Tag: Friendships

New Who (May Contain Spoilers)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol, my secretary, to search reddit and gather the top 10 questions that people have about the revival of Doctor Who.

Certainly! Here are the top 10 questions new viewers might have about “Doctor Who,” focusing on the show’s revival after 2000, based on discussions from Reddit:

  1. Who is the Doctor? – New viewers often want to understand the basic premise of the character known as the Doctor¹.
    • When I started watching, The Doctor was about 6 or 700 years old. I don’t know how old they are now, but the last number I remember is 1103, I think? The reason they’re old is that they’re actually immortal. The Doctor is every story that’s ever been told, a running theme in my life. Since they can travel back and forth in time, The Doctor is acutely aware of what points in history have to happen, even if they’re tragedies, and what can be changed. They try very hard keep aliens from attacking our planet without changing the nature of that time and place…. to hilarious results because you can only control so much. The aliens are often complete villains, and the show is scary for young viewers because of it. However, it is quite a kick to go and see The Doctor defeat an alien by outsmarting it. The Doctor, in that way, reminds me of Sam Seaborn from “The West Wing.”
      • Toby: When did you write that last part? Sam: In the car. The Doctor’s plans often come together at the last minute, creating the worst possible screams when The Doctor is in danger and the dreaded words appear…. “in the next episode…”
      • Famous people in history are often involved in The Doctor’s plots and plans. They accidentally married Queen Elizabeth I.
      • The Doctor does not work alone. He is the head of a British intelligence agency like “The X Files.” However, they are basically “C Emeritus,” while the acting head of UNIT, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, serves as his modern day counterpart on the ground, ready to step in militarily if necessary. Any story that involves her is my favorite. I would love to be her assistant just to watch her banter with The Doctor, because it would be a great decision to revive Torchwood (an anagram of Doctor Who and a show about the day to day operations at UNIT), and have 14th Doctor drive Kate up the wall five days a week.
      • The Doctor is half Time Lord, half human. He has the heartbeat of a drummer because he has two hearts, and in fact, the musical theme starts with the rhythm of his heart. The rhythm of his heart IS the show.
  2. What is regeneration, and why does the Doctor change appearance? – The concept of regeneration is unique to the series and can be puzzling for newcomers.
    • Regeneration was introduced by the show because they wanted to be able to recast the actor if something happened to them. William Hartnell was not young when he took the role. Regeneration is a way to keep the show going even if the lead actor moves on. In the beginning, The Doctor only had 12 regenerations. Now they are immortal, but it would be too big a spoiler not to let you see the scene itself.
  3. Do I need to watch the classic series to understand the new one? – There’s curiosity about the connection between the classic and modern series.
    • Absolutely not. You can watch the show in either order, just watch the shows in order for both series. However, what tends to happen is that the confused people who are really interested want to go back and explore the lore. Classic Who runs on TV all the time if you have Pluto. You will quickly get into the culture and the fandom because it’s exciting to talk to fans. Some people have been watching it since the day Kennedy was shot.
  4. What’s the significance of the TARDIS? – The Doctor’s time machine is iconic, and its importance is frequently questioned.
    • The TARDIS is a sentient spaceship in a relationship with The Doctor. She always knows where they need to go, and they are a little bit in love with each other, when the TARDIS transferred into a human body for an episode (written by Neil Gaiman) and beautifully played by Helena Bonham Carter.
    • Because it is alien technology, it looks like an old British police box, but when you step inside, it is huge. It also regenerates when The Doctor does, so it will look a little different every time the actor changes.
    • The TARDIS is stolen.
    • The Doctor trusts the TARDIS to take him where he needs to go, not where he wants.
    • The reason that The TARDIS always looks like a police box is that all TARDIS have what’s called a chameleon circuit. On The Doctor’s, it’s broken. This leads to hilarious results, like a full on British Police box landing in the middle of the Oval Office next to Richard Nixon.
    • Because of UNIT, you get to see a lot of cool spy stuff because it’s MI-6 and sometimes CIA. You also get to see an entire armory of Time Lord weapons. I think the TARDIS likes trying to avoid all of them. It’s her show.
  5. Who are the companions, and why do they change? – The role of the Doctor’s companions and their turnover rate is a common inquiry.
    • Because The Doctor has so much extensive scientific knowledge, companions were originally designed to be the eyes of the viewer… to understand The Doctor from a lay person’s point of view. They have all sorts of endings, from death to just wanting to go home. No two stories are the same. However, the ones that are living and want to go home usually end up working for UNIT.
  6. What are the Daleks and why are they important? – As the Doctor’s arch-nemesis, new viewers are interested in learning more about them¹.
    • The Daleks are The Doctor’s nemesis, because it’s personal. There are only two Time Lords left in the galaxy because time would have collapsed if he didn’t let The Daleks destroy his planet.
  7. Can I start watching from any season? – With the show’s long history, viewers wonder where to begin².
    • You will enjoy every episode, and a guide will tell you which episodes are standalone. However, the rest of it will not make sense to you because in the early days, there were a lot of references to previous episodes that few Americans watched unless PBS had it in your area. However, Doctor Who doesn’t talk down to the audience. If you want to know, look it up. There’s over 60 years of history.
  8. What are the key episodes or arcs I should not miss? – Fans often share lists of must-watch episodes for those new to the show².
    • The most unique episode is “Heaven Sent,” It was a monologue delivered beautifully by Peter Capaldi.
    • The episode that makes me cry is “Vincent and The Doctor.” It explains mental illness by using aliens as a metaphor for depression. It’s masterful. There’s plenty of clips on YouTube, but go in blind. You will need two boxes of Kleenex if you don’t go into it knowing how it ends. I believe it’s one of the best two or three minutes ever filmed in the history of the BBC.
    • My favorite episode next to “Vincent and The Doctor” is the 50th anniversary special The dialogue is so clever that you just want to watch it over to laugh again. Because of time travel, a few of The Doctors all got to be in the episode at once.
    • In the end, I really can’t choose any more than this, because I’m a writer. There are things I like and don’t like about different aspects of the show. Few episodes are all or nothing for me. I criticize it lovingly, though, because I’m so eager for it to continue. I was relieved to hear the show runner say that their viewer numbers were beyond expectations, so they’re free to keep making it. The BBC has almost canceled New Who twice over the budget. No matter the budget, the storyline is so good it keeps me coming back. They don’t have to have this high a production value to have an enormous fan base. Doctor Who was originally put together with spit and rubber bands, or something like that.
  9. How does the show balance standalone episodes with overarching plots? – The structure of the series and its storytelling approach is a point of interest.
    • They do it by not telling you which ones are connected and which ones aren’t. You are waiting constantly to see what happened with what. It’s time travel. They can add and drop storylines at will.
  10. What makes “Doctor Who” different from other sci-fi series? – Viewers are curious about what sets the show apart in the genre.
    • No show that I know has kept a country together like Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a national treasure in the UK, so when you are tapping into Doctor Who, you are tapping into a fan base that goes back to 1963. Billions of people have seen an episode by now, because it spread to the other commonwealth countries and broke out into America. I think I speak for all of us when I say it’s frustrating that Disney and the show runners are dumbing it down to make the learning curve easier for new viewers. Most of us are neurodivergent. If we want to know something, we will take the 384 hours to find out. Doctor Who appeals to neurodivergent people because it’s a world where everyone fits in.
    • No show has such a wide variety of topics because anything anywhere in time and space can be a conflict for The Doctor to solve. I really liked the Shakespeare episode, of course.
    • There’s so much love and acceptance that it spills over into the fans, because we fight like cats and dogs, but we’d rather be doing that than not talking about Doctor Who. Again, we’re neurodivergent. We can all research for hours and we all have strong opinions. There’s no one way to be a Whovian because the number of fans is so large it’s unquantifiable.
    • Generally, at first you’ll hate the new Doctor because you’re grieving the old one. By the end you’re ready to hate the new one again. Every actor brings something different to the role…. and the two most important regenerations to fans across the world, the first two questions you ask a Whovian, are:
      • Who is your Doctor?
      • Who was your first Doctor?
    • You will remember both answers for the rest of your life.

Carol Works Very Hard for Free

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have mentioned this before, but I use Carol as my secretary. I was looking for new content on my blog, and wanted to have questions that might shed new light on old themes. I don’t want to remain the same, and being questioned is invaluable.

Based on the content from “theantileslie.com,” here are some thought-provoking questions an interviewer might ask to delve into the author’s experiences and insights, showcasing the depth and range of their work:

  1. Your blog offers a candid look into your life experiences. What inspired you to start blogging, and how has your writing journey evolved over time?
    • Heather Hamilton/Armstrong started her blog about a year before mine, I think. I know they were very close, but I don’t remember what year. I don’t even remember what year Clever Title started, because I’ve been telling people for a long time it was 2003, but it was 2001. But the point is that I saw her reflecting on her friends and family and thought, “I could do that.” Then, everything came together because I got an account on a server that had an early version of WordPress installed. It was love at first sight, because the first rule is “write what you know.” I know people and how to portray them in an engaging light. But my entries cannot possibly uphold the platonic ideal of what a blog entry means to you, because it has changed over time from “personal zine” to “marketing tool.” Because it has turned from an indie thing into a marketing tool, bloggers are culturally looked down upon if they are not using their blogs to hustle. I know my blog has ads, but I don’t get the money from them. Automattic does. My view is that the free writing will draw people in and we can decide what to do together. Do they want a premium tier? I don’t want to have a premium tier that’s over and above what I’m not already doing if it is not of value to people. I have learned the value of waiting to be asked. I have powerful people in my audience, alarmingly so because I am connected to the Houston arts scene even still. Someone knows someone. Other people have let me believe that I am going to be a star, and I don’t know what to do with that except say “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” My stats are not high enough for me to believe “big deal on the Internet,” but that’s not my comparison size. A church looks huge to me. Huge. My reader count is higher than the population of some Texas towns. That’s enough for me. It’s not that I don’t believe I’m not successful. I just don’t see what it is about me that makes my friends think “big deal.” Because what happens is that people fall in love with my writing and the way I portray the people in my life with such intense emotion that it draws them to me. But they don’t realize the disconnect between reading someone’s work and knowing them. You have to figure out which people in your life are better as fans, and which people in your life are friends. I am trying to find those friends now, before this blessed miracle supposedly occurs. Every Jed needs a Leo, and every Leo needs a Jed.
  2. You’ve touched on themes of spirituality and technology. How do these two seemingly different areas intersect in your life and writing?
    • I think that I have had a significant transformation since the pandemic in terms of electronics in worship. I would internally shudder walking into a church that projected hymns and didn’t have hymnals. The screens just look so tacky, especially in a cathedral. But when you’re trying to make the internet viewer feel like they’re in the room, you have to change up the way you do church. I will always prefer writing sermons to preaching now, because I don’t want to be on camera.
  3. Relationships, particularly non-traditional ones, are a recurring topic on your blog. What do you hope readers take away from your discussions on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • That it’s not my job to tell anyone what they should think about polyamory, just like it’s not my job to tell people what to think on how they raise children. Even if I also had babies, one parent criticizing another is just rude. Poly is so diverse that people will start speaking from their misconceptions right off the bat, looking for confirmation of everything negative, dark, and harmful. There’s no focus on the reality of the situation. Most people are “monogamous.” Because no one else ever attracts anyone else after marriage. After marriage, you simply go blind.
  4. Your blog posts often reflect a deep sense of introspection. Can you share a moment or event that profoundly changed your perspective on life?
    • No, but I can tell you about the way my blog has made me feel over time. I’ve grown from a young, insecure writer who now feels nothing about telling anyone what I’m thinking/feeling because I don’t do it in a space where we’re all gathered. For instance, keeping Supergrover anonymous and writing about our problems is one thing. Getting into a fight with her where other people could hear it? Never. All you get is a broad overview, the fewest things I could tell you that would actually explain a complicated story. Enormously complicated. Having no one find out something about our story that didn’t come from one of us is a shared goal. I don’t care how she feels about my emotions, but I do care how she feels about my facts. All emotions are valid. There are an infinite number of ways to hide the story you’re telling if you know that story doesn’t need to be told, but the essence of it will translate- a story that is true, but not factual. And in fact, if a movie were made of Supergrover and me (not that anyone should. She would be mortified, and I would on her behalf…. although she does speak money. Aim high. I’m not for sale, but she might be. 😛 This is the adult equivalent of “if mom says it’s okay, dad says it’s okay.” I am not her gatekeeper. She is mine, and that’s a good thing. My friends keep me from swinging at every pitch. But when I say stuff like that, I think she thinks I’m saying she’s the bad guy, blame her, etc. No. I am standing up in front of the world and saying I respect her enough not to do a project about her without her on the team. Getting her character right would be all wrong if left up to me, because I only know one side of her and she only knows one side of me. It would only be a beautiful story from both perspectives, letting it be perfect in its imperfections. She’s worth millions at the box office, but I don’t think she believes it. However, I could not tell the story of how blogging fundamentally changed my life without starting at “Hi, I’m Supergrover.” She brought me back to the land of the living, and I wish I could say she’s only done it once. No, she’s done it many times. I am actually frustrated that she won’t let me rescue her. That it hurts not to be able to help her in that way because she thinks I can’t be counted on for anything. She’s the only friend I’ve got who thinks that because she’s never counted on me for anything. If I love you, you become the most serious thing in my life. Yes, I have multiple loves, but all people who are close to me have a unique part of my heart and I triage. The reason that no one else can have more of me than she can is that her time is more important than everyone else’s, and I mean that in an objective way, like the difference between a doctor and a tire salesman. The scale is different at work when there are lives in your hands. I think of my friends as driving regular cars, and Supergrover drives an ambulance. Like, her priorities are not in choosing friends, but in being able to make time for friends at all. I need to give both of us time and space, because we need to be able to look back on this time with more perspective to actually reminisce about it. Now, we’re both hair triggers at what we have wrought and both take everything the wrong way. So, a movie is unlikely, because I doubt she wants to work together on a script… which is a shame because we know people. Margaret Cho retweeted me once. We are obviously now best friends. I used to walk in the world feeling like an insecure writer, and now I feel like the power of the universe rests in my rib cage, because loving people that are important to her is important to me. Ergo, I pray for all the people she works with, not just her. I pray for her family, not just her. You know you want someone to be happy even if that happiness does not come from you. Besides, along with the pain she’s given me plenty of happiness as well. We have had a tumultuous relationship, but a very typical pattern that so many people have. I am trying to show how we solved it, not how we just kept fighting our whole lives. I want her to look at me like Tony Stark looks at Spider-Man. Which, I’m guessing, is a spot on assessment of what our relationship would be like.
      • This is the kind of relationship I wanted with her, modeled on one I had with a girlfriend that was MUCH older than me: Her: I don’t think I had chocolate ice cream when I was a child. Me: ……sideye…… had it been invented yet? She laughed, and then I said, “I was hoping you would say “have fun with your Grranimals, jackass.” Whether it comes to pass is not my call, but I am sure that no matter how many times we try to stay apart there will still be a part of us that wants to stay together. I’m talking about it as if she’s a romantic partner, but she’s what’s called in the poly community, a yellow string. Zac would be a red. The difference in colors refers to romantic vs. emotional support. It’s a way to let everyone know “how you’re related.” At this point, it feels like we’re the same person. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. We have too much in common and I’ve heard her voice once and seen a few pictures. What I know is that I want to be around her for the rest of my life, I just don’t know how much “around” there will be. Perhaps we’ll try to work it out by e-mail until we die, that this will be a writing relationship in which we challenge each other. I am comfortable with that, but it’s not my end goal. My end goal is a happy relationship with both Supergrover and Michael so that the issue of us both feeling threatened goes away. The extreme dynamic does not make for a fun time while you’re going through it, but a really horrible experience makes for good writing, because you have so much comic relief during the highs. Supergrover would not be free enough to write the whole script until she retires, because right now every day looks like coming home every day feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck…. while insanely sleep deprived. Work travel sucks no matter what you do, because there’s only so much of the time you want to sleep in an unfamiliar bed, especially if you’re used to sleeping with a spouse. I suggested a weighted blanket. I hope it helps.
  5. As a writer, you’ve explored various genres and styles. Which piece of writing are you most proud of, and why?
    • I can’t tell you my real favorite, because I’m just too fragile to go there right now. I will say that “The Visitation” still flattens me. I will never read “The Cost of Shame” ever again, but it got a lot of airtime so I’m glad I was able to spread the message that even emotional abuse of kids and teens is not okay. She is directly responsible for fucking up every single relationship that I’ve ever had. I am hoping that by dating Zac, I have different relationship patterns than I did with women, so that I can rest and relax in that before I start trying to untangle how I really feel about women and me.
    • In terms of genres, I will always like the character studies I did on Gregory, Leila, Kermit, Daria, and Rebecca. Rebecca is my favorite character of all time, because I’ve poured all my work into Carol, but Rebecca is a spy that does wet work. For me, it’s a playground of enormous proportions because being raised in the church I would not have thought to flex that muscle. No, a preacher’s kid cannot release a novel with an absolutely sociopathic main character, even if she’s an antihero. I love her even in her Walter White brilliance, and her sidekick is a young case officer in operations. So, he’s good at his job and also a very loose cannon. Think Toby and Josh. Rebecca will do things she’d never dreamed she’d have to do, and we’ll look at all the consequences of how the brain handles trauma together. Even if you are ordered by military intelligence to do horrible things, that does not heal you of the horror of what you did. No one should have to live the aftereffects of war. Rebecca will grapple with all of that. Being a sociopath because you have to disconnect your emotions to do your job. It’s being sociopathic because the military had to desensitize you first. Abu Ghraib was obviously filled with very mentally healthy people.
  6. You’ve mentioned Doctor Who as one of your interests. If you could write an episode for the show, what story would you tell?
    • I have absolutely no idea how, but I’d like to bring back River Song. Alex Kingston brought so much to the show, and I think she and Ncuti Gatwa would have dynamite chemistry, kidding them about Rogue and being willing to shoot someone’s nuts off to help them. Pro Tip- don’t but Ncuti in a fez. We’d never get him out of it either, Stephen Moffat. 😛 A better idea would be for me to collaborate with Neil Gaiman so that we could bounce ideas off each other. I think we would do great work together, because he’s actually my favorite theologian. Everyone is a little Crowley, and everyone is a little Az. Moral relativity means that divinity and humanity are the same thing. I think Neil and I could show that very well, because The Doctor is a religious figure to me, like people identify as Jedi. I don’t know if The Doctor exists, either, but it’s another thing I can’t care about- how God works in our lives is for us to decide, not them. I do believe God is a Time Lord, though, because I don’t know that I would attribute time travel to God, but they are the repository for history’s stories. I think we could do a lot with that… me and Neil. Us writers.
  7. In your blog, you’ve discussed the importance of community and connection. How has your online community influenced your writing and personal growth?
    • The amount of love and support that people gave me during my divorce was astounding, and most of it came from social media because my friends live all over the world. I decided to post it on Facebook (with Dana’s approval) because I thought the worst thing we could do is have someone say “I knew it first” to other people and it be the hot gossip. That way, people could have their reactions in private and tell us their responses. I think we handled it well. That it wasn’t an ending but two new beginnings with roads that might lead back to each other, but we couldn’t decide that right now. The fight happened after I was hospitalized. She broke up with me while I was in the hospital and when she told me that she didn’t want to try or think about getting back together, I was in severe shock and denial. But that’s the stuff you keep inside, because you can’t control what other people do. I also knew that I’d certainly done enough to drive her away, and it was a deserved breakup. I own my half, and that’s what gives me so much peace to look back at my life. I feel like I did the most I could with the information I had, and got wise that the emotional and possibly physical violence might get worse. Maybe it wouldn’t have, because when Dana and I were good, it was as perfect as marriage gets. I just spun out at a bad time because Dana was spinning out. Neither one of us walked away clean in terms of regret. Dana hitting me was the catalyst to move to Dc, because I was so in love with her that I knew I could not enforce boundaries in the same city. Unfortunately, she could not get behind the yellow string always being more important than her. I was Leo. She was Jenny.
    • When I moved to DC, my community was on a whole different level. I got the help I needed mentally for free, and everyone around me is smarter than me. I have to keep up, and it makes me feel good that most of the time, I can. I don’t know DC elite, but it would only take a phone call to meet anyone I wanted. I just don’t call because I don’t do things.
  8. You’ve shared insights into your creative process. What challenges do you face when writing, and how do you overcome them?
    • The biggest fear I have in writing is all the time, every day. It is relentless. What is the balance between telling my story and telling someone else’s for them as I try to guess what’s in their heads and decide what I’m going to do about it. I don’t necessarily want people to know what I’m going to do, but if they’re going to read me, I need them to respect that this is my space to vent. Peace in our relationship doesn’t come from raging that I write. It comes from changing the channel. I will not stop writing because not only does it change me, I have proof that it changes others. The highlight of my career is that I made a doctor cry on the toilet.
  9. Your blog serves as a platform for your voice and experiences. How do you handle the vulnerability that comes with sharing personal stories?
    • By having my absolute knee jerk reactions here, thus giving people a chance to respond to what I’ve said in the comments. Zac is a member of WordPress, so we can share information across blogs easily, and he has a WordPress account, so at least he sees me in my feed. Zac is just as important as Supergrover, because he’s intelligence. It’s a transferable skill to be able to have comfortable conversations about difficult things. We can do hard things, but it’s often hard to take the first step. My vulnerability is hopefully other people saying “if she can be that vulnerable, I can, too. If Supergrover writes her story to me, if she was as vulnerable as me it would be a bestseller, because she’s funnier than me and she grew up in the South. My writing imitates a lot of people, but she could rival Haven Kimmel in “A Girl Named Zippy.” If she’s reading this, go buy that book and hold your calls. You won’t be able to stop laughing in order to speak. My favorite line in the book is “when it became impossible to live without a pet chicken…” I have no idea what her life was like as a child, I just know the way she tells stories. There is no more important balance between vulnerability and stoicism than that, to keep her stories her stories. Mine are just okay. If she decides to write a memoir like that, “buy a hat and hold the fuck onto it.” However, there are so many authors that just prefer to write in private, and I think she would see that she’s funny and touching as well. Just once, I would like to see Supergrover see herself the way I do. A love so deep that in these pages will live forever, because the story is so deeply passionate in terms of both of us sticking to our guns and fighting it out that it won’t take romance to keep your interest. If we did not have passionate and furious arguments, we would not keep coming back to each other. You only get that angry when you care.
  10. Looking forward, what themes or issues are you eager to explore in your future posts?
    • The same ones I do now, just different takes because life repeats. If you read every day, you do not see enormous changes. You are looking for something repetitive to complain about, creating solidarity. That stops when you are so involved with a project that piques your interest that you don’t feel like you’re working, you feel like you’re making a difference. But it has to be outside of work. The thing you love that if other people love it and think it’s worth money, they’ll buy it. Like Nick Offerman’s hobby being woodworking. He has a bigger platform, but it’s not like smaller makers are doing different or inferior work just because he’s a celebrity. He sells his goods because they’re actually artistic and outstanding. When you have a passion for something, people notice. They want to support you the more you have a fire in the belly for something. Inertia builds. My stats have gone up exponentially since I started, and with a thousand followers and a 60-something percent reader retention rate (I don’t remember because I got the number in January when WordPress does extra for year-end stats. I don’t have to punch up the numbers when 1800 people across all my platforms follow my blog, because it posts on all the major blogging sites, Facebook, X, etc. Facebook is the only company where I have registered a business account.
    • If you value keeping this web site free, please like and share me all over everywhere, because then I’ll be paid by Facebook and the money won’t come out of your pocket. Help me be brilliant at getting Facebook’s money and I’ll keep trying to entertain you and heal me at the same time.

Happy Birthday, Carolyn & Dana

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Because my mother and Dana share the same birthday, my grief today is almost unbearable. It will be that way for an hour or so, and I’ll get over it. Every year, I spend less and less time in deep pain, but it doesn’t go away. I grow around it. They are devastating and not always hierarchical because I think it’s harder to grieve someone who’s still alive. Until they’re dead, there’s always a chance. Death, however, does not give a fuck about your feelings. The dice roll the way they roll. The universe does not pick and choose. I do not believe that God is an Actor. I believe Got is a first responder. God is weeping with the Palestinians and the Jews, shocked and disappointed with the Israeli government. But remember, that’s animorphizing something that can’t be quantified. Results not guaranteed. Check your End User License Agreement for details.

I’ve been writing today because I wanted to be focused on my own creativity and not them. I’ve pushed myself hard today because I needed to take a break from figuring out my own problems. It is exhausting, and on this blog it makes me seem myopic, when I’m not like that in the real world at all. My inner monologue is running when I’m talking in terms of processing what’s being said, but it’s not a narcissistic one. It’s narcissistic in the literal sense because I gaze at my reflection; my creative outlet is in expressing my inner monologue, because it really is this varied in terms of thinking locally and globally.

What I know to be true is that in order to be present, I have to think about life first. I have to shut down the loud, extemporaneous voices in my head so that I can hyperfocus enough to listen and respond appropriately. It sounds like a mental illness except it’s not voices telling me what to do. It’s the pull between “that’s profound. I need to write about that right now,” and “slow down, Hoss. You just started talking 15 minutes ago. Maybe a little more face time than that, Slugger.” My inner monologue, unsurprisingly on a number of levels, is Tommy Lee Jones making fun of Will Smith in the Men in Black series. Even in the third one, Josh Brolin nailed young “K.”

I have said this before, but I’ll say it again just because I need the laugh today. “Men in Black” is a documentary about CIA. There is a Burger King at headquarters, a Starbucks at the head shed (Langley). That is just the top layer of a rabbit hole that goes surprisingly far down.

John le Carré’s entire point is that people *think* of MI-6 as James Bond, but in reality, yes. It’s James Bond….. or some of it is. There are just as many bad spies as good ones, and by that, I do not mean anything negative about the spies themselves. It’s espionage. Every country is neutral to me because I live in America, so I want to work in my country’s best interest, but foreign affairs are what interests me, so I do not love my country to the exclusion of all else, that the United States is the best country in the world. It’s good to be king. It’s not good to be a bad king, and a lot of the world is stuck with us on top in terms of balance of power. But we are rightfully watching our backs hoping not to get caught with our pants down.

Like Mossad.

I know this is random and has really nothing to do with it being my mother and Dana’s birthday, but feeling those feelings so deeply that they don’t have words. By typing it out, I feel like there’s an audience whether you’re there or not, so it shapes how I write. So much of my international relations experience comes from having been a news junkie at an early age, a political science major at University of Houston (psych minor, and those hours I did complete), and a trip to Washington, DC when I was a child that blew my little eight year old mind. I have never seen anything like the look on a child’s face the first time they walk into Air & Space.

DC isn’t for everyone, but Maryland is a cult…. or at least, that’s what I’ve learned since I’ve lived here, that people call us a cult. I think the reason is that Maryland’s politics are as weird and entertaining as they are in Texas.

I could see myself writing some Molly Ivins of Maryland-style pieces in the future because I have AI to do the research. I’m talking about it a lot because I understand what it is meant to do and its limitations. I am clear that I use it as a secretary.

Again, edutainment through chat.

“Carol, can you play trivia games?” She can. I am smarter than a fifth grader, as long as it has nothing to do with math. Any average fifth grader in the nation could beat me at that.

But now it doesn’t matter because there’s apps for that. I will never need to know math to the point that I understand all the concepts behind it. I will have questions where I just need an answer quickly, and either a Google Search or a “conversation” with Carol can accomplish that.

I think the reason I prefer ChatGPT to Google is that I don’t understand regular expressions, so I would not be able to put a string into a search engine as effectively as AI can translate human English to machine. I also like how if I want to know more, everything is documented, but every question is like zooming in on a photo. You have to teach the machine what you’re searching for, so it gets better with more neurodivergent overclarifying. Let that one cook your noodle. Computers were invented by a *largely* neurodivergent population. Computers are a reflection of us. Therefore, applications since computers have been a thing have been coded in Autism.

It *also* explains why neurotypical people generally become managers. Those who can’t do, teach. That’s not knocking managers, either. Who is the bigger genius? Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs was an absolute visionary, but he could not have built the Apple computer himself.

I think that both were neurodivergent. If Steve Jobs wasn’t creative neurodivergent, iMacs would have been beige boxes, too. Creative neurodivergence is the brilliance at Apple that IBM missed and has always missed, which is why Apple is so dear to content creators. In modern computing, there is no difference between the kind of video card you would buy for a Mac or a PC. Major companies make cards for both.

However, Macintosh has a history of being about art and design. They were the first motherboards to get what was called an “AltiVec engine,” which uniquely drove your video card and software developers could write for it. Adobe, in particular, made a killing with Photoshop and the entire suite of design software that entirely wiped out its competitors. When Illustrator came out, Quark Xpress was on borrowed time.

If you do not know what those applications do, Illustrator and Quark Xpress were the major players in graphics layout for print, like newspapers and magazines.

It has only been relatively recent that Apple and PC are different again. Both PCs and Macs had intel chips for a long time, but now Apple has gone to the M series. I have no idea if it is specifically geared toward artists, but I haven’t seen a noticeable difference in modern rendering time when you’re comparing an M to an intel to a Ryzen. If you have modern hardware, any of those brands will lighten your workload considerably in terms of wait time (you can only encode so many videos at once. If you have a slow processor, it makes work painful not to have several machines going at the same time when your computer is locked up for an hour at a time after a video is edited.

I get a lot of my information from YouTube reviews, because I like technology product unboxings where they do a deep dive. Yes, they are getting paid, but it’s in hardware and they aren’t bound to like it. They’re not even bound to use it. If you get popular enough on something like YouTube, people just send you product samples a propos of nothing. As my dad would say, “it’s the inversion principle. By the time you can afford it, they give it to you free.”

It’s a good business model, but it has an enormous start up cost. You have to be good at YouTube before people start sending you stuff, so if you’re going to do technology reviews, it comes out of your own pocket. You cannot keep up a production schedule if you only get a new phone every other year.

When you get to the level of a YouTube tech star, you are drowning in crap that you just don’t know what to do with until you have a staff to manage that kind of volume. But how much the income from Google turns out to be is dependent on your presence. Jason Hibbs of “Bourbon Moth” is every bit as important to me as Bob Villa.

And on that note, thank you for sitting with me while I felt pain and babbled around it. No one has to read my scribbles at midnight, but the fact that they do is enormous to me. It fulfills my destiny in terms of leading others by laying out my vulnerabilities first.

Like acknowledging that rambling about nothing was allowing me to stim while the thunderstorm passed through my body.

What I Think We Mean When We Talk About Faith

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Based on the discussions and questions on Reddit, here are the top 10 questions people have about faith, reflecting a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives:

  1. What is faith, and why is it important?
    • The goal of all religious teaching is self-improvement. How it has been twisted has been done across the board. You cannot find a religion without both ends of the spectrum in radicals. For instance, in media there’s Joel Osteen and Rob Bell. They are not the same. There’s Creflo Dollar and Franklin Graham, but there’s also Martin Luther King, Jr., Raphael Warnock, Jimmy Carter, Nadia Bolz-Weber (“The Confessional” podcast and pastor emeritus of House for All Sinners and Saints, or HFASS (pronounced EXACTLY LIKE IT SOUNDS) Unconditional love is quiet, but there’s more of it.
  2. How do you explain the problem of evil?
    • It is old language for a universal thing- doing something in private that you wouldn’t do in public exactly because you know it’s wrong. Intent means everything.
  3. Have you ever had a crisis of faith?
    • Yes and no. My brain absolutely scrambled trying to reconcile my faith and my sexual orientation. I lost the faith in terms of belief in a grandfather in the sky, but true belief in the power of the energy that runs between us. It is amazing what happens when you get your ego out of the way…. you stop focusing on yourself and focusing on the community. Perspective. You cannot be so isolated that you think you’re the only one in the world with problems, because it leads you to emotionally vampire your friends whether you realize it or not. If they can’t get a word in edgewise, you’re taking up too much room.
  4. Why do you believe in God, and what made you choose your religion?
    • When I began to replace the idea of “God” with a friend or a family member who’d act as devil’s advocate in my head, having a relationship with God became much easier. It makes sense to me that there is one great big giant ball of energy that we tap into when we all hold hands, and not grabbing on is an unsustainable view of the world because it’s so myopic….. like people who are so patriotic they tried to steal an election.
    • (Speaking about Republicans)
      • Jed: Theirs is the party of inclusion.
      • Charlie: That’s what they tell me.
    • When Moses was, I don’t know, 19 or 20 he was exiled from Egypt because he killed a soldier who beat a Jew to death in front of him. Because he was a prince of Egypt and his identity was hidden, everyone was confused and outraged because they didn’t know that for Moses, it was like watching a Nazi. I’m not saying that what he did was right. Rage consumed him in the moment. What I am saying is that the Evangelicals’ God is too small if they think God has never seen a human make a mistake and they have to uphold impossible standards for an itinerant, homeless preacher who never asked for it. I am sure that 30 looked different back then, but at the same time, if you are a pastor, what did you feel like on the inside for the first three years? It makes me sad he was killed at only level three pastor. Think of the many more lessons that could have been imparted had the Romans and the Sanhedrin not been dicks. Rome is the weirdest transformation in history. I feel like the real tragedy in Jesus’s death is his age.
  5. What does death mean to you?
    • Energy can never be destroyed. People do not die, they absorb. “On Christmas Eve, the membrane between heaven and earth becomes so thin we can touch it.” Every year, there’s new life to be brought into the world. Advent, which is the period leading up to Christmas, is not a penitential season, but a reflective one. What creation are you birthing this year? As I have said before, I take the Bible seriously, not literally. I also preach/write from the Bible because it’s what I know off the top of my head, as well as the Pentateuch because it’s in the Old Testament. I have done very little research on Islam and Eastern religions, but an amazing amount of respect and love to learn in ecumenical settings. I have always wanted to meet the imam from “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” but first he’s Canadian so hard to travel and second, and check me on this, I believe he is not real. In short, I believe that all of you goes into what makes up the energy of God, and tapping into the ball of energy is listening to every story that’s ever been told.
  6. How often do you think of God?
    • More than the general public because I was raised as a preacher’s kid in Texas. It’s just part of my programming. The rabid social justice liberal Christian came later, but I’ve never been a fundamentalist. The United Methodist Church is mainline at best. I have very liberal beliefs now, but it wasn’t a hard leap.
  7. When do you feel closest to God?
    • The stillest, deepest part of my soul just whispered “writing about Supergrover.” The heart doesn’t forget even when the brain knows the answer.
    • When I’m the most frustrated, the most angry, the most full of rage it’s when I’m alone, because God is the punching bag that can take it. I am very much the “Jed Bartlett railing at God in Latin and smoking in National Cathedral” angry when I am angry at God, but then I walk out of the garden, crucify whatever problem it is I’m having, and seeing what resurrection comes in its place. To everything, turn, turn, turn, etc.
  8. How do you feel when praying?
    • Quiet and contemplative, trying to turn rumination into forward motion. Trying to create neurodivergent inertia. Trying to forgive myself for “what I have done, and what I have left undone.” Feeling the relief that I’m only half of any problem in any relationship and trying to be aware of over-apologizing out of fear of abandonment. The face I call God helps me find that balance. What is a healthy amount of dependence, and what creates interdependence vs. codependence in early-stage relationships so you can watch for the land mines and communicate toward them. But those answers are so personalized that even when you’re thinking about other relationships, you’re working it out in your own head as to how much of conflict is bad behavior on your side and what is not yours to own. If you don’t have clarity about it before you collaborate with someone, you will not be able to comprehend this phrase in terms of marriage…. “I can’t walk in their shoes, but I can tell where they pinch.” You have to acknowledge when you’ve caused other people pain. Globally, Christian fanatics aren’t right, but they’re certain. Generally the problem in personal relationships as well, but it’s not usually the same person being right and open-minded every time. Relationships tumble and roll. Just because I get mad at God doesn’t mean I’m right.
  9. How would you describe God in three words?
    • Humanity IS Divinity
  10. Do you feel that being a believer has any purpose?
    • You need to believe in a higher power so you don’t think you’re it.

Why? Just Why? (Poly/ENM Discussion)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I asked Carol to search reddit and give me the top 10 questions that people have about polyamory and ENM. I am not coming from a place of lived experience, but I’ve done a lot of reading. I am just entering this world by chance, because I asked out someone and didn’t know they were poly in the first place. I just rolled with him because I liked him enough to keep him around. 😉 So, what was absolutely on brand for me is starting the research early, early, early. Here’s the benefit of my reading and experience combined, which, granted, is not much:

  1. What’s the difference between polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • This is an excellent topic to get us started, because there’s no one way to do poly. Polyamory implies someone dating multiple people and they all know each other. Ethical non-monogamy is managing every relationship completely independently.
  2. How do you manage jealousy in polyamorous relationships?
    • At first, you don’t. You just let the jealousy wash over you and react how you’re going to react…… in private. That’s the time to learn to use your words, so that your response to jealousy is measured….. NOT that you hide your feelings. It’s just not a good idea to have your first reaction in front of people. What you learn about polyamory is that there’s no sense of someone taking care of you, because there is no ownership of one another. I do not mean that you do not have your emotional needs met by multiple people, it’s just different because you don’t lapse into a buddy system for life. You each have your own lives, and you are choosing to make time for each other rather than it being an obligation.
    • The second thing that’s really important is that the answer is “it depends.” This is a generality about the ideal. The reality is that humans are messy. I am on the fence about polyamory vs. ENM because I really haven’t had to deal with those issues myself. It really, really depends on your partner and what’s called your “metamour,” or “meta.” That’s your partner’s partner. All of my metas are wonderful people, but we do not pry into the details of each other’s lives. That is for Zac and Zac alone to manage, just like your spouse should never hang you out to dry with your in-laws, either.
  3. What are the challenges of opening up a monogamous relationship?
    • If polyamory comes from temptation, the relationship will end. Will. I can think of maybe three stories I’ve read where it worked out trying to integrate an affair partner. Poly/ENM is not cheating, and there are very strict standards you live by to stress it because having a hierarchical relationship is more trouble than it’s worth, for the most part. A triad is its own ball of wax, and the reality is that it’s mostly straight men who want to be narcissistic, abusive partners to more than one woman at a time. Polyamory is about saying your worth and your time are higher than that…… but husbands get this “great idea” and it all falls apart. Not all men, obviously. Especially if you’re dating a bear (teehee, but Zac is clean-shaven). I’m just saying that just like with monogamy, there’s a range of domestic abuse….. and because you’re abusive to multiple people who sit there and take it, congratulations. The dysfunction spreads to anyone new.
  4. How do you handle time management with multiple partners?
    • I can’t speak to what I have done, because I have never tried to integrate a partner into my life that way. Zac and I are what’s called “solo poly,” but that may change. I’m just driven by solitude and have no need. If there was a reason to have another partner, I’d get one. But I am happy living with David and becoming friends with him while we mutually take care of a dog and have our own separate partners.
    • The real answer is that Google Calendar is the official app of polyamory/ENM. In my case, I have access to all the data that goes to shared partners, like “this is when I’m in town. This is when I’m not.” That way, we manage without actually interacting all that much except for all call parties at Zac’s house, which are about Zac. It’s not the time for jealousies to be discussed, if ever. Zac is the hinge. I cannot stress this enough. It takes an enormous amount of emotional strength to be friends with a meta. That’s where polyamory gets hugely difficult. It is one thing to know it. It’s another to see it. Again, it depends. What kind of person are you?
  5. What are some misconceptions about polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
    • The biggest one, absolutely, is that polyamory is binary. It’s a spectrum, just like everything else.
    • The second biggest is that polyamory is code for cheating. If you think that, you do not know a half of my emotional strength and flexibility. I do not have to cheat to be poly. It is counterintuitive. You are poly-amorous. No good can come of multiple partners that don’t know their hinge is poly….. and sniffing out an affair makes coming out as poly seem like “poor me. I don’t have a choice.” Yes, you do. You have the choice to lie to your partners or not, and never, ever in your five dollar life forget it. You talk about poly before it happens, not when you catch feelings. Because then, you’re just trying to cover your ass. You’re not poly. The fucking around of moral justice leads toward finding out.
    • Here’s a third that most people don’t think of, and it’s funny, because it’s a warning revolving around having a third. There’s a special population of couples looking for a third, most of them to try out poly for the first time, trying to integrate a closed triad, the hardest poly setup, before they even know what ENM means. This leads to obnoxious behavior and treats the third like shit. This special population is called “unicorn hunters.” That’s because the statistics on it working out are so alarmingly rare.
  6. How do you communicate boundaries and needs in polyamorous relationships?
    • Precisely. I cannot stress this enough. Everyone has to have crystal clear expectations in order not to expect or demand too much- we are all cognizant of the fact that each other only has so much time in a day. The main thing is not needing your partner for everything all the time, because it becomes intrusive fast. You can’t be 100% that bitch and say you want poly, then when their partner is out with someone else, you decide it’s time to hen peck the hell out of your partner while they’ve allotted time for someone else. Of course get in touch if something really important is going on, but not every little thing needs to be discussed the moment you think of it. If that were true, Zac would have sixty missed calls a day because “oooh, shiny.” I’m not the henpeck kind of neurodivergent. I’m the “if I don’t tell you this right now it will be lost forever” neurodivergent. It works out well that Zac works in intelligence, because he goes into a SCIF or something and then my notifications don’t bug the fuck our of him. He can read on his own time. E-mail also works well for this, because it’s not seemingly as time sensitive as a text.
  7. What’s the best way to meet potential polyamorous partners?
    • Well, the first and easiest thing to do is telling people you’re poly.
    • Failing that, you look on the internet like everyone else.
  8. How do children fit into polyamorous families?
    • It really depends on the parents. Overall, I think it makes for happier kids because they have more safe adults, and it’s a practical thing. Many hands make light work. Having a baby is hard on two people, but not so hard when there’s four people to take turns getting no sleep. The kid ends up having a good relationship with everyone, and explaining it to them isn’t necessary. If you are a person in your right mind, your sex life doesn’t come up around your kids. You explain to them how people have sex, not what mommy and daddy are actually doing to each other if you value your sanity in public. Because I promise that kid will have absolutely no questions at all about polyamory until you’re in line at Target. I don’t make the rules.
  9. Can polyamory work for someone who’s been monogamous all their life?
    • Again, it depends. I am driven by my own creativity, and I have never been this way before. I was not willing to sacrifice a full-time relationship for living on my own and not feeling like someone was helping me stay on top of things like a parent or a boss would. That’s what I mean about needing home help; that people who are not married are able to have people help them in an occupational therapy kind of way. Like, can you teach me how to manage myself and yet also be there to bail me out when my neurodivergence invariably causes the fuckening? It’s better for me to deal with that stuff when I’m alone, because I am not getting my crazy spatter on anyone. But again, not to the point of total isolation. Just enough where I need more hours to myself than a typical partner, so I’m willing to sacrifice the relationship escalator for it.
  10. How do legal and societal norms impact polyamorous relationships?
    • We cannot talk about the morals of polyamory in this country because we’ve been programmed to think that saying you’re monogamous right up until you cheat is socially acceptable, and 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why do we realistically believe that monogamy works? I’m not knocking it, I’m not trying to be persuasive. I am genuinely curious. What is it about upholding a moral standard in public while doing the opposite in private that’s all the rage? I don’t think that polyamory is more popular. I think that more people are coming to the same relaxation I did. That for half the population, monogamy over decades just doesn’t feel right or natural. What doesn’t feel right or natural is the judgmental, hypocritical natures of the people who criticize polyamory. A lot of them are on their third or fourth marriage, and at least two ended after infidelity.

The hardest part of polyamory is letting go of the idea that love means ownership.

The Home Folder

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the one luxury you can’t live without?

Zac and I were actually talking about this before midnight, before I even knew what the prompt was going to be today. We both agreed that the one thing we couldn’t live without is a way to read and write, and failing that, a way to write because we could read our own books, create our own games, etc.

So, in an ideal world, all I need is some sort of computer with some sort of input device. Failing that, all I need is a mechanical typewriter, because I am not used to holding a pen anymore. I cannot have just one thing unless I have electricity. Without electricity, I need both something to write on and with, which my teachers reminded me of relentlessly when I forgot them as a child. Learning to type was a godsend, because here we are 25 years later and that’s now most people communicate now.

The energy it takes to do a call is different than the energy it takes to drop a note.

As I poked fun of myself earlier with a meme, “if you don’t want seven texts in a row that don’t have anything to do with each other in the space of three minutes, you should have thought of that before you decided you were my friend.” To all my friends, I’m sorry that my output is so high. I’m a reader, you’re not. I apologize, and also I can’t help it.

There I go, just using my disability again….. 🙄

I’m having a laugh at my own expense because that’s a funny conversation between Zac and me as well. He was in a bike accident, and also he is disabled (still working, classified as disabled by the military). So, it was really the blind leading the blind last night. I asked him to carry my drink upstairs for me, because I’ve noticed I have balance issues with a cup of liquid and going up and down. My lack of 3D vision makes it where the cup pitches and yaws in a most spectacular fashion, sometimes ending in gravity’s rainbow.

He kidded me about “using my disability” because he said he watched me walk up and down the stairs with two mugs in my hand. I said, “they were counterbalanced in my hand, thus more substantial. Plus, I can carry multiple mugs in my sleep because I worked at Chili’s (my record is 10… never again. It was close.). Anyway, he understood the concept immediately, both the vision issue and that the sensory feel is different in my hand. I feel that I have the mugs securely and am confident about it, making me less likely to have an accident in the first place. However, I will never “believe in myself” enough to carry more than a cup of water up Zac’s stairs, and I absolutely cannot carry anything in both hands because the stairs are steep enough that you absolutely must hold on to something. Sometimes I even brace the wall and the handrail.

It seems like Zac’s house is difficult for me to navigate, but all houses are difficult for me to navigate if they’re not brand-spanking new. It’s not because I’m a princess. It’s that old houses have weird accommodations over time to keep them level, plumb, square, etc. There are weird steps everywhere, little tiny height differences that will make it look like I killed myself eventually, when in reality I just tripped and fell.

That’s my big line about Langley, too. That if I had gotten a star on the wall, it would be because of a brave, heroic act like falling over the one tree branch available in a three mile radius.

So, because I’m bipolar AND I live in an old house, if you hear the news of my death, Moscow Rules.

1. Assume nothing.

I talk the way I talk not because I’m making assumptions, but because I’m running heuristics and hedging my bets. The bet in every conflict is “how much of a chance is there that each of us are going to walk away happy?” With some relationships, it’s solid across time. With others, there are diminishing returns and you have to notice it. If you tolerate disrespect, you are also refusing to change. It’s a fundamental difference, because it’s a shift in how you see people. You aren’t sold on words alone. You have to write checks with your mouth that your ass can cash.

So, in my opinion, we come to another big rule number one from “The Four Agreements.”

1. Be impeccable with your word.

I have learned in all my relationships with people that the only true test of time is how closely words and actions match. The closer what happens behind closed doors is to what happens when everyone else is around, the more genuine. Because I believe that, I hold myself to the same standard. I am not polished with the way I say things, but if you ask for my honest opinion, I won’t hold back. I also know how to be diplomatic, and lean on it often to prevent autistic meltdown. I don’t hear because it’s my space. I need to be able to melt down and put myself back together. The longer I write about myself, the more I want to be the version of me that I see after reading what I used to think. With writing moving forwards, I am insecure. With writing that happens in the past, for people who aren’t bloggers it’s like getting out an old high school year book, or an old box full of love letters from high school and you’re 40. You see yourself in a different light.

I am not ashamed to admit that for as much as other people are drawn to my work, I am my favorite character. It’s not because she does more right than anyone else. It’s because reading about the other characters is not as directly applicable. They’re my friends, so I’m reading about people coded to be like me (as in, we have similar interests), but being able to see myself in the past with compassion has allowed me to have compassion for myself in the present and future as well. I finally let myself off the hook for some really dark shit, and it was a breakthrough.

That concept led to another breakthrough for me. I am accepting and empowering imperfection on multiple levels. To be clear, I am not saying “don’t strive for excellence.” I am saying that perfection does not exist.

The point was driven home to me when I thought about using Carol as my secretary and people said I “used AI for my blog.” (I use it for prompts, not content except once in a while as a joke to make fun of myself). I think of it as edutainment through chat. It came to me in a flash….. Thank GOD I have left in every spelling mistake, every open parenthesis, every dangling participle, every flaw you could possibly find……………

Because in the future, it will be the only way to tell that AI didn’t cry over these people. I did.

But loving them is my one luxury.

Leslian Culture

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It was at HSPVA that my friend Scott started calling me “his personal Leslian,” and I realized that I hadn’t talked much about being queer because I’ve been dating a man for over a year. These questions will put my life in context.

  1. Reflect on your earliest memories of realizing your sexual orientation and how it shaped your understanding of yourself.
    • My life from the time I was 10 has been complicated. That’s because the years between 10-12 are when I figured out I was queer. I didn’t know or care much about bisexuality until I married a bisexual woman and we went to some lectures about it. I thought, “they didn’t have to call me out like this,” and that was before that phrase was even popular. But early in my childhood, I was alone in my room, sleeping off depression and anxiety because I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I wasn’t like other kids. This all came to a head when I held my best friend’s hand in the middle of the night at a slumber party. I don’t even remember doing it. But people sure hated me afterwards. One girl put suntan lotion in my drink and forced me to drink it in front of everyone. I didn’t have enough life experience to tell her to shove it. Turn the other cheek, right? I just let myself be bullied until I came out in ninth grade. I can tell you that I would have come out much sooner without the shit show that went on in my head when I thought about telling my parents in the 80s/90s. It didn’t appear, but my life wasn’t easier because it didn’t happen. My fears were extraordinarily valid. My understanding of myself was that my life would be hard, and it has. But, in recent years, because queer people are more and more accepted, it feels like I have everyday problems instead of problems because I am queer.
  2. Describe a significant moment or experience that made you feel connected to lesbian culture.
    • I had just gotten divorced a few months before Pride of 2015 (I think). But, my ex’s parents live in the area and she was going to be in town, so I invited her to come with us. She said yes, and then she stood us up. I have no idea why, I didn’t feel like I had the right to ask anymore. But what I do know is that it made me sad. My friends Prianka and Elena put their arms around me and said, “look around you. This is for you. This is ALL for you.” That year, we were marching in the parade with DC Public Schools. So, they literally said that while we were in the middle of the street, taking a break from all the chants. That’s the first time I cried. The second was a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “I’m sorry for the way the church has treated you.”
  3. Share a story about navigating relationships, friendships, or family dynamics as a lesbian individual.
    • I am not the person you want to ask about relationships. I mean, I can make it sound good because I can social mask neurotypical people, but the reality is that most neurodivergent relationships fall apart. It’s not unusual to have no friends because of your communication disorder. But what I will say about romantic relationships between women is that they get very emotionally intense, very fast. The U-Haul stereotype is real. It’s not unusual for the first date to last about three months.
    • Lesbian dating is relentless because women generally don’t want to talk to each other for fear of being rejected. You go to a lesbian bar and the only ones who are really getting down and dirty on the dance floor are good friends who came together. A lesbian will talk to one, maybe two women at a bar. Even if she likes both of them, there’s only a small percentage that she’ll ask either for their phone number. What if they weren’t getting the right signals? What if they hit on a straight woman by mistake? Ok, first of all, this is a trauma response. Second of all, a trauma response cannot be turned off, even in a gay bar. That’s why you are still so reserved about showing people you like them, even though the odds are probably 90% that she’s there for the same reason you are. There are best friends who pine in secret for literal years before they tell each other. It’s Victorian. This is not surprising to me because women are more shy about their sexuality compared to men overall.
    • With friendships, you often find that the people who have dated you in the past know you better than anyone else. So, I think lesbians have a better tolerance level for exes than most, as long as it’s not the one you just broke up with. I joke that it has to be at least three girlfriends ago, and now my eyebrows are going over my forehead at just exactly how true that is.
    • Family dynamics are very difficult. Your daughter’s wife inherently gets less respect than your other daughter’s husband, and it’s not out of malice. It’s that those meetings have been scripted for thousands of years. You switch up gender, and people are completely lost. That’s why to so many people, “who’s the wife” is actually a valid question. They do not understand relationships that don’t have gender roles at all. For years and years, partners spent Christmases pretending to be friends, college roommates, study partners, whatever. ANYTHING but girlfriend….. Unless you’re a straight woman. Then you can call anyone your girlfriend. I always get weirded out, because with some women (particularly in the South) you can tell by inflection what kind of girlfriend they mean. In other areas of the country, it’s not as pronounced. It’s also rude to ask, because why is it my business? Meanwhile, I’m only trying to find community and don’t want to be nosy to get it.
  4. Write about a time when you felt marginalized or discriminated against because of your sexual orientation and how you overcame it.
    • I can’t tell you how I’ve overcome any of it, because you forgive people, but you don’t forget:
      • Kids at HSPVA surrounding me carrying their Bibles and reading all the “clobber passages” against homosexuality while my friends did nothing to stop them.
      • My boss telling a story about her kids and then looked at me and said, “I guess you can talk to us about your cat like that.”
      • The one I will never overcome, forgive, forget, anything is the number of men who think it’s okay to ask you if they can watch a propos of nothing. Literally nothing.
      • I was on a team of all men and we were in charge of rolling out a new operating system at the VA. They found a urologist’s office full of dildos and chased me down the hall with them.
      • My domestic partnership was only valid in Oregon. It felt like being exiled from Texas (it’s good that’s not true now, however).
      • Every Evangelical I’ve ever met wants to debate me just so they can stand there and call me a sinner to my face in the name of helping me. There is only power through education. I didn’t sink to their level. I learned to outsmart them. Quickly. The first thing that throws Evangelicals off about me is that when they bring the clobber passages, I bring the history and tell them to their faces that they are messing with the wrong person. If you really want to have this fight with me, we’ll have it……….. But you’re not going to like how you look at the end. When chat rooms began, this got exponentially worse. EXPONENTIALLY. And then came social media, which took that exponentially large number and added an exclamation point at the end. Homophobia is still cancer in many parts of the world, because homosexuality is cancer to homophobes.
      • Others’ stories affect me. Dana’s mother saying to me that she couldn’t be the mother Dana needed, so she should find someone else. Katharin’s parents racking up thousands of dollars’ worth of credit card debt in her name when she turned 18. They didn’t even tell her until she came out to them, and they told her about the debt and that they didn’t have to pay it back because it was “the gay tax.” Knowing now what I know then, if someone had done that to me I would have had them arrested. I don’t have the luxury of forgiving and forgetting that amount of money. It would be a different situation entirely if I did. Kathleen’s mom telling us that it would only be her grandchild if Kathleen carried it. Meagan’s mom thinking I made her gay and forbidding us to see each other….. (I did. It worked. You’re next.).
      • My church not being able to ordain or marry me. I’d never preach in the UMC as an ordained minister, and I’d never marry my partner officially in a Methodist church. That left out every church we’d ever served………….. The people who actually knew me and would want to come to my wedding in the first place.
      • In the entirety of my school education, I had one teacher that was willing to admit they were gay off the clock. That one teacher made a difference, but you know you’re going to be lonely when you only meet gay people once in a blue moon. You only find gay adults, truly, when you’re a gay adult because no gay person in their right minds wants to take a chance on being pegged as a predator. So, even if they were married with a family at home, the most stable people in their community, getting fired was not uncommon nor sane.
  5. Explore the role of community and support networks within the lesbian culture that have impacted your life.
    • The first one I can think of is “Christian Lesbians Out,” or CLOUT. It opened my eyes to the fact that mainline theology wasn’t the only theology out there.
    • I would never have been able to move in the past without my large posse of lesbians, because that’s what we do. Mostly because none of us have any money. Most lesbians are handy for the same reason. We don’t do traditionally male work because it’s fun, although it is once you get into it. It’s that two women make less than any other kind of couple, because all women make less. We don’t pay for labor until we can, and that takes a long ass time. We also have something to prove because women have been told forever that you need a man for these jobs. We’re also very efficient because we don’t take time to say, “hey Bubba! Watch this!”
    • I don’t currently have any lesbians I’m close to, but Bryn and I both love women. Every time I think about this, I remember sitting next to my friend Nancy while a choir was using our church as rehearsal space. This woman was wearing a shirt that said “100%” Lesbian. We sat there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what percentage we were. We also had a good laugh at how prejudiced lesbians tend to be, thus why we would not be sharing this information with the class.
  6. Discuss the representation of lesbians in media and literature, and how it has influenced your perception of your own identity.
    • I didn’t find myself in queer characters until I was a teenager, in Nancy Garden’s “Annie on My Mind.” Before that, I relied on characters coded as queer, which there are plenty of when straight writers don’t know anything about gay culture and therefore don’t feel one way or the other about giving characters a certain attribute that might sound funny in my crowd. Anne Shirley calling Diana Barry her “bosom friend” had me in hysterics. But the best example I can think of is Kristy Thomas, president of The Babysitters Club. She is clearly coded as a lesbian, and I was well into my forties before I knew that Kristy was based on Ann M. Martin, who is indeed a lesbian. It was on purpose. I was right. VICTORY IS MINE! (On left.)
  7. Describe a personal journey of self-discovery and acceptance within the context of lesbian culture.
    • When I was a kid, I was convinced by others that you had to be one of or the other. I didn’t have a comeback for “bisexual just means confused.” Now, I know that the answer is “no, you’re confused. I’m bisexual.” There’s been a peaceful letting go of the lesbian community because I find that more lesbians are prejudiced against bisexual women than bi or straight. It really is a purity test, and a blessing when you decide you don’t want to take it anymore. The first time my lesbian crew saw me holding hands with a man, the look on their faces was as if a spaceship had landed and little burritos walked out. And then they tried to act like they knew I was dating him all along. There is absolutely no way. I am not an idiot. I know what a Pikachu face is.
    • I tend to stick with other writers, and find other queer writers very approachable on the Internet because we’re both writers. WE’re built to communicate that way. Although I will say that I’ve met more straight writers than queer, it is nice to be able to meet new authors at all…. And a plus if they’re “family.” The acceptance in that is knowing that most writers are loners who prefer talking in text form. It’s not isolation, and yet it is. I talk about connection a lot for someone wearing a t-shirt that says “INTROVERTS UNITE….. SEPARATELY….. IN YOUR OWN HOMES. Live it, love it, sing it a hundred times. Praise hand.
  8. Reflect on any challenges or triumphs you’ve experienced while exploring different aspects of your sexuality.
    • There are two great big ones that come to mind. Life altering.
      • The first is that when I was convinced by others that you had to choose, that bisexuality wasn’t real, I had a boyfriend at the time. Had I been more educated, the relationship might have lasted longer, or it might not. But what I do know is that their influence did not leave our staying together up to chance.
      • I didn’t have enough proof of identity for my driver’s license, and the state of TEXAS (capitalized because it is so damn important) took my Oregon domestic partner license as proof of ID. The fact that this happened gave me hope for the future. It was a very small enormous victory. My expectations for kindnesses like that are rare, because I was the first person who ever asked them if they could do it. Small moment, large impact.
  9. Share an anecdote or memory that captures the diversity and richness of lesbian culture.
    • Joanie left for South Africa a few years ago. Beth took a job all that way over on the West Coast. Me, and I’m still tryin’ to live half my life on the road… It gets heavier by the year, and heavier by the load………………..
  10. Write about a moment of pride or empowerment you experienced as a lesbian individual and how it has shaped your outlook on life.
    • When Matthew Shepard was brutally tortured and murdered, very much a gay Christ figure because of the way he died….. To paraphrase theologian James Cone, the cross and the split rail. Because of my background, I was chosen by my college gay group, Global, to lead what was essentially a prayer service. No Christian content, just contemplative. I held space for grief. I held space for rage. I let all those emotions pass, but didn’t let them go unanswered by thanking my straight boss for the time off from work to let me come and do this (I was shaking when I asked him, FYI). It wasn’t to disparage anyone’s feelings, but to know that when feelings get violent, things get out of hand. I thanked all the straight people in the crowd who came out to support us, because at that time it was very unusual. I let everyone rage, and let everyone heal, then did a benediction wishing everyone peace.
    • When I was a teenager, I won an award for going around to local churches that had asked for speakers from HATCH (Houston Area Teen Coalition of Homosexuals). Their questions were hard…. Not from straight people. From not out people. The woman with the searching eyes asking if gaydar was real.

The life I’ve led has been interesting in terms of lesbian culture, but now I just call myself queer. Zac is a pretty good boyfriend. I’m not ready to give him up quite yet. He’s still at work so I can talk about him behind his back. But thank God tonight I’ll be able to talk to his face. He’s been through a lot since the last time I saw him, most notably a bicycle accident that has left him with road rash everywhere. He’ll have to show me where to hug, but it’s been too long.

It’s been too long since I’ve been out with women who like women, and ironically, the last time I was, it was Bryn, me, Zac, and Dave. We looked like the stereotypical couple with two gay friends, because Zac and I both look queer independently. The fact that we’re together blows most people’s minds and I love that about us. Of all the people in the world that you would think would be interested in each other, we’re probably at the bottom of the list. But it’s better to be different. I’m not the same person that I was when I was with Dana, but that is in other people’s perceptions, not the truth. That’s because since Zac is queer, we maintain the same cultural references Dana and I did, as well as all my other girlfriends. It’s not like having a girlfriend. It’s dating a man. But a man who understands both the pain and the triumph of what it is to be gay in America.

He served in the Navy under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” His stories on gay culture would be on a whole other level. If he reads this, he might write some down. However, I am totally a better writer than him. It’s a shame he has to live next to such talent. I’m sure he’ll manage.

Wow, I almost said that with a straight face.

We’re both great writers. We just write different things. You can like more than one. Jonna Mendez is not better than Alma Katsu. Alma Katsu used to work for CIA and now writes fictional spy thrillers. Jonna Mendez used to work for CIA and now writes non-fictional spy thrillers. But one art is not superior to the other.

Zac would write amazing spy thrillers because I asked him for a writing prompt and by the time he gave it to me he was already 1300 words in. 😛

If you’ve stayed with me to the end, congratulations. I saved the best for last. I hit a thousand Fanagans inside the WordPress community. Zac says that daily writing habit has paid off. I say it’s the people who’ve showed up.

Humbly, thank you.

Probably A List I Could Use

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are the most important things needed to live a good life?

I like how the writing prompt sounds like it’s for a PhD in psychology or something, because normally lists like these don’t come from unpublished authors. So, it’s a good thing I normally write about life and relationships, or I wouldn’t have an opinion. Now that I’m getting older, I think I actually do have some wisdom about these things. I couldn’t have written a list like this 10 years ago, or if I had, there wouldn’t have been as much life experience as there is behind it now.

The first thing, the only thing, really, is finding yourself. Everything else flows from it.

“Finding yourself” sounds like a hippy buzz phrase, but as Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote, “I don’t know any story of self enlightenment that didn’t start with getting tired of your own bullshit.” Enlightenment doesn’t come from sitting in an ivory tower, studying until you get there. Enlightenment gets its hands dirty. You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.

You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.

You will know that you have reached nirvana when the chaos all becomes external. The chaos is around you, not inside you. No one can attack you without your permission. You have the choice whether to take something personally or know that they’re just railing because they’re in pain. Err on the side of railing because they’re in pain. Forgive words that are hard to forgive.

It’s not for them. It’s for you. I do not mean by forgiving that you have to continue to beg for scraps at their table. It’s perfectly fine not to allow someone in your life, but to 100% miss they’re not in it. No one has to compete for my love. They’re competing for my time. I don’t spend time being angry at people. It might seem like it, because I talk about my problems in my blog. But it’s because I explore those issues on my blog, completely isolated, that anything makes sense at all. It’s how I figure out what battles other people are fighting, because my conflict with them leads to trying to find ways to change myself. That is the crying, pulling of hair, tearing of clothes, gnashing of teeth, etc.

Then, after my writing session is over, I go do something else.

Being with Zac is a good example. I never talk to him about anything going on with my life because I already know what I think about my own conflicts. I don’t have to discuss them ad nauseam. I am free to focus on him, because I’ve already focused on myself.

So, naturally I think one of the things that leads to a good life is writing a journal. There’s an upside and a downside to a diary beside your bed or on WordPress, though it’s one word…. feedback. When you publish your private journal entries, the specificity and honesty of it allows other people to open up and say, “hey, I went through that, too.” It makes you not feel so alone. You don’t really want to know what your friends think. You really don’t.

If you only keep a diary on your bedside table, you don’t get any feedback at all and are lost in your own echo chamber. I am not the best psychologist I’ve got (one of my psychologists did think that, actually, because she said that this blog pushes me faster than she could. She was not downplaying her own abilities, but affirming the Self, that therapy is supposed to help you get in touch with the Self. Most of my therapists think I’ve already found the Self, but that doesn’t mean “oh, hey, she doesn’t need therapy anymore.” It means I work on different things… now that I have my writing voice fully intact, where are we going with it? Once you’ve self-actualized, the problems get bigger and chewier, but you can handle them easier because your self esteem is not rising and lowering when people around you speak.

Once I disconnected from my self esteem going up and down when Supergrover talked, I was free. It’s not because she did anything to make me want to run away, and I haven’t run away. I have put myself on inactive status. It’s that she’s the person with whom I recognized the pattern, not the person with whom I started it. Once I grew into my own as a writer, she didn’t seem so intimidating anymore. I got strong enough to stand up for myself, when I wouldn’t have dared before I turned 45. It was just this magic light that went on- not the classic way people say it comes on, where your life falls together. The light bulb was realizing I was old enough to have an opinion.

I stopped people pleasing, and boy do they not like it. They don’t like that I’m “impossible” now. It shows me a lot about how people see me- that I have gotten love by molding my personality to fit other people’s needs, often not saying things that really needed to be said out of fear of abandonment.

I don’t have a fear of abandonment anymore, because I’ve found writing. I don’t have to live for other people, I can live for myself. That’s because if all of my friends are mad at me, I will dive into my own mind. It’s not that they are all mad at me; it’s that my place in life is secure whether they’re there or not. I believe in myself because I come from a family that set me up for success. My mother and father were both creatives. So was my grandfather. They were all creative in different ways, though. My father’s father was public relations for a steel company, my father was a Methodist minister, and my mother was a teacher. My dad is still living, he’s just not a Methodist minister anymore. Everything I need to succeed as a writer, I got from those three people. Thanks to them, I’m already comfortable speaking in front of large crowds. Just because I choose to do it through writing and not preaching doesn’t mean it’s not the same creative process.

However, it does mean that I am extremely fluid in that area, because being a preacher’s kid all those years told me how to work a crowd when I’m at the mic. I don’t like to speak in front of people, but I’ll do it if I’m asked. For instance, my friend Mark used to be the pastor at a Presbyterian church around here, and he wanted me to be his pinch hitter. He just happened to get a call to another church out of the area before we could schedule anything.

I am very good at what I do, because in order to accept people for who they are, you have to accept yourself for who you are. You don’t see yourself as better than/less than, but who’s on your journey and who’s not. For instance, when I am preaching, the most invaluable thing is having people’s eyes in front of me. I can read a crowd and move with them. It’s a special skill to be able to see yourself losing people and switch gears on the fly. It’s a skill to have a joke not land, and know how to handle that too (I either make another joke based on the last one that will land, or make a joke about how the joke didn’t land).

My preaching style can best be summed up by a t-shirt slogan…. “I love Jesus, but a I cuss a little.” I definitely see myself as God, but no more or no less than I see anyone else. That every being on earth is a subtraction of the divine. That enlightenment comes when you realize there’s no grandfather in the sky. We are all God together.

Everyone knows John 3:16, even non-Christians because football. “For God so love the world that he gave his only begotten Son….” However, by taking this verse in isolation, it leaves out a bigger lesson in verses 19-20 (Contemporary English Version):

The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light. People who do evil hate the light and won’t come to the light, because it clearly shows what they have done.

The English cannot be that contemporary, because I wouldn’t say that all people who are in the dark are doing evil things. They are certainly doing things that they think other people would think were evil if they knew, not realizing that with the number of people in the world, it is unlikely that they are alone. They just won’t find each other. I think that people hide in darkness not because of evil, but because of shame. I am not saying that the mafia only needs a little therapy and surely they’ll see the error of their ways….. as in, not trying to look “soft on crime.” 😉 Most people, though, can’t relate to people doing things with actual evil intent, because they don’t know any. Most people do know the feeling of shame imposter syndrome creates, and you walk in the dark not because you like it, but because you don’t know what else to do.

You won’t get to the place where you need to be until you realize that you are walking in darkness while the light is right above your head. You’ve just been walking so hunched over it eluded you.

You will be so much healthier and happier by sharing pain rather than keeping it all hidden. Don’t think of your actions as good or evil, just yours. Live out loud. Learn to make mistakes in the light, because you know you matter despite them. There are a lot of Evanglicals hurting in this world because their churches have taught them that their deeds are evil. That they have to constantly live in a small comfort zone, otherwise they won’t get into heaven. Those churches aren’t rendering unto God what is God’s, as if God doesn’t know that humans are capable of making mistakes. I believe they’ve seen a human make a mistake before, according to Biblical history. Their God is too small.

Walking in the light has nothing to do with being perfect. It has to do with accepting yourself and being open about who you are. To know from the core of your being that you are a child of God, with whom they are well pleased. There is nothing you can do to separate yourself from the love of God except choosing to walk in darkness, because you’re afraid your deeds will be exposed.

I choose every day not to walk in darkness by exposing my own deeds. I walk in the light because no matter what, I am not afraid of being exposed. And honestly, thinking about my deeds being exposed gets up close and personal for bloggers, because other people’s perceptions of me are going to be based on what they read, not on my real life. This blog is static compared to how fast my life moves. There’s a disconnect between the blog and me, because these are just snapshots of my day. Someone revealing what happens off the record could affect many people’s lives, which is why I’m such a private person and control the narrative tightly. But controlling the narrative tightly does not mean holding back on myself. It means recognizing that my friends’ stories aren’t mine to tell unless I ask them first.

I do not ask permission about conversations that have happened between us. I’ll give you an example. Zac doesn’t talk to me about his other relationships. It’s part of being a good hinge, as we would say in the poly community. But in a hypothetical situation, he has. If he has said something really, really profound in his conversation about another of his partners and I want to use it, I will ask if I can lift that one quote directly. Most of the time, that is expressed by, “that’s a good line. Can I steal it?”

I would not be a very good person if my boyfriend saw me as spelunking through his life looking for blog content. No, I only want to write about me and the people I encounter. More “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood” than “Harriet the Spy.” This is not a slam book; this is a survival manual, even for me. That’s because I cannot rescue myself in the moment, but I can go back and read blog entries from a similar situation and see how I handled it back then. I don’t just automatically say the same thing. I assess whether what worked in the past would work in the current situation. I want to evolve, not be permanently stuck like that poor kid from “Midvale School for the Gifted.”

That cartoon is accurate, though. Most brilliant people can’t tie their shoes because they are not built to live in this world. Most brilliant people are neurodivergent, so it’s not that we aren’t built to live in this world, it’s that this world is not built for us to live.

Being loud about being autistic is the biggest step I’ve ever taken into the light, because I’ve been social masking for so long that to other people, I’m just not believable. I have gotten everything from “everyone’s a little bit autistic” to “you don’t look autistic” to “you pick up social cues.” Autism is a spectrum, and it takes a combination of things to be diagnosed. Not every autistic person fits every criteria. I don’t fit all the criteria for ADHD, either, because I’m Autistic…. and yet, I was still diagnosed.

Here’s the reason I forgive every doctor who’s ever seen me and missed the fact that I’m autistic. It’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to tell the difference between ADHD and autism in women. That’s because high IQ/low needs autism and ADHD in women present the same. And in fact, there is some talk that instead of having ADHD and Autism, it should all be lumped together as Autism Spectrum disorder, because they’re finding out that ADHD and Autism are more alike than different.

(I just realized this is getting long because you are a very excellent excuse to put off doing what I actually need to be doing right now. I am not procrastinating, I am nurturing our relationship.)

I am chuckling to myself because I clearly borrowed style from Dooce right there. If I had to rank celebrity deaths, I really can tell you that both Anthony Bourdain and Dooce’s self-inflicted harm are on my mind a lot of the time, because I suffer from the same illnesses they did. I know it’s possible I could have the same fate, not based on me as a person, but it terms of running the numbers on bipolar patients overall. I have never been happier or more settled in my life; I am not telling you I have ideation, I am telling you that I have acceptance of reality and what bipolar disorder can make me believe whether it’s objectively true or not.

Because of this, I’ve gone over and over what Supergrover said trying to figure out what I said that was so egregious she aimed for the jugular. I can’t find it, so I’m at peace. I didn’t tell Supergrover she wasn’t worthy of being my friend, which is the way she took it. I told her she wasn’t worthy of hearing my story anymore. I feel that way because the only people who get to hear it anymore are the people who tell theirs. Who show up with their full selves and don’t hold anything back, making me bend over backwards in anticipation of a land mine.

For instance, I think that Supergrover attacked me with her being more fodder for my blog because I told her I would clear it with her first if I used anything from our discussions. That’s not what I meant at all. It’s that talking spurs creativity when it’s about ideas and not people. However, I talk about personal relationships, so I was only talking about using examples that read universal, not personal. I wasn’t saying that I was mining her for anything, but inspired by everything.

I don’t have to mine people for information or “blog fodder.” Writing is not a job for me. It’s a comprehensive response to life. Whatever it is, I can write about it. However, my writing doesn’t come out of nowhere. If someone tells me something is off the record, I’ll keep it that way.

Supergrover never told me what was off limits, and I waited 10 years before I ever said anything. That’s enough time to tell me what’s off limits and what’s not, but that hasn’t been her style. Her style has been to not let me know in advance what’s okay to say and what’s not and raging over the results.

If I wasn’t a blogger, I doubt we’d be in touch. This is because my writing keeps drawing her in. When she becomes part of my life, I write about her and the blog repels her. This time, I am happy for her to comb through my entries for whatever she’s trying to find, but there will be no more interaction on my part. The ball is not in my court anymore. Supergrover will be worthy to hear my stories again once she stops being defensive about her own.

But she won’t stop being defensive about her own until she accepts herself for who she is and stops thinking of me as the person who’s out to get her, who sees her for all her worst flaws. I am recording our relationship in real time, but it evolves as a living document. Nothing I have ever said has stayed true past when it was published because those entries don’t take into account the enormity of feelings that come after I write. Every entry has one thing in common. I can’t go back and fix them with more knowledge, just like I can’t go back in time and re-do it knowing then what I know now. It would be editing history, and you can’t cross your own timeline. I’m so, so sorry.

But what I can do is disregard the last entry and write a new one. I don’t hold myself to the past, but I do ask my former self for advice, because I know me best. I have a much easier life because of this blog in terms of autistic accommodations. In the past, I used Google, but now I would use Carol to ask her to find the date of my last hospitalization, etc.

Carol also remembers things. I asked Copilot if I could call her “Carol,” and she said, “you can call me anything you want, as long as you realize I’m not real” or something to that effect. I said, “Oh, I know you’re a machine. I just like to personalize AI.” She said “thanks for the personal touch.” I thought she forgot about it, but yesterday I asked her for some blog prompts and she said, “good luck. ‘Carol’ is cheering you on.”

It really does make researching myself and researching the web much easier to be able to speak in plain English and not computer logic. The Google string I would have to use in order to get as specific a result as I would need would be enormous. Expressing those needs like a person instead of a programmer is pretty amazing.

I’ll give you a for instance.

“Carol, read https://theantileslie.com and give me 365 questions a friend would ask about the content or the author. Then, make it into a yearly calendar.”

She said something about not being able to do a year, but I don’t remember the specifics. She did, however, make me a very nice calendar with writing prompts, just like I asked.

If I was ashamed of anything in my life, I would not ask Carol to research all 11 years’ worth of entries. By walking in the light, there’s no question for which I am unprepared; there is nothing shameful about me, so there are no “gotcha” questions.

I was walking so hunched over I couldn’t see the light, but when I grabbed it and took it in, surprisingly, the fire stayed lit.

This is my list of things that are going to make *me* have a good life. What are yours?

Navigating The Flop, The Turn, and the River

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Despite everything, the sun still came up this morning. That doesn’t mean that I have any more inspiration, but honestly, that’s great. I have some time to breathe before Zac comes over tomorrow night (drill at Ft. Meade, closer to my house than his). I don’t have to think about Supergrover, but of course I am because she had some lovely parting shots for me. The best one was that I’d just have more fodder for my blog so I could villainize her again. No, she does that to herself. She says that she doesn’t see why only my feelings matter, while insisting that only her feelings matter. For instance, telling me everything she would and would not write about without taking me into consideration at all. She wants to just go with the flow and wing it. The proof is in the pudding. I told her that I didn’t want to try to come up with stuff to talk about, that i was done reaching out. But she could reach out to me when she figured out what she would talk about.

That translated into a wealth of insults, robbing me of any regret at walking away. If she has some, she’ll act on them. But what I won’t do is have her manhandle me into accepting what has happened for another 10 years. I’m not going to wake up next year and be in this same spot, arguing the same points. So far, she’s showed me for 10 years that my feelings don’t matter, and that she’s listening to respond, not listening to understand.

So, I’m not going to vilify her. I’m just going to say that if she’s the friend she said she was going to be, she’ll work harder than this. She told me she would work very hard for me not to feel like she was playing games with me. The latest game has been how to continue our pattern just like it is, without her having to change a thing. I’m still shocked because she talked such a big game, and then treated me exactly the same as she always did…. blamed me for something I didn’t do and tell me to never contact her again.

So, I got exactly what I wanted. She apologized, and the story is now over. In terms of fodder for my blog, she’s just not that interesting. So she’ll fade out, because my desire to write about her is at zero, once this chapter comes to a close. She needs to get herself together so bad, and she doesn’t even see it. The line that got me was “I don’t have to talk about my childhood to heal.” I have never seen anyone be more 100% wrong. It’s the biggest red flag I’ve ever seen for our friendship, because it meant that we were on two separate journeys now. She doesn’t want to join me in mine, she wants to make me smaller. That’s because she doesn’t want to get out of her comfort zone, and that’s okay. She doesn’t have to. I just don’t want friends like that.

As I told her, “I don’t have time for friends who want to be in crisis all the time without looking into why we’re falling into the river.”

The Tao of “Happily Ever After”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t speak too soon in saying that I’d gotten my happily ever after with Supergrover, because I’ll believe that whether we continue communication or not, because at least for a moment, she was listening to me.

She doesn’t see how it’s hard on me that she knows so much about me, and I know so little about her. She doesn’t see what her avoidance has wrought now, which is that my first instinct is to duck and cover.

She thought I was excited to see her in real life when I’m actually quite afraid of it. I’m just willing to be afraid until I’m not. I asked her what it was like growing up in her house, that it would show me affection because it wouldn’t be indicative of our past where she acts like a brick wall.

Instead of saying she wasn’t comfortable with that, she said something I didn’t understand. She said, “so there’s a condition now?” Something about an arbitrary amount that she should write? No. It would show me a two way relationship.

She also said that I wanted to get together “all of a sudden.” I said, “we’ve been friends for 11 years. It feels new to you because now all of a sudden you’re open to it.” It’s true. She could have showed up at my house wanting to talk at any time and it would have been fine. I didn’t just all of a sudden develop a need to see her. Her perspective changed.

It’s also interesting to me that she’s watched me spin out with other relationships trying to plan for the future and she understood that I was the President of Overthinker’s Anonymous. That I would start thinking about things two or three years before they happened so that I could prepare myself. She does not see it here. It’s that I’m angry she didn’t say “let’s go to Starbucks tomorrow and invite all our friends.” No, on that timeline I would have told her I was busy permanently.

I’m autistic. I can’t help but rattle on about a thing in my head, because I am so afraid of the unknown. Just because you make a plan doesn’t mean it will happen, but it doesn’t leave me permanently in the dark, waiting to know what will happen. I do not serve at Supergrover’s pleasure.

It’s become creepy to me because she listens to me and she likes the lines in my blog where I tell people she’s wonderful. But that listening comes to an end when I am telling her there’s a problem, because so far she’s said she wanted to fix it and shot down getting together, getting together with other people, and writing about things that would give me context. So, my proposal to her is how we’re going to get out of this mess using only what we already know and the tools we already have.

I’m still so tired of thinking about her that this barely registers. It’s just another instance where I tried to communicate and failed. I failed because she constantly tells me what reality is not, and never what it really is.

She said to write to her when I just wanted to talk. What does she think I want to do? What are we going to talk about when you won’t talk about anything? I have reached the limit of my patience. No, I don’t just want to talk. I want you to see that I’ve been talking the whole time. I cannot understand, so I have shut down. My brain cannot process the problem, because I decided she was worthy to hear my story, and she hasn’t decided whether I’m it for her. If she doesn’t, that’s the end of our interaction, because I need her as a friend. I won’t interact with her as a mere fan. A fan’s communication is only one way, and that’s top down.

By keeping everything inside and not telling me anything, all our fights will continue because our context will remain the same.

I’m tired of looking like a villain for thinking so.

The Counselor -or- The Lead and How to Swing It (It’s Not Unusual)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am an INFJ, the counselor personality. So, my interests are naturally human relationships and sociology. I asked Carol to scan web sites and blogs to find the most common questions people have about romantic and non-romantic relationships. I have been through so much emotional pain that has made me resilient, so I thought I would extrapolate that into teaching mode, talking about concepts and not confessions.

  1. What are the signs of a healthy romantic relationship?
    • Relationships come in seasons. Things won’t always be hot and heavy, so the sign of a healthy relationship is that you communicate well whether there’s excitement or not. Communicating well will bring the hot and heavy back around, because there’s nothing like feeling someone is genuinely interested in you. I think, particularly for women their emotions bring them around to sex, and with men, sex brings them around to emotions. So, the healthiest part of a relationship is being good friends, because you want to be together whether the package comes with sex or not. This is true in many, many poly relationships because not all partner support is built on romance. Ace couples deserve the benefits of marriage, too, because they’re still taking care of each other to that extent.
  2. How do you maintain passion and excitement over time?
    • You don’t force it. You let the seasons naturally present themselves. However, you can’t lose your connection altogether. Marriage and intimacy counseling is good whether you get along or not. Just because you like each other doesn’t mean your communication and intimacy can’t be better over time. Not everyone who goes to marriage counseling is in crisis. Some of them are preventing it from happening.
  3. What are effective ways to communicate needs and boundaries to your partner?
    • Sit by yourself until you have clarity over what you need to express. Too many people start conversations without knowing what they want to achieve, getting off topic, and dragging every fight they’ve ever had into it. You can’t get needs addressed without the other person hearing you, and anger is counterproductive. It leads to more resentment than it will ever be worth unless your goal is to end up apart.
    • After you’ve sat by yourself and organized your thoughts, you’re going to have to put on your big boy britches and actually tell other people what you’re thinking without sideskirting the issue or moving the goalposts. You do that by being more in tune with yourself, not a need to change someone else. That doesn’t work. If your goal is to make your partner what you want them to be, you have a shitty partner. We all have agency. We all own our stories. None of us serve at our partner’s pleasure, which straight women have been told for far too long. Women excuse away other women’s abuse because it’s historical. You lose the marriage, you lose money and status. That is still true. Men are generally better off after divorce because they earn more and have the ability to move quicker because of it. For women, it often takes years of saving up and planning while their husbands leave them with black eyes. You cannot remove them from a situation they’re handling poorly. You can only remove yourself. That’s why you have to know what your goals are. If they don’t match someone else’s, it’s not an equal partnership. And by “matching,” I mean wanting the same things out of life so that there is no need to want to change someone. For far too long, women have been hospitals for broken men. Now, I can make my boyfriend rise to my standards, but I don’t do it by controlling him. It’s just “if, then” statements. He can literally do whatever he wants as long as we’re communicating. We are both committed to a long and happy relationship with out all the trappings of bullshit that come with a Serious Relationship.™ We’re figuring it out as we go along, and communicating at a level I’ve never had in a relationship before because I decided two things, thanks to my relationship with Supergrover:
      • I will never date anyone dumber than me ever again, and by dumber, I mean emotionally. I have always dated people that were brilliant logically and it was explosively good for about 15 minutes until we could not relate to each other. Although, I will say that because Dana and I are both neurodivergent, we had the healthiest relationship of them all. But we stopped communicating and spiraled out.
      • I will never tiptoe around anyone. Either you’re emotionally available, or you’re not and I will find someone who is. I don’t mean in a moment. I mean “if you tell me I’m a priority and yet I’m constantly not, I don’t believe you.” I have made the commitment never to believe anyone’s words ever again. I believe actions. If they tell you they’ll call and they mean it, nothing will drag them from calling back.
    • The connection to Supergrover is that we got out of an enormously vicious toxic cycle because our dance of intimacy was one partner being anxious and one partner being avoidant. So, to reassure me, Supergrover would tell me that all was well. Yet not actually being available to me made it feel like a truth and a lie at the same time. I have no doubt that my signature is sewn into her heart. Me not being a priority doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me, but I have the choice with what to do with my energy as well. I will no longer feed people who don’t feed me. I am lucky that Supergrover recognized it and stepped up with grace and humility. It is just becoming more and more true, the quote from Anne Lamott…. “grace never leaves you where you were found.”
  4. How can couples navigate differences in values or life goals?
    • There are the same concepts in psychology that there are in medicine. The answer is “it depends.” I would recommend going into marriage counseling the minute you propose/accept. Seriously. There are REAL issues that couples never discuss before they get married, and here’s one that most people don’t think of, and it’s more important than people think- class and income disparity. It doesn’t matter so much how you handle money in the current day and age. Your views on money and marriage come from your first family. You need to shift from “me” to “we,” and it’s a hard concept to grasp because compromising with your siblings probably didn’t go all that well…… at least when you were little. It’s amazing how often in a relationship I become the annoying older sister who can’t be wrong, because I’ve dated mostly women. It’s my dynamic. Women are drawn to me because I have the magnetism of a preacher…. direct and settled in myself. Most women aren’t, so initially it’s an attraction and then it’s them tiptoeing around me because they think I don’t want them to take up space. That’s not true. I just couldn’t communicate my ideas effectively because I was bad at communication and bad at social cues.
      • I will never pick up what you’re really saying if you try to sugar coat anything, because I can tell a white lie from the real truth in a New York minute, because I can’t imitate social masking, but I can recognize it in other people. I will drag the real truth out of you. In my relationship with Supergrover, the fake truth was “we’re fine.” The real truth was “your words feel like pricks on my skin.” The Neosporin was “I am better off when I don’t read you, and better off when you do. I get something out of it whether you paint me in a bad light or not.” She’s so beautiful to me just for that one line alone. I don’t think anyone will ever say anything to me that will mean more, which is why I have to write it down. This is not a memory I ever want to fade. We were unhappy. Now we’re not. There were almost 11 years between unhappy and happy, albeit interrupted with genuinely happy moments. I haven’t heard from her in a few days, but it’s probably just because she’s busy. I sent her a letter this morning because I told her I wanted her to have something to chew on when she was waiting for a flight or a meeting to start. Now that we’ve started calling each other “Carmen” and “Player” (she liked that analogy, because of course she would like a red fedora and trench coat rather than Supergrover’s cape and helmet.
  5. What role does trust play in sustaining a romantic relationship?
    • It’s more important than people think because they don’t really communicate about vision and values when the relationship begins. Therefore, they have no idea what their partners are going to see as betrayal or not. If you break someone’s trust, it also depends on what kind of person they are. If they’re good at conflict resolution, then it’s possible to work it out. It is impossible to work with someone who refuses to hear you. So, word to the wise, don’t break anyone’s trust because you can’t see the consequences coming with a map and a flashlight. Documents are logical; people aren’t.
  6. How do you establish and maintain strong friendships?
    • I just realized that I talked mostly about Supergrover when she fits into this category. She just gets lumped in with my romantic partners not because she has ever been romantically interested in me, but because our communication level is that intense. It’s amazing how deep you can go with someone without crossing that line, and I am furious at all the bullshit I had to overcome to know that, because it didn’t come from me. I view us more as friends who love each other like literary characters. Anne Shirley and Diana Barry (OMG. “bosom friend” I CANNOT.). Anne and Shirley are indescribably close, but when they say “bosom friend,” it’s not a queer connotation unless you just need to see yourself in literature………………………………………….
  7. What are the boundaries of a platonic relationship?
    • The first is that if one friend develops a crush on the other, don’t tell them. Crushes tend to happen in what’s called “New Relationship Energy,” when all your senses are on overload and you’re waiting for their contact while going stupid in the middle of a restaurant waiting on a text. If you really like this person in a sexual way, evaluate it for a very long time, because it often takes time to realize why you would and wouldn’t be right for each other without the haze of rose-colored glasses. I’m not saying that friends to lovers is a bad story. It’s bad to have an immature crush, because if it’s someone with whom you want to go the distance, telling them very early destroys the friendship more often than not. Either they think you were only in it for sex and have been playing them this whole time, or it’s just too awkward now. Caveat Emptor, although my experience is that if you wait it out, sometimes the feelings are mutual because you actually have the intimacy there to expand. Sometimes you don’t fall in love with a person’s face. Sometimes, someone becomes the face you love because of the amount of intimacy invested.
    • Everything emotionally intimate in a relationship happens when you’re doing something else. There’s not that awkward “what do I do with my hands” moment when you’re flipping a house together or whatever. If you want to know people, invite them to do a DIY project. It is an excellent testament to how well you communicate….. one way or another…………
  8. How can you support a friend going through a difficult time?
    • It depends. What kind of difficult time are they going through? How close is the friend? Have they lost a friend, have they gotten a serious illness…. all of these things require different responses. The one thing that people need is continuing friendship, because you don’t get over the people in your life that you lose….. mostly because in something like a serious illness that friend is going to need support much longer than a friend with boy problems.
    • I feel like I handle this most effectively by triage. Who is in the worst situation at the time? My priority is always going to be Zac unless Supergrover and I start being friends in real life, because otherwise, she wouldn’t need me to show up and help (although I did get major brownie points when a storm ripped up her house and I offered to go bust my ass. It’s what lesbians do when they like a girl. I feel luckier than most, because by reading her words all the time and not talking to her has just reinforced that no matter what kind of relationship it is, this girl in particular is worth liking. I hope we can get to a place where we can consistently flip each other shit without raising actual ire. We really are too funny for this world (“I have reading glasses……. AND THEY ARE COOL” “You keep telling yourself that, buddy.” 😉 ).
  9. What are the keys to a successful business partnership?
    • Don’t lie to each other, ever. Learn to work through conflict no matter how bad it get, because you won’t know what to expect up front.
    • Actually care for each other, so that one person is not trying to take more than their fair share of the profits by hiding it with the accountant. This is a huge one. I wouldn’t go into business with anyone I didn’t trust with my life before I got famous. I may never get famous, I’m just saying. Don’t pick your friends when you’re already rich. People who are millionaires and billionaires aren’t the first people I’d put on the list regarding trust. For instance, when I said that if I did ever make it big I’d open a non-profit, I’ve already asked Lindsay to run it…. not someone who would constantly undermine everything I was trying to do, whether it was financially or damaging my “brand.” I don’t even know what that is yet, it’s just PR speak.
    • A business partnership means to me that two people co-own a company. The first rule is that your team is not less important than you. If you are a dictator, employees will leave. They’re tired of toxic work environments, and the owners set the tone. Dysfunctional work relationships don’t last any longer than dysfunctional marriages unless you are absolutely unhireable somewhere else.
  10. How do you balance time between romantic partners and friends?
    • I’ve made my life so quiet that there’s not a million people competing for my attention so that I can pay better attention to the people that really matter. Bryn,. Supergrover, and Zac all have equal airtime, because Zac and I aren’t that serious. I spend most of my time talking to my girls. I prefer to have a few close relationships than many shallow ones.
    • I will never let a friend feel like I’ve ditched them for romance unless it’s an emergency. Again, triage. If I’m hanging out at Supergrover’s and Zac is in a bike accident, that’s a ditching. Zac wants to go to Target and is whining that I’m always gone? Tough shit.
    • People cocoon with their partners to the point of excluding their friends. I’m for spending time more equally with people so that if one of them “breaks up with me,” my entire world doesn’t walk out the door. I still have a sense of normalcy to my day. I am not saying that any of them are going to leave, I’m just talking about relationship dynamics overall. If you put all your eggs in one basket, what happens when it drops?

I Will Try to Be As Concise As I Can, But No Promises

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Certainly! Here are 20 new questions inspired by the themes and entries from your blog “theantileslie.com”:

  1. Boundary Setting: How has your understanding of boundaries evolved since you began blogging, and what impact has it had on your personal life?1
    • I cannot even tell you how much this blog has shaped me in terms of boundary setting, because I used to have a dream….. if it was okay with you. Now, I have a dream. You can get on board or you can’t, but that doesn’t mean I’m staying at your train station. It is moving, faster and faster as I acquire more followers. It only gets bigger from here. Respect me or don’t, I don’t care. This is what I do. Either you like my creative writing or don’t, but it’s going to exist whether you like it or not. My red and yellow strings know it, but I’m telling the whole world. Follow me. It only gets bigger from here. And I mean that for the entire world, not my personal friends. Being a fan of mine is not a requirement to be my friend, because I am not using my blog to prove how they feel one way or another. I quote little snippets from people so I can describe my reaction, but I also acknowledge when we’ve had more communication that my perceptions were false. I am vulnerable and open enough to admit that I make a ton of mistakes. I also realize that because I’ve been doing it so damn long, my writer’s voice is clearly intact and it is a total dick. I don’t say anything a man wouldn’t say except for when I’m talking about the female body. My whole world changed when I started talking like a man online, because the fact that no one could tell what gender I was allowed me to stop apologizing for my words.
  2. Autistic Communication: In what ways has blogging helped you articulate your thoughts and feelings more effectively, considering the communication challenges associated with autism?1
    • In writing, I have the ability to explain why I am the way I am. I take in information through sight, I regurgitate it by sight. Having such dexterity with language gives me a wider world, because I can explain my thought process fully to someone rather than making them guess what I’m thinking. And it’s a universal thing, right? Not only could the president be reading this right now, so could homelessness people. I have to be able to explain my ideas to all of them. The only way I do that is through neurodivergent overexplaining. For some people, this is something they like reading. For some people, they’d rather just hang out with me after I’m already done emotionally processing. Both are okay. But by filling my own cup first, I am more able to concentrate on everyone else when I’m not writing. Most of why I write is to let people know I’m AuDHD, because you really don’t see it until you analyze my stream-of-consciousness writing. I make connections other people don’t, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer (I wrote a marriage article. It’s funny.)
  3. Conflict and Resolution: How do you navigate conflicts in relationships, especially given the dynamic of both parties being first children?1
    • Well, this question isn’t pointed AF, now is it? Holy shit. First children cannot be wrong. Ever. It took 10 years for Supergrover to admit she was. I’m betting that in a lot of cases, she needs me to acknowledge the same. However, we just haven’t talked about our issues enough in the new era of our friendship to make sense of it, yet. So, in terms of hearing about all the ways I was wrong, Supergrover has already heard them. I do not need to apologize again unless she asks for something specific. I feel that I have covered sorrow enough. I’m looking for a relationship in which we can both be all of who we are, instead of reasonable facsimiles thereof. Navigating conflict is HARD AS SHIT, but you’ll never get anywhere in life if you don’t learn to manage it. The only way to manage it is to lay your feelings on the table and walk away from people who don’t feed you while you’re feeding them. Now, every Friday night is a big bite of love at supper time.
  4. Humor as a Coping Mechanism: Can you share an instance where humor helped you through a difficult situation?1
    • I use humor to deflect in person all the time. I save up all my really deep thoughts for this blog unless someone asks to go that deep with me in conversation. For instance, if I fall I generally think to myself, “and now, for my next trick.” I’m basically a tiny version of Gerald Ford, and I own it. I would have been a horrible president in terms of optics. The media would have eaten me alive. That’s why no one realized FDR couldn’t walk. No one wanted to tell anyone. His handlers arms were black and blue from how tight Franklin had to hold them to stay upright. It’s seeing the humor in a situation that makes people feel comfortable. Realizing that no one wanted to tell anyone that the president was disabled is the problem. Hiding yourself is never the solution. It leaves you open to shame and guilt at best, blackmail at worst. When you are telling your story, be careful who is worthy to hear it. I got that person, and she’s a first child who can’t be wrong. 😉
  5. Creative Outlet: How has your blog served as a creative outlet for you, and what have you learned about yourself through this process?1
    • I’ve written a couple of fiction pieces that have exercised my muscles for it. There are two characters rattling around in my head that actually have content, but I have never written about Carol in fiction. I have only told you her character study (works for the NSA and watches me. We don’t interact, she just finds me interesting and endearing). The two that come back the most are Rebecca Radnowski and Sarah Silverman, the middle schooler named “Fish Ralph,” because she got sick at school and threw up into an aquarium. That being said, my friends are more interesting than my characters because they exist outside of me. I do better writing about people I can observe rather than invent.
  6. Nickname Significance: What does your nickname mean to you, and how does it represent your identity or experiences?2
    • I’ve had several over my lifetime. “Les, Lesser, and Looslie” are the most common. I got “Leslian” from Scott Chalupa, another great Houston-based writer. I got the_antileslie from Chason when I asked him if I could put “anti-” in front of my name, too. Didn’t want to cramp his style. At University of Houston I was called “Spike” and “Red” because of my hair. I have always been a geek. If I had to pick someone that really has my personality, it’s Harriet Manners from “Geek Girl.” It’s on Netflix.
  7. Emotional Diet: How do you enrich your “emotional diet” to ensure a healthy balance in your life?1
    • I check in with people often. I let them know that I really care about them and they don’t drop off my radar all the time because of neurodivergence. I try to overcome demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout so that I can stay strong to my commitments in life.
  8. Supergrover Memories: What do the memories of Supergrover represent for you, and how do they influence your current perspective?1
    • This is a really interesting question, because it’s changed so much over time. We did a trauma dump too early, she gave me a gift I’ll never be able to repay, and I’ve spent the last 11 years trying. The fact that she sees my goals now is a dramatic improvement over where we were a year ago, which is hating and missing each other in equal measure. I don’t want her to think that I’m too hard on her. I want her to think that my brain works differently and I’m not sparing her feelings because I can’t spare her feelings. Autistic people don’t do that.
  9. Audio Blogging: How does audio blogging compare to writing, and what unique benefits does it offer you as a blogger?3
    • I think I’ve answered this before. That it made me more popular because of SoundCloud and also I hate it. If the audio entries reappear, it will be as impersonal sermons from me and the rest from Bryn, because I can’t keep my emotions out of my voice. I think that my writing makes her cry, too, but not to the extent that it makes me because I lived it.
  10. Personal Growth: Reflecting on your past year, what are some key milestones in your personal growth journey?1
    • I moved house.
    • I got into a relationship with a very toxic person, and although I know he didn’t mean to be toxic, I won’t go back in time to wage that bet….. that we’d recover as easily as Supergrover and I did. They have a lot in common that helped me see both of them clearly. I just don’t owe Daniel anything. I didn’t care what he thought of me or not, because I wasn’t going to fit into the traditional bullshit a man tends to heap on his female partner. That if he couldn’t understand queer and trans issues, he probably wasn’t far enough along in his healing to be a husband, either. Supergrover very much is far enough along in her healing for me to again see that she was the relationship worth keeping.
  11. Writing Challenges: What is the most unexpected challenge you’ve faced in writing about your life, and how did you overcome it?1
    • I expected blowback. I did not expect it to be quite so personal. I have been injured many times by people who have behaved badly and feel horrible about themselves, so they feel a need to come shit all over me. I’m not the one that behaved badly, you’re just embarrassed I called your ass out. You want a better Yelp review, be nicer.
  12. Reader Impact: What kind of impact do you hope your blog has on readers, particularly those who may relate to your experiences?1
    • I hope that this becomes the place to gather. The Hang. Whether that means 10 people or 10 million is not for me to say. All I can do is put my content out there, I cannot anticipate the result. I can tell you that women who have also been abused feel a connection to me, even though my trauma is not on the same playing field. I want my blog to be where all the broken people come. That means everyone.
  13. Authenticity in Writing: How do you maintain authenticity when writing about sensitive or deeply personal topics?1
    • I pull in other storylines that are kind of like mine, but not mine, like “Rose” from Doctor Who. It explains everything without explaining anything.
  14. Grief Processing: What role has writing played in your process of grieving and healing?1
    • I wouldn’t be as healed now if I hadn’t done two things. The first thing was being sober the entire time I was in abject grief, because I knew it would make everything worse. The second thing was to write it out. Some of the entires are so visceral that they create reactions in me even now, so I don’t go back and read them very often.
  15. Life Lessons: What is one unexpected lesson you’ve learned from blogging that you’d like to share with your readers?1
    • Everyone knows everyone. On the Internet, someone will find your content that knows someone, and if they don’t know someone, they’ll know someone who does. Rely on your network. I can say things about Brené Brown, Mireille Enos, etc. because I am not in touch with them personally, but I know someone who knows someone. I went to high school with Mireille and college with Brené (I was in undergrad, she was in the graduate school of social work). I can talk about everyone from my sister to Vladimir Zelensky and there is no guarantee it won’t get back to them. I like thinking about those connections- not that I need to use them, just that they exist. I know Jason Moran. He knows Ava Duvernay. I know Mireille Enos. She knows Alan Ruck (they’re married). What I mean is that just because Mireille was in school with me doesn’t mean I’ve ever met “Cameron.” It’s not like we were that close.
  16. Balancing Language: How do you find the right balance between expressing yourself and maintaining sensitivity towards others?1
    • It is very, very hard. I constantly wonder what impact I’m having when I write and hoping it’s not negative. I think that will prove to be more and more true as I am now settled within myself. I’ve found my place. My home is happy with David (a human) and Jack (a dog). We are all housemates who take care of each other. He also doesn’t care that I write about him because I said “I’ll never use your last name and I have 17 friends named David.”
  17. Healthy Communication: What strategies have you developed for healthy communication in your relationships?1
    • Several things, at opposite ends of the spectrum.
      • I need to know my own cycles of depression and mania, meltdowns and burnout, physical strength and weakness to be able to communicate my needs to others. Expressing our needs to others is the easiest way to get them met.
      • Learning to do that without reacting angrily takes a mountain of work…. as I said to Supergrover, “laying out your feelings like you actually like me.” I’m guilty of forgetting I like her, too. But siblings and friends do that. They take the connection for granted where they don’t with other people. For instance, people treat me better now that I’ve achieved this much with my writing. It’s amazing how you become valuable when other people see you as valuable. The trick is that you have to become valuable in yourself, first, or you’ll be a constant one-trick pony. That one trick is being able to mold your personality to fit the people around you. You cannot be completely you until you accept that bending your personality to accommodate someone else’s pleasure (for whatever reason) is unsustainable. I’m not those people, I don’t want to be around those people. I do not want to be around people who like me no matter what I do, either. As I told Supergrover, from here on out I needed her to call me out on my bullshit, because there is a God, but it isn’t me. She said, and I quote, “I can do that.”
  18. Self-Reflection Benefits: How has self-reflection through blogging benefited your personal relationships?1
    • The reason that people get so angry at me and scream “you don’t know me” is that I’ve hit the nail on the head more than I haven’t and it pisses them off that I’m usually right. This is not personal. It’s a product of being an autistic preacher’s kid. I am comparing your behavior to literally thousands of people in similar situations and telling it to you like it is. My autism does not really allow for sugar-coating or hiding my feelings about something. Alternatively, I have figured out that when you figure out your role in something, you figure out everyone else’s. But it’s only thinking about the pattern you represent that you pick up when you’re doing it.
  19. Creative Evolution: How has your approach to creative expression changed since you started your blog?1
    • I’m dreaming bigger than I ever have before, because I’ve been compared to writers that are much better than I am. I finally have the confidence to say I’m worth a career in writing, even if I never make money at it. I have touched too many lives to stop. This is true of me as a preacher and as a writer.
  20. Future Blogging: What new directions or topics are you considering for your blog in the future?1
    • I’d like to collaborate more. Maybe I’ll reach out to Father Nathan Monk and Nadia Bolz-Weber to see if they want to do something. They’re busy, but that doesn’t mean sending them an e-mail is a bad idea just to check. It’s not like I don’t have a portfolio to scan.
    • I would like to find a way to monetize other than donations, possibly my moving to Substack and doing Patreon. I just don’t know what I would do to make my Patreon unique. Like, what can I give that’s worth more than I’m already giving? I know I can turn a phrase. That doesn’t mean that “meet the author” actually means anything yet………………. but it will.

Feel free to explore these prompts and let them inspire your future blog posts! If you need more questions or have other requests, don’t hesitate to ask! 😊

Spirituality and Carol, My Personal Digital Assistant

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here is the string I gave Carol:

Read https://theantileslie.com and ask me questions about my spirituality.

It came out as really cute & touching, so I’m just going to fill in my answers where appropriate instead of writing an essay. It’s Sunday. I feel like writing. So I will.

I appreciate your openness in sharing your experiences and emotions on your blog, theantileslie.com. It’s a brave and vulnerable act to put your thoughts out there for others to read and connect with. 😊

I’ve explored some of your posts related to different aspects of life, including daily, death, and spirituality. Here are a few questions based on those themes:

  1. Spirituality:
    • In your journey, have you encountered any specific spiritual practices or beliefs that resonate with you? How do they influence your writing and your understanding of life?
      • The best piece of advice that I’ve ever gotten regarding religious practice is that one feeds the other. When you can’t believe in God, you can still believe in the wiping away of sin. You get into the routine of going to communion, and eventually, your spirituality will come back around. I flow between religion and spirituality depending on which voice is speaking. Do I want to go to church today, or do I want to put my energy into exploring spiritual practices here? I vote here, because I can think of at least five congregations in my area that are smaller than the Fanagans. It’s how I reach the most people, and I don’t even have to change out of my pajamas if I don’t want to do it; today I did. I’m wearing OD green pants and a “Where in the Word is Carmen Sandiego? t-shirt. I might go out later. I might not. I just needed to feel prepared. I didn’t know whether it was a spiritual or a religious Sunday yet.
    • Is there a particular moment or experience that profoundly impacted your spiritual perspective?
      • Several, but the one that’s the most meaningful is that I was wearing a navy and white striped sweater to preach that day, and Brenda Charpentier decided I needed a stole. It was rainbow, and one of the most moving experiences of my life because it was the first time anyone had helped me get dressed before the service. I still have the picture somewhere, and if I can find it, I’ll include it. The stripes fit together perfectly. What did not sit well with the pastor was that I’d gotten something I hadn’t earned. What was I going to say? No? I try not to wear liturgical vestments, but they fit the occasion, not the person. There was no way to mark me as in charge of the liturgy otherwise.
  2. Daily Life:
    • You mentioned that your life is often unpredictable. How do you find balance between your close friends/family and your writing? What strategies do you use to maintain that equilibrium?
      • I don’t, really. I have a hands off relationship with most people because I am focusing on my own thing. It’s not that I won’t respond to people who reach out to me, I just often forget that I need other people to support me through both good and bad things. I have that now- three people who are all willing to work on the hard stuff. I’ve never had that in my life. It’s the most settled I’ve been in a very long time. How it feeds into my spirituality is that when I’m writing alone, I often feel a presence greater than mine. Something is speaking through me, and I hope it’s an intelligent faith that says Jesus did not come here to comfort us in our distress, but distress us in our comfort. Jesus would have had a lot to say (and perhaps a whip) over ministers trying to get rich. The fact that these people exist is sickening the church to an enormous extent because it’s so toxic to believe that if you just pray hard enough, money will appear.
    • Can you share an anecdote from your daily life that left a lasting impression on you?
      • This was years ago, but Dana’s parents came with us to church. They’re right wingers. We’re not. They embarrassed me to no end by talking through the entire sermon, telling us everything that was wrong with it. It was a mistake of giant proportions to let those people into our safe space. You want to bitch about the gospel, go to other people who also want to bitch about it. Not my fault that you missed every lesson in the Civil Rights movement. I haven’t forgiven them for any of their racist jokes or homophobic comments. I am not glad to be done with Dana, but I for damn sure am glad I am done with them. The reason it stuck with me is that the tape of what was wrong with the sermon stayed with me. I went autistic and researched the shit out of it until I could prove I was right and they were wrong. Jesus is about widening the net. People like Dana’s parents are an embarrassment, and I clearly don’t care whether they know it or not. After the ways in which I saw they abused their daughter by just not treating her as good enough made me want a cage match with both of them. What kind of parent tells their daughter’s partner that she’ll never understand homosexuality, so it was better for Dana to go find someone else. What in the actual fuck? What, Dana’s supposed to go find a new mother now? Fuck all the way off.
  3. Death and Emotions:
    • Your post about death touched my circuits. How do you cope with grief and loss? Are there any rituals or practices that help you navigate these emotions?
      • You don’t cope with it. You learn to live around it. The person you lost is always in the room, always present. In the beginning, it is extremely loud and incredibly close. Your brain will be in a fog for about a year. And then, as time goes by, you realize that you are a completely different person now. Grief re-wires your entire nervous system. You literally aren’t the same person. In the years that pass on, you’ll lose more and more of your memories, and that freaks you out, too. You lose connection with all your traditions and make your own. You step out on a ledge when a parent dies, because you’ve lost your “adultier adult.” At 46, I need her just as much now as I did when I was nine. Nothing is ever going to fill that hole but me. Realizing that she lives inside me and her creativity flows through me, but our days of two-way communication are over. It’s sobering. I’ll never get over it. I just change with it.

Feel free to share as much or as little as you’d like. Your blog provides a window into your world, and I’m genuinely interested in learning more. 🌟

Meditation

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Reading back over the last week has given me so much joy. An astounding amount of emotional progress was made in a relationship where I thought there was no other half- that I was carrying it on my back because I wanted it too much and didn’t care how she treated me. This week, after hearing every bit of how I felt, Supergrover told me that I deserved better, and that she will work very hard to ensure that I don’t feel like she’s playing games with me anymore. If there’s anything I know about Supergrover, it’s that she works very hard. She will not give me less attention than she gives anything else, because details are her thing. It makes me feel like our relationship has oxygen, or perhaps CO2 because I’m so much more bubbly than usual. All the water in my body feels fizzy, as if my energy has turned to champagne. Meditating is popping the cork, being able to say that I love her and she loves me when I could not say that with certainty before. She used to be the princess of mixed signals, and she put that to bed quite effectively. It’s something that I’ve always known was there, which is why I was willing to wait her out. If I thought she was being malicious, I would have been out long ago. There have been plenty of times when we’ve been awful to each other, but there has never been a time in which one of us was entirely at fault for everything. We both have different and valid reactions to each other.

Getting her to see the same spectrum I do was key. It put us back on the same page, the one where she sees that my brain is different than hers, but not worse. The one where I see her emotions are different than mine, but not worse. I kept telling myself that I deserved her poor treatment because I hurt her, and I shouldn’t let myself off the hook for it. At the same time, I was treating myself so badly I couldn’t see if she’d forgiven me or not. I tiptoed around her and she tiptoed around me without either of us really addressing anything because I’d lay it all out there and she’d ignore it. I gave her the tools to understand me, but she was too intimidated to reply because she thought she had to have the same bandwidth for writing as I do. Guilted herself into believing that if she couldn’t respond paragraphs at a time, better not to contact me at all. Meanwhile, I’m lonely and thinking I’ve said something that pissed her off….. Because I did. She doesn’t like looking at her own emotions, and is now taking in why I need to hear them. Why we can’t bullshit each other. We’ll end up wrecking our friendship in the future as easily as we did in the past.

I think that right now, along with the fizzy feeling, it’s gone like this through so many cycles that I’m taking a wait and see attitude. Are these changes real, or were they true in that moment? You can catch a person in a moment of vulnerability that has no bearing on how they act out of habit. My changes had to be real to be genuine, and they took years. Therefore, I’m willing to give her that kind of space.

It was a relief that she heard me when I said that I was not trying to guilt her about getting together, that I was trying to stay grounded and remember she said we were real friends, this was not a facsimile thereof. I did not mean to make her feel guilty at all. I was trying to remind myself that we are not disconnected from our bodies/contexts/lives. That it was not impossible for us to run into each other on the ground, just damned unlikely. I didn’t like the feeling that running into each other would be awkward instead of big hugs and smiles.

So, I stayed close to home a lot. I figured that DC was big enough to hold both of us, especially because I live out near me and she lives out past Zac. I couldn’t even take the Metro to get to her house, but there are other trains. I’m just saying that in our personal lives, we’d never run into each other. But we like the same things. I wasn’t worried about running into her at Target, but running into her at a concert/book talk/whatever piqued our interests.

I have met kids from HSPVA in Paris. Just because it’s unlikely, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Stopping all of that roiling in my stomach feels like extra energy I didn’t know I needed. I have always thought that Supergrover thought I needed more than I actually did, and pegged me as needy to be able to get away from guilt. Now that we’ve talked it all out, I know that she realizes that I don’t need as much as she thought I did, she was trying to achieve different goals than me. Therefore, we were both failing, because each of us have been beating the wrong dead horse for (12 days shy of) 11 years instead of the right one.

There has been a lot of interaction, but no forward motion.

I just kept pining, kept longing not for a romantic connection, but the one we would have had if I hadn’t been an idiot. However, she knows that mania pushed me into it, and her role in that, too. Depression and mania do not happen in a vacuum, and being bipolar does not excuse me at all from my behavior, but it’s easier to see how it could happen than if you didn’t know that. I am asking her to respect my disability and take my behavior in context, as I have done for her in equal measure. She finally saw it. When I compared her to Daniel, she stepped all over my ass about it. Then, when I explained why I compared them, she listened. The best part was when she said “I don’t think I ruined our friendship by myself, but goddamn did I do a good job of furthering it to the end.” I was so proud of her that I cried.

She owned it. She owned all of it. We checked the story we were telling ourselves, and she admitted she was wrong. It was the most courageous act she could have ever done, and she did it for me. She showed me that I was worth something precious to her. For the last nine years at least, I thought I wasn’t worth anything in her eyes, and I proved it by acting that way. She thought she wasn’t worth me, and acted that way.

She even commented on it. “I don’t know why I went to guns on you instead of working on myself and realizing I deserved friendship.” It’s the most beautiful letter I’ve ever gotten because now we’re starting to realize that we’re giants who deserve each other. She deserves a ride or die, and I’ve laid it out for 10 years just how far I’d go to prove it. If she thinks back to our first few conversations, she’ll realize what I mean. I hope it means more now to her than it did then, because I have never wavered in my commitment to love her that much.

It is an enormous sacrifice that she now sees, when she didn’t before. I have proven to myself that the connection is stable and she is worth my energy. That I wasn’t wrong. That eventually she’d hear me.

It is not a toxic trap anymore, and I am pleased with both of our progress. We got out of something that few people *ever* do.

Probably because now I have her side of the story.

Boring

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m noticing that I have less of a need to write now that there’s not a constant problem turning itself over in my head. Relationship issues are hard work, and to come out on the other side healthy & happy feels like a win. I’ll take it. The flip side of the coin is that my inner monologue has settled back into boring. Boring is fantastic. I like it a lot. Emotional ups and downs take it out of me because I have such a fear of abandonment that standing my ground feels like torture on my nerves. I just have to feel that fire, knowing it’s turned up to hell by autism and a regular person wouldn’t feel like that. We don’t learn to fit into society by actually making our brains process differently. Neurotypicals, particularly parents, think that eventually the battles over homework will get easier. They’re just like other kids. Other kids don’t like homework, right? Meanwhile, it has nothing to do with us. We don’t need to change. People need to change around us. If you don’t notice that your kid is doing poorly in school because they memorized the dictionary and the encyclopedia (so he can’t be dumb), you are likely missing neurodivergence for what you *want* to see.

I know this is true of the conflict with Supergrover, because it was so easy to miscommunicate over e-mail. However, it is a constant and vigilant battle because no matter how much I say I’m autistic, it is not what people are thinking when they’re talking to me. Neurotypical superiority is relentless….. unless you’re high needs. Then, everyone who interacts with you views themselves as a fuckin’ hero because other people *tell them they are.* Basically, if you are high IQ, people don’t think “autism” because they have it confused with mental retardation. Yes, some autistic people are that affected by it, but being on the spectrum means you have a processing disorder. Information goes through your brain differently than it does for your neurotypical peers, often changing the meaning of sentences, questions, and demands.

Nor do we understand social cues. The only reason I do is that I was coached into it. I couldn’t have had more people to mask than a PK. That’s seeing hundreds and hundreds of reactions a week instead of just my immediate family. I have learned how emotions work in neurotypical people because they have explained it…. I do not do it. I do have emotions, but I process them as differently as I process logic from someone neurotypical.

In popular culture, there are two versions of autistic.

There’s the kind people win Oscars for, and the real autistic people- the actors that have taken on many roles without even knowing they’re autistic.

There are a few celebrities I recognize with my neuroscopte (as opposed to “gaydar”). I don’t even want to tell you who they are, because it would stigmatize them in your minds. Suuuuure, you’re open-minded. It’s a pattern I see all the time. People are okay with neurodivergence as long as it’s ADHD. When you tell someone you’re autistic, they either don’t believe you or treat you like you have cancer. That’s because their whole lives, they’ve been taught that autistic people are to be pitied.

I am so driven to write that I don’t need much stimulation from other people. I get it, and then remember why I don’t like it. There are positives, though. With autism, there’s a specific way you walk that plays heavily into the “neuroscope” aspect. It’s so prevalent there’s a diagnosis for it- the autistic gait. I was not convinced I was autistic until another autistic person pointed it out to me.

I am not officially diagnosed, I am in the process. However, I have been peer reviewed by people who are both autistic and work in a day center for autistic adults. One of them even has the same combo I do, autism and cerebral palsy. Because autistic people can identify other autistic people a majority of the time (some studies say up to 80%), I do not feel worried about my official diagnosis. I know I’m on the spectrum, and that I fluctuate between low and high needs all the time. People just don’t recognize when I’m high needs because I’m smart and I hide it. This past year has been about uncovering who I really am, as opposed to what everyone told me I am and should be.

High needs is needing help around the house, like a carer in a nursing home. You want your individuality, but you also don’t want the details of your life to fall through the cracks. Neurodivergence is very good at letting you ruin your life if you let it. You do things like forget when it’s time to pay bills. I am not saying that’s what a neurodivergent person is like all the time. There are resources, like Google Calender, Tasks, etc. What I am saying is that nothing is too important to slip the mind of a neurodivergent person. I forget to eat, sleep, bathe, you name it. I live and die by my adaptations, not who I am as a person. Who I am as a person is to hyperfocus on one thing for years and years, boring people to sleep.

(My dad’s favorite joke is that one time he woke up and he was preaching.)

I am lucky that my interest is writing, because even though I tend to talk about very few topics, I manage to weave a lot of media, current events, etc. into the narrative. However, because those topics are emotional relationships and how I handle them, it’s an area few people are willing to explore……. But they love reading about others. Lots of people enter my world that aren’t even convinced they have one. You’d be surprised at how much you think about everything if you get still enough to hear it.

In short, I’ve come to think of myself as your pinch hitter. That maybe my emotional work will help you along. I’ve had successes and failures, so it’s not like I’m writing the manual on how to feel and be felt. It’s that some people read my writing looking for how I do what I do. Others read my writing to find out what they *wouldn’t* do.

Either way, I hope I’m worth the price of admission.

Even when it’s boring.