimmune disease. It’s just that the need for oncologists surpasses the need for expertise in other autoimmune diseases that don’t have dedicated departments. I assume GRID/AIDS was first thought of as an autoimmune disease, rheumatological or oncological in nature. Then AIDS research, too, became its own department.
This is where the rubber hits the road. Blink and see if you’re right, but have an Option B. Doctors, particularly in Urgent Care and the Emergency Room, aren’t given time not to blink. They patch you up.
I’ve been patching myself up for decades because I have had the opposite problem. I have waited too long on a lot of things because I didn’t feel I was capable of them. In fact, I had seven years to do nothing but think about my motivations and goals. I’ve thought about the things I’ve done and left undone.
The dragons that circle my bed at night and let me lie on my back and watch the stars while we travel.
Who I wanted those dragons to be, and why, and why it should cost so much to be my friend. It costs something to be a friend that believes in a writer, because now they’re in the position of having to defend your writing whether they like it or not, because it’s your obsession, not theirs.
I chose one dragon in particular because not only is she the architect type of writer, she has also edited a few other things for me that have been successful (mostly book reviews). She also has the amazing ability to talk with me about craft and not plot. It works in our actual relationship as well as the one we have professionally. “I can’t fix this.” “You absolutely cannot fix this and I will be mad if you try.” Although I will say that sometimes I wish she could wave a magic wand because a good bit of the time listening to her goes better than whatever all THIS is (looking in mirror).
The other two are more talkers than writers, so we make up for it with phone calls and quick texts to set up phone calls, or we video each other. As I have said before, that’s new. I’m finally okay with it… as previously mentioned but I feel it goes along here very well. I talked to one person, and then I talked to my audience, almost in quick succession. This is because I realized that if I treated a vlog like a FaceTime call, I wouldn’t get overwhelmed at the stats. Here’s what I do know, though. Every post I write resonates with someone. They just don’t all resonate with everyone. That’s true of every writer on Earth, even Stephen King. Most writers have a special place in their hearts for “On Writing,” even the ones that don’t like horror. Those realizations created a blink decision. I vlog, because talking to a million of you is the same as talking to one of you.
I blinked, and didn’t regret it. I had the heuristics.
My conversations with Daniel in preparing content are tough shit, and I am so glad that I’m a blogger because of it. When I go all up in my feelings, I have a place to express them without having to think about what he’s going to think when he reads the entry. It’s a mixture of fear and excitement, because if you get PTSD from combat, those are generally the only two emotions in a story.
And then there are things that make me bleed out, like telling Daniel why I have PTSD and Daniel explaining to me why mine was so much worse than his…… Daniel’s enemies were clearly defined. Mine were turncoats, both of them, at a time when I was too little to know that wasn’t okay and took it on as all my fault.
One of the things that’s so different with our two cases of PTSD is that I cannot define triggers before they happen. I’m fine one minute, and inconsolable the next. He actually has enough self awareness to say that he doesn’t like the sound of popping popcorn, because “that’s what M4s sound like when you put them on fully automatic.” He can do something that at this point, I cannot. He can tell me what his triggers are, and I can avoid them. I have tried to quantify what a trigger means to me for nine years, and I haven’t really come up with a good solution.
The biggest trigger I have is smell. Whether it’s my abuser’s old perfume, or the air smells just the way it did when I was standing there with that journal, asking what certain things meant. I think that is true for all trauma, the way the smell of the smoke in our recent house fire took me back to the one my family had when I was 11.
Music doesn’t bother me, generally, but there are a few choir pieces and opera arias that I have put away. If I’m in a church choir that is doing one of the pieces that for me, acts as a trigger, I don’t sing that day. I don’t even go to rehearsals that contain it.
One of the things that I’ve done for the last probably, ten years that I refuse to do now is minimize. Everything that has happened to me is now being given its full meaning and weight. I am no longer trying to make it look lesser than, that things weren’t as bad as I thought. In order to know how bad it was, you cannot just know my side of the story. You have to know the life story of the woman who emotionally abused me as well, and how that pathology affected me. I can only tell my story and a teeny, tiny part of hers. There’s so much more you will never find on this web site that you would find if you looked in other areas. For instance, none of our mutual friends except Dana has ever talked to my dad about what I was like as a teenager.
I can think of a few more I’d like to have him school. Some because I still don’t understand their reactions, some because I just want my people to know who I really am without pretense or bullshit.
I am coming into my power. I am 45 years old. Either this year or within a few years half of my life will be over, using my 92 year old grandfather as an example. A whole lot of shit I used to care about doesn’t even exist now in terms of my focus.
Like getting all upset because Daniel is in love with me and I know it. He has been for 36 years. Let me get this straight. A military doctor wants to be with me, and he’s telling me up front that he’s an alcoholic and has PTSD and is going to rehab to change himself and just wants another writer to lie next to in bed with both our laptops going…… and I’m going to freak out because he’s male and not female? I got this picture in my head of Jonna and Tony Mendez writing “The Moscow Rules” on a king-sized bed and thought, “why not?”
Here’s why I didn’t freak out, and it’s all my trans friends’ fault (I’m really grateful and I’m teasing). I realized that there was just enough man in me to be absolutely terrified that a straight dude wouldn’t like me AS A PARTNER. Straight dudes love me in general. Instead of thinking of myself as a bisexual woman, I had to game this relationship out as a trans man. This is because I knew that Daniel had never been in a gay relationship before, and so his reaction to my gender identity would never be negative, he just might be confused. I needed him to know that I express as male sometimes, and that has to be okay with him. Luckily, it very much is.
But this is just the beginning of a very, very long story. Please do not think that I have lost my fucking mind. Daniel doesn’t start rehab until January 5th. He lives in NE Texas. There is no possible way we will even see each other until his rehab is over, and that could take up to a few months. We’re talking about living separately for at least a year, because if he moves to DC we might screw ourselves over by skipping dating and just moving in. It wouldn’t be a deliberate screwover- DC is expensive and it might seem tempting to have one household “since we want to be together, anyway….” Eyeroll………
My perfect picture of Daniel and me is that we visit each other a few times in 2023, and then think seriously about stability after 2023 is over. This does not mean that we won’t be in contact at all, just not physically sharing the same space. Rediscovering each other through calls and letters for a year before going all in.
I am also not saying that Daniel is my forever person. I am saying that he’s one of them. Maybe it will be this fairy tale in which I suddenly transform into the perfect heterosexual wife. However, my money is not on that. My money is on Daniel becoming so important to me that he becomes a priority, and it is too damn early in our relationship to put constraints on what that actually looks like. Just be happy for me that I have someone that loves me and is in my corner. That if I get into a Situation, it’s handled. Don’t look into the future and try to pigeonhole us as friends or married. Let us decide that over the next few years on our own.
I am turning a corner in my sexuality. I am less sure about my gender than I ever have been, which has made me flexible about everything else. I was telling my friend Zac that I was feeling very non-binary, without the need to come out or change pronouns. How that plays out in my relationship with Daniel is that I feel like a partner, not the archetype one sees in their minds eye of a “wife.”
I have also been a wife before, but not to a man. My definition of “wife” comes from that context, and I don’t know enough about men to know whether my definition and theirs is similar. My saving grace is that Daniel is attracted to my personality. I don’t think he would have been attracted to me if I was male on the outside, because sexual orientation is a thing. But what I do know is that if I look at myself in the completely genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary but doesn’t give a crap about pronouns kind of way, Daniel still loves that person.
I’m not becoming less. He’s becoming more. He’s opening himself up to the possibility of not being with the picture and definition of “woman” he’s always known.
It took me back a bit. All of the sudden, someone from my past reappeared, and I want to talk to her “privately.”
Dear Karen,
I remember the first time I saw you like it was yesterday. We were out in the sun at Chuy’s on Westheimer, and I was completely suckered in by your preppy attire. I mean obviously, my wife teased me about seeing you and running into a door for like four years. What might have seemed schoolgirlish actually made me relax and find peace within myself. You were the first woman I’d ever met who identified as straight and also wore men’s clothes without making it a big deal. Nine times out of ten, it was men’s styles in a women’s cut. Every time I looked at you, I saw a little more of who I wanted to be on the outside. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.
You might think it’s because I thought you looked like a lesbian. Actually, that’s not it at all. I saw the way your husband looked at you and realized that I was putting too much emphasis on my clothes. That what I wore wasn’t advertising anything. That if a straight woman could out butch me any day of the week, then wear whatever I want. Nothing about my wardrobe says that I am seeking attention from men or women.
I know this because now I’m divorced, it’s eight years later, and now a man wants to be with me. I said yes. I said yes because I looked at you on that warm April day, and knew that he would love me no matter what. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.
As of today, Sam is a PNG. But I do want to talk about me and how I’m reacting to the most grief I’ve had since my mother died and how I’m doing right now. Sam is certainly involved, but that’s because I learned things about myself from her, not because I am trying to talk about her specifically. It just is.
I learned that the relationship was a much bigger deal to me than it was to her, or that’s how Sam made it look from the outside. She has kids, people who live in her house to give her affection. I do not. Even having someone hold my hand was legendary in my mind. Having someone look at me differently turned my world right side up. Having someone lovebomb me into submission was amazing. The thing is, though, I didn’t pick up any narcissistic vibes from her, but I should have.
I actually canceled our first date and she begged me to reconsider. That was the first red flag. She picked on me for not having a car, and I’ve lived without one most of the time in DC. I know how to get around. In fact, I know it so much better than she does that it never even occurred to her that public transportation is a thing that exists and that I’m used to it and I like it because I can read. From minute one, it was like “I don’t want to date someone without a car because I can’t handle those kind of logistics.” This is because she never let go of letting me handle my own logistics. Not once did she say, “I’m going to X. Meet me out there.” I would have. Now I have money on a Baltimore system that I have no idea what to do with, but I do have a free ticket to BWI any time I want and that’s no love lost.
So, anyway, I picked up on her apprehension about me not driving, and called her out on the carpet. She said that she was sorry she didn’t listen to me and that of course I was making the decision that was best for me and please still go out with me?
Against my better judgment, I went. And that’s when the first life lesson hit. My DV PTSD kicked in and I noticed how enormous her hands were. I imagined her fist coming at my face. I’ve never told anyone this before. Never. I should have. I have one friend in particular who would have kissed it and made it better. But I didn’t. I told Sam instead. I told her my biggest, deepest, darkest secret because I thought that as my girl, she ought to know. She told me that she would never raise her fist to me in anger, and I believed her. Of course that was true. Dana and I got into a heated situation and she lost it. I never got angry enough at Sam or she at me to even produce something close to my level of emotion in those first few moments, kneeling on the floor.
Also, now do you see why I don’t write about Dana? Why that toxic mess will be with me for the rest of my life? Nobody cares about two girls fighting. Lesbian DV is invisible.
So, I trusted Sam in a way that I’ve never trusted anyone. Our breakup didn’t have anything to do with it, only that she proved I was wrong to be so open and forthright because she was not a safe person to talk to. She’d never been through it, so she thought nothing of my issues surrounding it and whether abandonment might be one of them. So she broke up with me by text. Abandonment is a recurring theme in my life. People get sucked into my orbit (which I have only recently realized is a thing), and get caught up in all the ideas I have, and then realize they’re in too deep and I’m so emotionally intense that they can’t take it. I do not do this by choice. It is my personality type, and I know it sucks. Visionaries do what they do naturally, it isn’t malicious. We see pictures of the future and depending on future decisions, change. It’s “we could do this, or we could do this, or we could do this…..” ad nauseam.
I need people who can stand up to that, and say “I’m not ready for this” rather than “I’m out of here.” I am extraordinarily emotionally flexible and sensitive to the fact that my personality type is rare and exhausting. I’ll do whatever I can to make my loved ones comfortable with it, but they have to let me know that they’re having a problem for me to do anything about it. They wait until they’ve already made up their minds about who I am and what our relationship is like and it’s always going to be the same.
I am never the same across time. Never. I bend and adjust to what’s in front of me, and plan for the future based on the information I have. In a sense, I feel like The Doctor, because of Matt Smith’s one line, “I’ll never forget when The Doctor was me.” I have lived several lives by now, at least four regenerations, one for every decade. I just haven’t picked a new face to do it.
I am so emotionally complicated that it’s isolating and lonely. I know my emotional quotient is off the charts, that I would be in the Mensa of EQs if that were a thing that existed. I see patterns of behavior like most people breathe. One of the things that I said to Sam was, “don’t do this. Not only can I see how you’re wrecking my life, I can see how you’re wrecking yours.” I have seen true joy on her face. I have awakened something in her that wasn’t there before. I have changed her, and I have no illusions about that. She is every bit as miserable as I am, crying all the time just like I am, and it’s incredibly sad and depressing watching her be miserable and shooting her own foot repeatedly.
Or maybe not. She had a lot of conversations during our relationship with not only herself but friends as well that I wasn’t a part. There’s no way of knowing what I might have done to cause such a reaction. But what I do know is that she’ll regret the way she treated me for the rest of her life, because she set so much on fire that there’s nothing to reconcile. I don’t even trust her enough to be my friend, because my friendship runs so deep that my friends become a part of me, and I don’t want that with her, either. She told me who she was, and I am choosing to believe her the first time. I am not going to let this get any worse. And that’s another life lesson.
There’s just so much here. The first is that I take good care of my relationships so that if they end, it’s without animosity or cruelty so that there’s a chance of rebuilding later. The way she left was monstrous, and there’s no coming back from it. She lied to me and said that everything was fine while she had all these dark conversations with herself about the things that were going wrong. She never let me in, because she never wanted me there in the first place. She wanted a magical experience for a weekend and couldn’t allow herself to just say that because she’s not that kind of girl. So she trumped up a relationship and then extracted herself in the most ugly way possible. It was childish and it will resonate with me for years. Because that was the moment I stood up and bent the spoon. I was not going to teach her to walk all over me. If she said she wanted to talk about the end of our relationship without being open to the possibility of rebuilding, then I never wanted to see her again in my whole life, and that if she contacted me or wrote to me, I would lose my shit. If she showed up at my house because she finally pulled her head out of her ass without telling me she was coming, I’d get the police involved and I wouldn’t deal with her directly.
I was clear about boundaries. If you walk out now, never come back. You’re going to set too much on fire. I am being clear and I want you to respond and tell me that you understand this is it. You will never see me again. I wanted to light a fire under her ass to DO SOMETHING. This is crazy. It makes no sense that we are each crying desperately for each other in our own houses instead of talking about what we’ve been through and what we each need. And now it’s too late. She’s been cut out of my life and thrown away like a bad penny. What she has done has been childish and painful. I am in no hurry for a repeat performance, but I know I’ll have one.
Because people are afraid to be vulnerable with me, and it’s easier to cut and run.
