There are so many people I’ve met that live all over the world now. It’s impossible for us to get together in person, but we talk virtually all the time. Forced to choose one person and one person only, it’s J.L. Henry. He’s a novelist who’s from everywhere, but currently resides in Norway. He’s partnered with kids and it’s a country I’ve always wanted to visit (I’m fascinated by building homes in extreme climates). Therefore, a great vacation to talk to J.L. soon would just be us teasing each other about our writing, cooking together, and just hanging with the whole famn damily. Because Norway is a long way from the United States, it may be a dream deferred. But not for long. I still fully believe that if Bryn and I want to go to Helsinki bad enough, I could talk her into Norway as well. 😛 Plus. she’d get to meet the great J.L. Henry, which is way better than meeting the great Leslie Lanagan. 😉 Oh, and I only said Bryn was coming with me because I already mentioned that we have plans in Helsinki and Kilpisjärvi (well, dreams without earnest money, anyway). If our boyfriends decide they want to drag themselves across the world with us, who are we to stop them?
It’s not about meeting J.L. Henry. It’s about meeting J.L. Henry in groups.
Tyler Moore is another author I’d really like to meet, because he took out a great deal of time one night to help me figure out how to get my “rising creator” status on Facebook off the ground. Tips and tricks on how to gather followers, etc. The reason it’s more infinitely possible for me to meet Tyler is that he lives in Oklahoma, which is far from DC, but not from my grandfather’s house, which is two and a half hours northeast of Dallas. So, it’s an easier trip to visit Tyler than it is to visit J.L., but we all know each other and technically DC is in the middle. Tyler and J.L. should just come to me.
Now that that’s solved……
Doctor Who reminded me to keep talking to my mother, that the conversation isn’t over. I won’t spoil the episode, but the line that got me was “he’s not dead. He’s just gone.” I will say that The Doctor is still alive, however. 😛
Speaking of the show, there was a new character this week played by a British actress that looks so much like Cush Jumbo (Varada Sethu- she’s Indian, but in the show also had Cush’s pixie cut from “The Good Fight”) that I did several double takes.
I love Cush because she’s done Shakespeare as easily as she did an American legal drama. Those RSD women. Jesus.
Although if I had to pick my biggest celebrity crush on an RSD woman, Helen Mirren has been knocked down a peg. Now Cynthia Erivo has my heart. It’s not because Helen is any less beautiful to me. It’s that I heard Cynthia sing the Pie Jesu from the Rutter Requiem on “Fresh Air,” and I knew we were kindred spirits (I used to have a fabulous recording of me singing it). Plus, even though Cynthia is British, she’s an honorary Marylander because she was the title role in “Harriet Tubman.” Please respect Helen Mirren’s privacy during this difficult time. Although if I know actresses, Helen probably thinks Cynthia is amazing and worthy of my affections so she might not be too hurt by this.
Maybe I should send flowers.
Too much?
And lastly, I would like to talk to my housemate, David, soon. He’s probably up. I should go and make him some coffee. I don’t treat him like a partner or a child- he’s got a big interview coming up today for a work from home job that would fit us both perfectly because we like our home offices, we’re both neurodivergent, and we have all the sodas we like.
If you are a praying person, please put him on your list.
When I was 11 years old, my parsonage burned to the ground five days before Christmas. All our stuff, including our new presents, were in it. As a result, I don’t treasure anything. I don’t have that luxury, because I realize that anything could be gone in less time than it takes for the fire department to arrive. I can say that my necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint on it is dear, but would I really be surprised if it disappeared? No. It’s the nature of stuff. My mother is not in the necklace, so I am not attaching her memory to this particular thing. I don’t need things to remind me of people, but they are useful. I wear the necklace every day, and gifts from my friends surround me so that I think of them all the time. It also means a lot to me when Zac and I have matching bracelets, even when they were $3. Every time I look down at my wrist, I think of him when I see the rainbow of our friendship bracelets and the maroon of our nautical rope ones.
Plus, now I’ve been through two house fires. At Wire Ave., we had a professional electrician drill into a live wire in our basement, nearly sparking the gas main and taking out the whole neighborhood. That’s the kind of situation where you realize death is no harm, no foul. There’s literally nothing I could have done about it, and death would have been over before it really began with that kind of TNT. There are only so many events that you can prevent in life. Sometimes, you have to fold and say “the plane is going down.” However, I do not think that I would have even seen the gas main blow. Gravity’s rainbow ends in disaster whether or not you see the arc in the sky first.
It seems like I’m complaining, but I’m actually advocating for minimalism. You cannot believe how much it has helped my mental state to have all my books, newspapers, and comics on my Kindle instead of as kindling. There are practical ways to solve all of these problems. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t think of them until after the house fire is over. Everyone’s library is invincible right up until it isn’t. And in fact, there is a very popular novel that has probably told you the exact temperature at which books will burn since high school. Gotta keep that temperature below Fahrenheit 451.
I am sure that Android tablets and iPads also burn, but which is more expensive? The iPad/Android or the 2700 books I’ve downloaded over time?
All of this being said, I believe that my books are my most important possession. The autographed copies of all the books from Team Mendez might go up in flames, but I won’t have to re-buy the digital copies. Their words are more important than their signatures, and as I joked with Jonna, “if I didn’t have a hardback, I’d just let you sign my screen.” Her Js are pretty adorable, and I think it would be hilarious to learn how to copy her signature only because Tony taught an entire room of people at the Spy Museum how to copy Vladimir Putin’s. I unashamedly made it though high school because legit no one could tell when my mom signed something or I did. My dad’s signature is a pretty lost cause, but my mom’s was just classic teacher handwriting. And in fact, forgery is one of my favorite things about espionage because I love FONTS. Forgery, to me, is literally figuring out someone’s personal font. I just don’t show people that I do it, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone or get away with anything. It’s just an exercise to see if I can. See a Tony Mendez magic trick, do a Mendez magic trick, teach a Mendez magic trick. I wrote it just that way because the axiom in medical school is “see one, do one, teach one.” Themes in my life present themselves over and over. I have a feeling that my blog is a direct result of trauma and creativity. Here are my two roots:
The fire has made it where I feel more comfortable blogging, and more comfortable with e-mail altogether; all my personal letters that hadn’t been sent burned. Then, later on, my mother’s air conditioner flooded the back of my closet, and I lost all my journals as well. In those days, it was devastating. I was absolutely over the moon about my emotional abuser from ages 12 to about 20, when things became more complicated and the trauma of it all kept me from enjoying her. That doesn’t mean that losing all the letters and journal entries I wrote about the situation weren’t important to me back then. I had not made the connection that it was emotional abuse yet. I just swallowed all her bullshit whole. How could I not? I was a child.
I watched Doogie Howser, MD religiously as a child. No one knew that show better than me (at the time, anyway). I have always been fascinated by child prodigies, and this was right up my alley. Because of my emotional abuser, I cried through similar movies like “Little Man Tate.” It was a salty, bitter cry because it was like I’d been taken out of the safe environment of my parents’ shelter and dumped into a family where I didn’t know shit from Shinola.™ Watching Doogie write on his computer for the last three minutes of that show changed my entire fucking life. In fact, I sent a version of this as a Tweet to NPH, and I hope he sees it. That show was just as traumatic for him as my own coming out story. We helped each other. Between Doogie/Wanda and Barney/Robyn, you can see how much he’s absorbed about playing straight. He had to for just as many years as I did, I just didn’t have the pressure of being on TV. But tell me, truly, how is being a queer in the 1990s and also being on TV different from being a queer person who is also the child of a minister? It’s not a different situation, it’s a different scale. Neil’s career could have tanked if he’d come out when he was on Doogie, because back then, no one believed that children understood things about themselves. It is only now that people are starting to respect their children’s choices, because being who they are is a part of letting them individuate. If a child is brave enough to say they’re queer, they’re queer (lumping gender and sexuality issues together as one community), they are. No one in the current society who is also of sound mind and body would call themselves queer if they didn’t absolutely have to in order to survive their lives without shame and blackmail. Institutional homophobia and transphobia are going to take eons to get out of the fabric of the American experience, because our country is currently a theocracy run by the most hypocritical heretics I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus is not your homeboy.
:::stares in non-denominational:::
I am dabbling in exegesis over the many pericopes in the New Testament over Jesus’s enlightenment (“Pericope” is theology speak for “an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.” Some people say “peri-cope,” but I think it’s actually “per-ric-oh-pe.” I have no idea if I’m right, it’s just how my dad has always pronounced it and he’s a professional (you take Greek and Hebrew when you do a Master’s in Divinity). Let’s take a simple one and unpack it.
Matthew 15:21-28
Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Here is what Matthew was trying to prove, in my opinion. The first is that Matthew was a Jew trying to convince other Jews that this was indeed the Messiah they were looking for. He approaches it from a number of aspects, including lineage. More importantly, it shows the exact moment in which Jesus changes his mind. He decided that the moment the woman showed such faith, gentiles were as worthy of salvation as Jews. Matthew was a man on a mission from GOD, trying to bring the receipts. I admire that in a person.
One of the reasons I trusted David implicitly the first time I met him is that bad people don’t love their dogs so much they get a DNA profile of them (Jack is half terrier, half chihuahua. This means that he is a very tall chihuahua with a lazy, I don’t give a fuck attitude. It’s quite refreshing because chihuahuas are known for being little hellions….. similar to what my grandfather used to call “101 Damnations.” They’re as aggressive and energetic as little dogs, because they were bred to run next to fire trucks. I would only get a Dalmation if I started training for a marathon, because one of my friends offered to take him jogging. They went five miles and DJ (said dog) wasn’t even tired out when they came back. Because we couldn’t manage to beg, borrow, or steal good behavior out of him, we ended up giving him to the runner. He died not long after of an astrocytoma (star shaped tumor in the brain that was impossible to extract). I couldn’t believe that he had cancer and was still running five miles a day. Interesting how everyone deals with illness differently. Some people cater to it, some people pretend it doesn’t exist. No way is right, it’s just that some people view rest and relaxation as the way to cope with illness, and some view keeping busy right up to the end as their calling.
I would like to believe that Jesus would have given the runner a dog and a healthy brain. That he didn’t have to choose. I liked what they chose to call him, especially in retrospect having lived in Oregon……. “Otis Spotford.”
Speaking of which, before we change to a different topic, Supergrover and I have this thing about naming our dogs and it makes me laugh. It comes from when Daniel and I were engaged. “Check this shit out and get mad with me (joking). You need to go and set that boy straight. He wants to name his dog “Ozzie” instead of “Virginia Woof!” (it’s always serious if I use an exclamation point. They are of the devil most of the time.) If I remember correctly, and I am paraphrasing, she said he was only on thin ice, but “Virginia Woof” was damned clever. Ok, that’s the kind of stuff from her I live for. Having a good line in front of her is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Supergrover also said that she disagreed with “Virginia Woof” and thought we should call them “Sidney Brisdog.” That made my day because I thought, “you get me.” “Alias” is my favorite show of all time. I would give goddamn anything to work with Jack, Sidney, and Michael. But if I’m really honest about my relationship with Supergrover, I’m not Francie. I’ve been Will Tippet this whole time. Quietly pining away and trying to put together the pieces of why this attraction kept coming up for me over and over when I could clearly see how pointless and stupid it was. My brain chemicals just flooded, like you do.
Speaking of which, when she said that she got something out of my writing whether I painted her in a bad light or not, I thought for the literally 4,000,000th time that it was such a shame she never let me marry her and have her babies. It’s the hottest thing you can ever say to a writer. I love your writing whether it’s good to me or not? Come the fuck on. Who has that kind of support as a writer, when the traditional line about them is that “writer” is code for “unemployed.” My favorite retort comes from Brandon Sanderson, who waited YEARS to get this moment. This dude came up to him and asked him what he did at a cocktail party. He said, “I’m a writer.” The guy said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” Brandon looked him deadass in the face and said “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.” It was the equivalent of walking up to Stephen King and asking him if he needed money. Shiiiiiiiiiat. If God ever smiles upon me in the best way possible, that “best way” will be getting that moment as well. Here’s why:
I had a complex about Dana’s parents. That because I was female and queer and desperately in love with their daughter, we had something wrong with us. I was right to be paranoid, because they were absolute total dicks to both of us. The reason I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here” over blowback is that my sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing about it and my skin was too thin to tell her that I owned my own story and to fuck all the way off. It’s the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a writer, that not telling her to fuck off. She silenced not only my voice, but my popularity as well. Wil Wheaton *used* to read me. *Used to.* Now, it’s one of the sources of my rage and a tape I’m working to solve. In some ways, it already is because I’ve gotten over the hurt. I can’t forget how it made me feel.
One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with Dana was talking to her about how much it hurt me to watch her jump up and down for a type of approval she was never going to get, and she needed to stop. She needed to go low contact because of what it was doing to her self-esteem. In my mind, once you get married, you are individuating from your first family. That what God has put together, let no man put asunder. That meant she didn’t get the right to cater to them and ignore my discomfort, because she should have stood up for me and I became the family problem. They were lucky to get a daughter-in-law like me, because any time an in-law joins a family they shake up old family patterns and it is not often pleasant. An outsider can see dysfunction better than someone living in it. An INFJ sees what it will take to solve it. But they didn’t recognize themselves as lucky, because they never saw that I was trying to make their dynamic healthier and happier. They just thought I was stirring up shit for the fun of it.
This presented itself by me complaining to Dana’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful diamond of a woman because she helped me navigate all of this having known the subject intimately. I told her that I was going to have to win the Pulitzer to get them off my back, and she joked, “oh, don’t worry. They’ll find a problem with that, too.” Empathy went a very long way in dealing with them, because it set off my autistic rage a lot. Supergrover can testify to that without blinking, because I told her every goddamn thing about my relationship with all of them that I possibly could, because I was constantly emotionally overloaded by them treating Dana’s sexuality like a problem to be solved and treating me like a loser dumbass. I was not trying to isolate her from her parents like a control freak narcissist. I was trying to isolate her from her parents because her mother told me that Dana was never going to get what she needed from her because of her limitations in understanding Dana’s sexuality, so it was better for her to go find someone else. That motherfucker didn’t say that in front of her daughter. She said it in front of her protector, mediator, and advocate….. words that will mean a lot to Dana because they come from The Book of Common Prayer. I viewed her as taking care of the sick, the friendless, and the needy. I have never told her that in person, because I thought it would hurt too much. I had to carry that pain for a long time until I was able to write about it. That gave me enough strength to kick her parents out of our house because I never would have done it if I’d known they couldn’t afford a hotel. For the first time, I got tired enough to raise my voice, because I was tired of tiptoeing around total emotional disaster on everyone. I said, “you come in here and you eat our food and you drink our drinks and use our utilities all while disrespecting me and my wife?” They got so angry that I yelled at her dad to “sit down.” He didn’t, but he sure fuckin’ thought about it. Sometimes, the only way to deal with a bully is to push back. He’s a lawyer, and the ace up my sleeve is that I am twice as obnoxious about the law as he ever could be and I have cornered the market on the asshole archetype because I’m a paralegal in the state of Texas. Come at me with Con Law or TRCP and I will instantly try to own your ass. But you can’t argue with the Religious Right. You just have to ignore them. I could. Dana couldn’t.
Jesus wept.
John 11:35
The more stress that piled onto Dana, the worse her physical health got….. making the connection that she broke out in hives for absolutely no reason at all in the middle of all our fights regarding all of this led to a lot of rethinking medicine; the reason I needed Supergrover so desperately to talk it through no matter how we felt about each other at any given moment. She won’t be my dragon and rush in when someone has hurt me when it’s her, but GOD HELP anyone who messes with me; she is quite capable of fucking you up in ways you’ll never see coming. It is delicious when it is not directed at me, and the thing she thinks I hate is the thing I crave. I want to crawl inside her brain to see how it works more now than I did almost 11 years ago, because we are equally taken by each other’s writing and she has very good stories when she’s willing to share them. The blessing of my life is that she may not want to meet me in person, but she likes crawling into my brain to see how it works, too. The curse was that she didn’t like doing it anymore. And even though she started a fight when she did it, it was not lost on me how sweet it is that she heard me. Tell me your feelings and step up, so she did. The disaster was not letting me respond and saying “I see how it is. What Leslie has written, so must it be.” I was telling her that I was allowed to have a reaction after I heard her out, not that what I was feeling was more important than her and “my opinion is fact.” She accused me of “rope-a-dope” when she went out of her way to hurt me after telling me to move on with my life. It’s unforgivable in most cases, but not for her. I love her too goddamn much and we’ve been through hell too long to give up now. But the ball is not in my court. She was the one that hurt me first by covering up her feelings that she was wigged out I was attracted to her by accusing me of something I didn’t do. It screwed us up and cost us time, not having an honest conversation. I handled it really well, and then as reality set in I had to create fantasy to get away from reality. But not fantasy, exactly. It was giving a story to information I couldn’t use with information I could. I can use our personal issues to illustrate what’s going on with us to drag her privacy issues into it.
The reason she’s so angry is because we’ve never had an honest conversation about boundaries on my blog, and she waffles between letting me be real and telling me that what I think is fucked up and all wrong without telling me what’s fucked up and wrong about it. That it’s lazy, childish, reductive, you name it. All the while ignoring that she’s feeding the pattern by getting angry and not just laying it out there because she’s frightened as fuck to do so. She needs to see that I see her so clearly because of an interview I saw with someone in her field that would punch her in the gut if she saw how much I truly picked up from it. That tape runs deep on how to handle her, and because she’s an IQ fan and I’m an EQ fan, I mean it like she’s my asset and I’m her handler, not that I try to emotionally manipulate her to get what I want. I am trying to be the tough love that she is to me (strident, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, I’m not going to do your emotional work for you kind of love), but I make mistakes all the time. Jim Mattox comes to mind. “I may be rancid butter, but I’m at least on your side of the bread.” If Supergrover’s last letter is any indication, this quote is relatable to her as well. I’m not innocent of this, and neither is she.
Editor’s Note:
Jim Mattox was the Texas AG (D) when I was a kid, and my favorite story in life about him comes from either my first political science professor or his wife, depending on who was teaching the class that day; I’ve slept since then. Anyway, when Mattox was AG, he was a drunk. He was out at a bar one night, and decided that he needed to sleep it off. He goes out to his car and gets in the backseat. The next morning as the car is being driven away, Mattox wakes up and says “My name is Jim Mattox. I’m the Texas State Attorney General. I’m a little hung over. Could you turn the radio down?” Mattox had gotten into what he thought was his car……………………………. #shatnerellipsis
She lights up my life all the time, and if I haven’t said that enough, I’m sorry- both to her and my audience, which are one and the same thanks to the fact that she’s chosen to stick by me no matter what. I think I have, but she has focused on the negative for so long that even if I haven’t said it in those exact words, she wouldn’t have retained it as much as something that cut deep. What she never understood is that I was trying to lance a boil, not irritate her. Patterns repeat, and I am never trying to hold someone to the past. I am explaining to them that the longer the bad pattern goes on, the less I want to engage because they’re hurting me. It’s a lost cause when you’re trying to be vulnerable and ask for solutions, and you become a problem because of it. I became the only friend who ever called her out on anything whether that’s true or not. How can she get through life without having conflicts with people?
Sometimes I wonder if she knows that I get so vulnerable I cry and shake when I go to that place of writing about her. That 10 years ago, I wrote to her, “sometimes I have to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears when I write to you,” and it wasn’t about anger. It was about my hopeless romantic showing up in my writing as a style. I wanted her to feel as precious as she is.
She fits into my theology very well, because she doesn’t believe in a higher power, but she does believe in paganism. It’s her theme. She loves the idea of Outlander, which eventually spoke my language. I couldn’t make it past the first rape scene until I learned that it was a fantasy built on Doctor Who (seriously. Diana Gabaldon is a Whovian, and she based Jamie on Jamie McCrimmon, a Scottish companion when she was a kid. She invented her version of time travel by watching Doctor Who as a child). The fact that we are both obsessed with novels that cover the same things from different ends of the spectrum is the perfect representative of our communication differences. In effect, I speak “Doctor Who” and she speaks “Outlander,” not realizing that both of our points are valid because they come from the same source.
They say that these are not the best of times But they're the only times I've ever known And I believe there is a time for meditation In cathedrals of our own Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes And I can only stand apart and sympathize For we are always what our situations hand us It's either sadness or euphoria
So we'll argue and we'll compromise And realize that nothing's ever changed For all our mutual experience Our separate conclusions are the same Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between reality and madness It's either sadness or euphoria
How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies Perhaps we don't fulfill each others fantasies And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives With our respective similarities It's either sadness or euphoria
-The Gospel of Billy Joel, Glass Houses
“So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing’s ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. It takes a very special artist for me to feel like they are speaking to me only, and he got me with “cathedrals of our own.” I hope that when Supergrover reads me, she realizes that not only is she entering my sanctuary, in it she has the concept of sanctuary. When I’m around, no one can touch her. She is the ideal child of God, the fallible hero, the atheist who is actually Jesus to more people than me, or Moses if she’s more toward the Jewish persuasion. I don’t know how she identifies. Wherever her faith background lies, it’s not the same now as it was when she was a child. Being able to joke about that particular topic is one of my favorite joys in life because of another friend I knew from the same faith background.
I told this other friend that I was impressed about one thing and one thing only. That it’s one of the few religions in which there is documentation all the way from the beginning that has eyewitness accounts. Without missing a beat, she said, “yes. Documentation all the way back to when he made it up.”
It is my hope that eventually everyone in that religion will just self actualize and say, “it got weird,” and move on with their happy little lives. Tom Cruise could probably use that advice (not the same, but relatable).
You do you, but okay.
Speaking of which, that was another phrase that irritated Supergrover when it was a reference to another blog entry in which I explained that “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That it was like telling the religious establishment with the snarkiest voice possible, “you do you, but okay.” It was not personal. It was me speaking truth to power. I was just being as snarky as Jesus, and repeating a line I hope gets stuck in people’s heads, because it’s emotional shorthand for being kind and taking no shit. BOUNDARIES. I tend to say small things repetitively because they do the most good. The music of the phrase makes it speak louder in people’s minds because they remember it. “You do you, but okay” means to me that you can uphold the system if you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
People pleasers do not realize that catering to everyone’s needs and trying to anticipate them is actually more problematic than open and clear communication….. in essence, trying to render unto Caesar and render unto God and you can’t serve both. Speak truth to power. Please, please, please hurt my feelings rather than keeping it in. I only ask that you think about the problem long enough not to give me a knee-jerk reaction, because I’m making the commitment not to react to it and I don’t want to regress.
Red mist rage while I can type with my eyes closed is not a productive use of my time, and is feeding into my autism to an enormous degree because once I’m overstimulated, it’s meltdown time. I learned this from Harry Wales in “Spare,” because I don’t know if he feels red mist rage because of autistic meltdown or PTSD, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same kind of neurodivergence because all of the above alter your thought processes and they’re your new normal. You have to learn to cope with them, knowing that your first reaction will always be wrong. Always. You’re wired to shut down and protect what you have left, not to open up and share your pain so that someone else can see it and help without asking. For people pleasers, you always have trouble getting them to express what they need because they don’t want to look like an imposition. Most of the time, it’s because people have been taught that they’re needy in childhood. You think you’re being a hero by keeping everything inside and you’re just burning yourself out constantly and with PTSD, not being able to regulate your emotions.
It was inextricably interrelated in my mind, and I’m not sure that anyone could prove me wrong. Harry, like Kathleen, Dana, Daniel, Zac, Bryn, and Supergrover (and even Franklin, my companion at Wire Ave., to some extent) are all affected by trauma that’s above my pay grade and always has been. That being said, because I grew up as a preacher’s kid, my first instinct is to minister them. Especially because Zac and Supergrover are atheists, I feel that approaching them with spiritual lessons without attaching religion to it is helpful in our communication; I’m talking about energy and not dogma. Sometimes people need an osteopath, not an MD. They’re the people I can think of as a good example of why the Mayo clinic is such a wonderful resource.
They treat the mind/body connection as so real- in a way that other doctors’ offices and hospitals don’t. There is also no national infrastructure for health integration, because mental illness is treated so differently from physical illness, as if mental illness isn’t also coming from a diseased organ (separating out processing disorders from depression and anxiety. The reason the brain is diseased is that it uses the very best lies against you to get you to off yourself because the brain is hell bent on protecting you and thinks that’s the answer. It needs medication and therapy to not feel “extremely loud and incredibly close”).
Editor’s Note:
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is one of my favorite books in the entire world because I have such a personal connection to it. Not only was I living in Alexandria at the time and heard the plane smash into the Pentagon while the paintings and windows rattled from three miles away, my birthday is September 10th. My extremely loud and incredibly close moment is perfectly expressed from that book……… That “The Best Day” transitioned into “The Worst Day.”
I have felt exactly that way about health integration for a very long time. The less Dana really meant she was forsaking all others, the problems with her family would just get worse. And they did. She started developing depression and again, hives for “no reason.”
All of this culminated in disaster when Dana invited her mom and dad to come and stay with us. It was great, up and to a point. They even let us sleep together in our own bedroom…… at their house, their solution was to get a room with twin beds so they could keep their imaginations intact. That’s why we never visited. My general rule is that if I ask for your opinion and help in a relationship, please give it to me straight. If I don’t, BUTT THE FUCK OUT because this is my marriage, not yours. But in every family, it is not the in-law’s job to deal with their partner’s family. My partner fell down on the job, and that played a large part in our divorce as well. I needed Supergrover to cope with that kind of pressure. I still have that love and devotion from her in large part because she’s wonderful at giving me advice in other relationships and I hang on her every word. My frustration is that she’ll work on all my relationships with me except ours, and it’s the most important because I tell her everything and she doesn’t tell me what she hears.
I was actually very humbled when she sent me her thoughts, not because they were good or bad, but because they were there. I only ended the interaction when it became too painful to continue. We were making great progress, and then she exploded like a firecracker when I really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. As I told her, “don’t let me be the asshole out here all by myself.” Then, it was her turn to recognize that she was indeed the asshole. I sent her a message immediately that said “you are forgiven. Honestly and completely.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference because it’s a line from Doctor Who, but that didn’t matter. I needed to feel the connection between Eleven and River Song to convey how I really felt about her. I will never be in love with her ever again, but because of my past with her and how much it affected me, I view her as an emotional support partner more than anyone else. It’s just not my decision to accept it or not. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. I was so happy I cried when she said, “you’re right. My first instinct was “LET ME GRAB MY PURSE. THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” If you get the reference, you’ll see how funny it really was.
I have no doubt that Dana’s dad would have thought I was brilliant if I was male. That’s because even though he tolerated me, I hung on his every word because he was a Marine and all of his stories have stayed inside me all this time. They’re just not my stories to tell. The one that I can tell is because it made me laugh. When cell phones first came out for intelligence officers (earlier than to the general public, I would imagine), the Americans knew how they worked, and the Russians didn’t. They thought they had privacy and couldn’t be tapped if they used them in their cars. I laughed so hard I was sagging in my chair. It does not surprise me in the slightest that my model for a perfect partner for me is military and intelligence (not as big an oxymoron as one might think) because I loved those stories more than I’ve ever loved anything. He sat there and fed my autistic special interest all day long. The thing I love about military/intelligence men (not because I prefer men, because I haven’t met many women in the service and only a few retired spies. Men are the ones that tell me these stories. I love all of them, from the motor pool to pulling a gun on a Colonel because he was being a racist bastard and that was the only thing they could think of to deescalate the situation- by making it clear just how serious being racist in the military actually is.)
My personal view is to baby myself, because I find that when I do, I am more able to show people that I love them, because my boundaries are not so overextended that I disengage. I don’t mean boundaries in terms of keeping people out because of their emotions, but boundaries on how much I want to hear at once. I like it when people ask me if I have the bandwidth for a call before they do it. I like it when people say they have serious shit to talk about and do I have the bandwidth to let them vent? As we say in Texas, “you better ‘redneckcognize.”
Because when people respect my boundaries, I am so much more comfortable bending them because I respect them so much in return. I will go above and beyond when people go above and beyond for me. I recognize Supergrover’s sacrifice, but she has not recognized mine as such. I think I’ll be waiting a long time, because if she was going to do it, she would have done it by now.
If she wanted to visit me, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it. Why did she snipe at me on the anniversary of my mother’s death instead of hugging me? I think it would have gone a lot further than making me angry as fuck for a very long time.
And in fact, the thing I invited her to do with me was on Mother’s Day. I only have this loose connection to it anymore, and I did not realize that’s what I was doing. Of course it was important for her to be with her family that day. But she didn’t say no. She agreed to mull it over.
Progress.
I have just been too intimidated and too humiliated to say flat out, “okay. This has gone on long enough. Only meeting in person will break our toxic cycles because we have no frame of reference to each other besides each other. There is no context to our relationship and seeing each other out in the world will give that to both of us.” The fantasy and the reality need to be managed, not ignored. I will absolutely die mad about that, because I got in very hot water over it. I didn’t ignore it, she did, then came down hard when she decided I should have known not to lay out what was really going on in my head and that her very specific secrets were not fair game but an overarching thousand foot view of the problem from all angles was.
I did not want to be the lovesick teenager anymore. I wanted to explain that there was a solid reason I felt like my heart turned into an 808 drum, that her love was my drug and that has proven to be true for almost 11 years. What kind of person thinks that deep a love is just a game I’m playing to fuck with her? What kind of person ignores how hard it was to say goodbye to her and Michael and instead, berate me for writing things like it? Or just telling me that she was incensed by some entries and touched by others, never telling me which ones touched her so that I didn’t have to be so afraid. I could know the boundaries I was crossing instead of guessing all the time to get my story out there.
I have caused a lot of hurt, but it has never been intentional. My story is for people all over the world, not direct letters to people. People would see my writing a lot differently if they viewed it as an episode of “The Moth,” “Morbid,” and “Risk!” (“Risk!” Is storytelling, but mostly adult content. Caveat emptor. I just love it because it’s hilarious.) People being able to read my writing and assess it like I’m Harriet the Spy are so close to the point, but it’s whizzing right by their faces.
I use my life as an example to others, both of what to do and what not to do. I allow myself to have a full range of human emotion, and not to dumb it down to protect other people’s comfort, because it’s not for them.
It’s all for me. As I work through my childhood and adulthood, I see the patterns that no longer serve me, and I have found that it was finally easier to leave the cocoon than stay in.
She’s still my precious, precious six year old. I’m just choosing to love her from over here……. until she realizes it’s not actually that far.
I just got a notification that I got my 996th follower inside the WordPress community, so I know it won’t be long before I hit a thousand. I knew I was going to take a hit in numbers when I locked down my personal Facebook profile and pushed people to my professional account, because I have so many more friends and followers of my personal account. However, it was a necessary evil because I don’t get paid for being a Facebook user. I get paid for being a Facebook creator. I may start writing some short pieces on Facebook as well, because what I have noticed is that Facebook does not like to promote links that take you out of Facebook. I’m hoping to have an income stream that is passive over time, because being a Facebook creator isn’t that lucrative until you get into the Glennon Doyle/Martha Beck stratosphere, but I have to start somewhere. Glennon and Martha didn’t become Glennon and Martha overnight, either.
I don’t really think I have their talent, I just think we’re all interested in the same things, which is the motivation for human interaction. Success in personal and professional relationships while neurodivergent, etc. Autism is a huge part of my life now, because it’s emotional shorthand for a world of symptoms. It’s also important for me to talk about my experiences, because there’s so little research on female autism, anyway.
Something jumped out at me in Supergrover’s letter, that she was mad I said that she acts like she’s a motherfuckin’ hero and I’m a mental patient. She went to the place of literal hero, like cape and tights Supergrover! ensemble. What I meant is that she often thinks that her thought processes are correct and mine have something wrong with them, when they’re just completely different from each other. Again, Mandarin on my side, English on hers. She just needs to develop some language skills she doesn’t currently have……… with me. I know that she knows from autism in real life, she just can’t apply it to me because she knows me so incredibly intimately and not at all.
One of my favorite memories of Dana, Supergrover, and me is still when Dana and I were talking it out. That I knew I was falling for Supergrover, and it could never be. So please just be patient with me. Dana was so incredibly sweet and kind. She said, when it comes to her, I am not threatened. I think I have more than proved my worth. God, she so did. Every day. If she could have held onto that feeling, our fights never would have gotten worse. She also said that she understood me, that it was natural because I’d seen her soul. She knew how it felt. She was married when she started crushing out on me. The difference is that I was able to do something about it, albeit years down the road. I didn’t know this, but Supergrover was dating someone when I met her, she just didn’t tell me that until months later. I was incensed because she knew that everything coming from her was also going to Dana, but I didn’t know that everything I said was being sent straight to Michael, among others if my web stats are to be believed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it did the least bit of good.
Dana was angry when she said it, but she knows me better than anyone else. She said, “you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to prove that you’re a good friend, and she’s always going to see you as a mental patient.” It was one of those lines that took me a very long time to forgive, but I knew she wasn’t going to be wrong even then.
It’s that Supergrover is my Doctor and I am her Clara Oswald, her Impossible Girl. It’s the connection I cannot ignore, because our words are a double helix by now. She is also equal parts Malcolm Tucker and The Doctor. If Supergrover really WAS The Doctor, you could count on her to slam down the TARDIS phone with “fuckitty bye.” 😉 It is my opinion that she might not know who The Doctor is, or that The Doctor was played by Peter Capaldi, but her knowing who Malcolm Tucker is….. probably a sure bet she’s in the loop. I never gave up because it was a connection I couldn’t ignore. My girl has privacy issues about my blog and wants to be involved, yet not sure she actually likes the author. Or, it feels that way to me. I’m not a judgmental dickhead, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even really kick her out of my life. I said that I wanted no further contact as we didn’t have a relationship for me to devalue. Prove to me that we have one, and I’ll play ball. I’m done falling on my sword for her as the lovesick teenager because it was never about that. It was a fantasy created to cover up reality. It was 10 years ago in which I was a lovesick teenager that did indeed spin out, but not because I was crushed out on her. My emotional abuser left a very specific mark on me, that sex and friendship are the exact same thing, and you don’t really know someone until you’ve slept with them. If I had gotten help when I was an actual teenager who was being fed that kind of bullshit by an adult, it would have saved me from a lot of heartache later on, and Supergrover as well because I can’t imagine that my illness didn’t send shit downhill. But I was never sick because of her. I was sick because of my emotional abuser. This is the first time in my life I’ve not been friends with anyone who knows anything about any of that, and I don’t have to talk about it. I am finally free. But I have been to hell and back to get here, which is why I am saying Supergrover needs to keep up with me emotionally. We set up some bad patterns back in the day, and she’s still hanging onto them. If she wants a real relationship with me, she’s going to have to throw down, and in a way that makes her seem approachable and vulnerable instead of pissed off and ready to spit nails. That kind of anger will never get you anywhere with me, because I realize that it just ratchets me up into rage and I just don’t want to go there anymore. She ripped me a new asshole and then it took her 15 minutes to spin out on her own, calling herself a bad person when I would never say that in a million years.
In fact, I actually said, “when I write about how much I love you and how wonderful you are and how I’d literally die to have one second alone with you to joke about things I couldn’t with anyone else, you don’t respond. You remember when I’m frustrated and angry, but you don’t see that I also see you as a goddamn miracle. If there is a God, they smiled when they put us together.” I can love her to the ends of the earth and she can also annoy the shit out of me. It’s about balance. It’s just that her response is “take care of yourself.” She feels deeper than that, but it would kill her to let me know. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t hang on my words the way she does, because she proved it. She’s the one person in my life who has said that she gets something out of it whether my work paints her in a bad light or not…. that I always have something worthy to say whether she agrees with it. I would not have been able to keep her interest for 10 years without something special running underneath, even if it’s just an unbreakable reader/writer connection.
I also know that she used to tell me she loved me. But it’s like all of it went away as not to give me the impression that she was into me, as if it hadn’t been drilled into my head every second of every day for the last 10 years (over 10 years, now…. coming up on 11 in the summer). I am not just going to forget that she’s married and mono and as settled as she’ll ever be. You’re never in the friend zone if you value having women as friends. At least that’s what they tell me. That’s what I’ve been working towards. Not a great love story, but yes. A great love story. Oprah and Gayle….. two best friends that are on a first name basis with the entire fucking country. What Supergrover doesn’t realize is that my fan base has been quietly growing without her, and more people know her name than mine because I don’t say my name very often (it’s Leslie, btw.). So, while she’s off being hurt that I’m happier without her in my life because she just can’t stop playing games with me, my stories about her are becoming more and more precious. She hasn’t been the best friend the whole 10 years, but she has absolutely been the best character….. a Siren.
Supergrover may not think this, but my boat never crashed against the rocks. I dragged her into it. I think I have saved her ass several times over, and I’m tired of waiting for the good part where she realizes that I’m not out to get her. As she said to me, “it seems like you’ve only taken away the bad.” That is objectively not true. Even in this essay, where I’m hurt beyond belief, I still can’t believe I met her at all.
People have problems, full stop. It’s how you handle them that matters.
I took a shower.
I got dressed.
I did my laundry.
I did my shopping.
Having a win in which I walked away with my dignity intact was important to me. Demand avoidance was not so strong today. I am making progress, however slowly.
The part that’s not so great about being autistic is not being able to manage practical things when you’re emotionally overloaded. My dad told me that he wasn’t coming (postponed, not canceled), Supergrover told me that she was mad that I compared her to The War Daniel, and Jack (who is also a dog) loves to trash out my bathroom when it’s that time of the month. It was special all the way around, and I’d had as much fun as I could take. I went to bed very, very early in hopes of starting this morning fresh.
The reason I folded into myself is that Supergrover once again contacted me to tell me everything I got wrong in my blog according to her, as if she has any validity in my life at all. She does, but it’s as a memory, a ghost who smokes in the back of my head. Why would I be so cold and callous? I’m not. She told me she had lost the ability to be a decent friend and to give back. I thought, “enough,” and I moved on. This is someone to whom I gave my whole self. I have dealt with every feeling on earth regarding our relationship. You can tell by reading this blog that I have drug myself kicking and screaming away from her, it’s absolutely destroying me and apparently, it’s not going the way she wanted it, either…… Because the way she reads all of this is “giving real estate to someone you so clearly loathe.” No, I’m grieving the fact that when you want to let loose with your friends, I’m not one of them. She doesn’t get to dump me and tell me how to get over it, too. We were never a couple, but it’s the best explanation for how I feel right now. You don’t count on the people who broke your heart to fix it.
I told her that I was happier without her in my life, because I am. I am happy without the up and down, will they or won’t they, “we were on a BREAK” kind of love. It was toxic and fucked up and anything I did to try and make it healthy was instantly suspicious. When I told her that I was happier without her, her tone instantly changed to “martyr.” She reminded me so much of my mother that I rolled my eyes. I moved on, I made new friends, all at her request. You can only kick a dog so many times.
She e-mailed me her thoughts on a few of my blog entries last week. I didn’t get them, because I’d forgotten that I’d set her e-mails to go to Spam on one particular account, but not all of them. So, she doesn’t get a response to her e-mails talking about what a childish, lazy, cruel writer I am and makes a point to send an e-mail to a different account to ask me if I got them. Why I wouldn’t want to read them is anyone’s guess………….. Especially when she came to find out that she’s just as lazy, childish, and cruel as I am and maybe she shouldn’t have just popped off an e-mail without thinking things through.
It was stirring up shit just for the fun of it, and I told her that. And in fact, she said that I devalued our relationship by lumping her in with Daniel. It was very clear to me that I wanted to marry the same type person twice, and it wasn’t bringing her down. Whatever she thought was “bringing her down” about that situation was self-inflicted, because it’s an idea she has about Daniel or about me, both of which live in her head and not mine. Autism is all about pattern recognition. I recognize PTSD behaviors in all three of us. I said, “if you can’t read Daniel’s tone and not see a compilation of your own greatest hits, you need to go back and reread.” The way they get angry is eerily similar, and it makes me feel the same type of fear.
It was really simple to me in the end. What relationship? How am I devaluing something you’ve said you’ve phoned in for years? Anything she liked about our relationship is probably a fantasy I created in my head to deal with the reality. I finally called her out on playing games with me, because I’ve finally had enough time apart from her to see it for what it is. Her game is that everyone else is playing games except her. Only she has a valid point. To her credit, she saw that she was doing it, too, and apologized. Whether that turns into a healthy pattern moving forwards or not talking to me anymore out of shame is on her. Her uploaded consciousness lives in me. I don’t need new interactions with her. My memories are precious and I’m not interested in watching her tear down her own legacy. I want her to add to it or leave it the fuck alone. What I realized a long time ago is that neither one of us are very good at love, but we have a lot of it. I am not “dedicating real estate to someone I clearly loathe,” it’s a wheel with many spokes and I’m writing about two 3D characters that I desperately love…… Both of whom are me, in a way, because never meeting Supergrover in person has never individuated her from me. Because I’ve never stood in front of her, she’s always lived inside me. Her words are given the entire echo chamber in my chest. I hear everything she says closer than my own heartbeat.
She doesn’t want that from me, and can’t stay away from me, either. I don’t want all of her drama, and was still excited to hear from her until I realized it was “All Shit on Leslie Day.” I want her, the real her, for everything she’s worth. But not if it means that I never have a valid point ever again. She’s worth a lot, but not that.
Here’s the string I used for Copilot, because as a blogger, the first thing I asked was “friends” and they said they could not research information on real people. Thus, none of you are fictional characters, it’s just that an AI capable of tracking your every move without telling you that has no moral high ground here………………. Search https://theantileslie.com and ask questions a friend would ask about the characters. You are all perfectly perfect in every way. There is no need to make you fictional characters. You are all enough exactly as you are. I am paining a word portrait, and that’s always going to include being a 3D character because as I was telling Zac, “that’s not real life.”
Who are the central characters in the stories on this website?
Supergrover is unashamedly the main character because she’s the friend that makes me the most passionate in life, and not about her. She’s fiery and intense, which makes me match her feeling for feeling when she is fully open and hearing vs. listening. The only reason I’ve ever wanted this relationship to the extent that I have is that I have no idea what she’s like in person, but online she’s fucking brilliant. She doesn’t have to write more, because all her other words are still inside me. I have memorized them. She lives in me whether she’s comforted by that or disgusted. Dealer’s choice.
What challenges or conflicts do the characters face?
It’s not about conflicts between characters unless it’s me and another person. I have no interest in publishing hearsay, like hearing Bryn’s side of the story on a fight with Dave or whatever. I cannot comment on the fight, because I was not there. I only write down what I observe, I am not a gossip column…….. as much as people would like to believe it. For practical purposes, I don’t give a fuck how they feel about the way I express my emotions. How they react is none of my business. The only thing I ask is to get some clinical separation before you come and talk to me about it, because I want your reaction to be yours and your response to be mine. Get all your anger out and be ready to discuss it without turning it into a knock-down drag-out. When people are angry about what I have written, it’s too much punishment, too fast. That’s because they attack me without really thinking about how they should respond. They just speak from the id and do not give a flying fuck whether it hurts my feelings or not. They don’t want to resolve the problem at hand, they want to cut me off at the knees for reflecting it as accurately as I possibly can without doing their emotional work for them.
I have been bitten in the ass for my armchair psychology approach to writing about people. However, there’s a reason for it. I am not trying to tell their story for them, but to try to make sense out of why they did what they did. I want to be able to give them the benefit of the doubt, and as I write about them, the good and the bad becomes clear……. what relationships are worth saving and what relationships drain my energy rather than giving me some. I am often best friends with Colin from “What We Do in the Shadows.” This is because I have a lot of neurodivergent friends who will ramble on and on. You can’t get a word in edgewise, so you listen to a lot of shit you never needed to know. I want to wait until I have the bandwidth to listen to the stories in which you came close to killing yourself. Again, people open up to me because I am an INFJ, the Counselor personality. That being said, I do not have enough emotional bandwidth to take on counseling as a career. I would be excellent at it, and a mess regarding taking care of myself.
Maybe later in life, when I have more money and less fucks to give, I’ll become an LPC or MSW. I need to work on clinical separation first, because when people talk to me my mirror neurons go off and I am overloaded to the point of meltdown a good bit of the time on public transit. The one time I really, really wanted to have a conversation with someone, her mom kept interrupting me and it was bullshit. I just couldn’t stop her from interrupting because the subject at hand was so serious. I was talking to a 10-year-old girl who was standing in the aisle while I was sitting down next to her. Children throw down truth bombs whether they’re autistic or not, so I wasn’t prepared for what she said, but I was prepared to help. I told her I liked her pink tennis shoes, because I used to have pink tennis shoes and I missed them (ask me how I lost them. If Dana is reading and she was drinking something, she just choked). I ask her what grade she’s in, etc. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “my dad’s dead.” Just absolute gravity’s rainbow (if you’re not familiar with the literary reference, gravity’s rainbow is the arc of a bomb). Oh my God. The perfect child walked into my life the moment I needed someone to talk to. I told her that I lost my mom, and we just sat there for a second, dazed. Then her mom started in with all the gory details while I just wanted to talk to the kid. She was young enough that her father’s death is going to affect her far more than me. My mom was at least able to see me through to adulthood, past my 40s. The last thing I said to her made both of us cry. As she was walking away, I said, “remember that your dad is still alive because you’re half of him.” It was the most I could do in four stops.
To turn that back around into challenges I face, It”s that people love stories I write about the random interactions on the bus/metro. Yet they rarely think I can portray them accurately, too. They believe that my observations of strangers are dead on, and my observations of them are wrong. I have been right so many times that I do not lose sleep over it. When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time. They love it when other people are 3D characters, but God forbid I love them more than strangers and treat them like muses.
Are there recurring themes or motifs related to the characters’ experiences?
The one theme that has been with me since my first entry, which I think was called “Apologia,” or something like that, is how to survive relationships with CPTSD. I have so many other “letters behind my name,” comorbidities that seemingly never end. It’s about how my brain processes logic and emotion despite that, because people see my brain as brilliant when I write this way, but not when I talk. Neurodivergent overexplaining in a neurotypical brain is called “making excuses.” I have problems with authority, and this is a big one. You have asked me for information, I gave it to you including my role in things so it doesn’t look like I’m trying to pass the buck, and you’ve chastised me. I have not made excuses for anything. I told you like it is.
How do the characters evolve or change throughout the stories?
Supergrover has the biggest arc, because it’s the story of how I fell in love with her twice. The first time, it was because I thought she was the hottest thing on God’s green earth, and more woman than I could handle in three lifetimes (her husband probably just high-fived me in his head). The second time, it was because of deep companionate love because I felt that even though she’d never be my wife, that didn’t mean we couldn’t be close if we wanted it, because our friendship was rock solid. Supergrover’s answer was to sweep it all under the rug. Mine was to work through it so the bad feelings got light to them and disappeared. She also has privacy concerns about my blog, and so do I. She did not see the ways in which I was trying to protect her and thought I was attacking her. The arc has been my romantic feelings and my process in getting rid of them so that we could relax into something easy and free. It’s not easy and free when the other person hates conflict.
Bryn has the most beautiful arc now, because we’ve known each other since 1997. I went to Portland before she met Dave to officiate at her wedding. Thus, the nickname “Rev. Argo.” It is the perfect representation of me and I love it so much. My two special interests are intelligence and theology. I would design a tattoo that said it, but I trust VERY few people with fonts. For instance, even basic ones. How do I know you’re going to recreate the ascenders and serifs perfectly? I do know that it’s a tattoo worth having because it’s a two word LDB (Lanagan Daily Briefing) on who I am as a person. That requires a special skill, like a Japanese writer who uses special ink and brushes.
Are there any memorable quotes or dialogues from the characters?
“My favorite comment was ‘I didn’t know the writer was gay until the end'” -on my marriage article.
“Painting my feelings as fact” -from Supergrover.
“As if it isn’t a wheel with many spokes,” which meant more to me than diamonds because even if she didn’t want to respond to them, she knew we had problems on both sides. It let me off the hook for everything being my fault all the time.
“Sometimes when we get the most angry and full of rage, we’re not even fighting with our partners. We’re fighting people who aren’t even in the room.” It was a comment on adding to the list re: my marriage article and it saved me a ton of resentment towards Dana because she didn’t hit me. She got confused and hit someone else. And I know who it is. I hope she does, too, and releases any guilt or shame. Their face got scrambled with mine, because I know that feeling so intimately. I have worn it on my skin. Most women do. We’re divorced because I don’t forget, not because I don’t forgive. She can be precious in my memories without new interaction.
“You’re like a 15 year old boy…………… and his mother.” Can’t remember which reader said it, but I absolutely fell apart laughing.
What emotions do the characters evoke in the reader?
I cannot speak to that unless people comment. I can only comment on what I control, which is my half of the relationship. What I want people to pick up is how much I love the little things about the people in my life. Supergrover is the busiest person I know, and sometimes she makes the clock stop only for me. It’s the most important thing in my life, that she’s giving of her time. I have never been railing that I want more of it. I was doing two things at once. The first is that I didn’t want more time with her, I wanted more letters where she laid out her feelings so that I wasn’t wandering around in the dark all the time. The second was trying to stay grounded. Of course it wasn’t weird to hang out because we’re actually friends, not a facsimile because we connect virtually. I only wanted her time if she was available, and she never has been. That part is completely okay with me. What’s not is waffling between feeling guilty she’s not responding and thinking about me frequently, she just doesn’t have the bandwidth to reply. Completely okay. What I object to is holding all that in and exploding when it’s a two minute problem to solve. I have asked her to go and do something one time, and she said “I don’t think I’m ready quite yet, but someday, perhaps?” She was trying to stay grounded as well, we just never made time for it. Such a pity. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is ride in her car, because I’m betting she drives like a normal person most of the time, but if I asked her to scare me, she probably would. She has the kind of engine that would be very effective at that. I think we would have had a blast together, but we just couldn’t resolve our conflicts. Those are the emotions I mean to express, but whether other people see that, I cannot say.
Do the characters have distinct personalities or quirks?
Of course they do. I have a random collection of friends in which I know in a lot of different capacities, and I lead a life that’s different than most people by seeing more in a day than others. Public transit is the credit balance of a writer just as much as childhood. You can write about people your readers don’t know, and neither do you.
Are there any romantic relationships or friendships depicted among the characters?
All of the above. Dana and me, me and me (it’s the stupidest thing ever that I fell in love with the character I created of Supergrover more than I fell in love with a real person. It makes me feel better that I didn’t cheat so much as develop a connection I couldn’t ignore. That information, however, did not go over well with my ex-wife…… but she knew enough to see it coming because the TARDIS had landed in the backyard. One person’s needs trumped the other, and I’m sapiosexual. Supergrover kept my mind incredibly busy, so I was ace for a long time (seven years) because I preferred it to romance. It wasn’t trying to persuade Supergrover of anything, just that I like talking to people I already know and am an introvert so it’s hard for me to make friends. I’m not shy. I have problems getting up enough energy to go out. I was incredibly devoted to her because I had the bandwidth. It was a lot, but I never meant any harm by it. I just wanted to make her feel loved and cared for whether she was my romantic partner or not. A yellow string indicating an emotional support person on the murder board of polyamory doesn’t mean less, ever. It means that they’re on the calendar because time with them is just as important as time with each other.. For instance, Bryn gets just as much airtime as Zac. It’s not about dividing my love in thirds, sixths if you count Zac, Dave, and Michael. It’s about being able to love all of your “gaang” a hundred percent. Your heart doesn’t get smaller the more people you meet. Your bandwidth does.
Zac and I have been dating over a year, my one red string. I am no opposed to the idea of having different partners, they just have to appeal to my brain and also be wired for polyamory because Zac and I are close enough that it’s not worth going through the trauma of breaking up with him. I want to help him be his best self, and I can’t imagine not being at his side when he asks for it.
How does the author describe the physical appearance of the characters?
In very vague terms and not because I want to. I have 2D vision and cannot place an object or person in its environment. Therefore, my creativity does not come across in physical description. It is easier to discuss what they wear than their faces. The most recent example is seeing Zac all dressed up in his formal uniform for a promotion ceremony with a fresh haircut and Rivers Cuomo glasses. It’s the most beautiful picture of 😉 I’ve ever seen.
Are there any character-driven plot twists or surprises?
Not on purpose. Because I’m writing about real life, if they happen, they are completely organic. I have not made up a story, I am writing the one that’s already in front of me by looking at the past. Past determines future. If you don’t reflect on yourself, here’s the motto you live by:
If you always do what you always have, you always get what you’ve already got. It is the only thing I have ever remembered from a company training video which empathized moving quickly.
The biggest plot twist in the whole show is that in season 23 I learned that I’m autistic and the way I’ve walked in the world all this time is a lie. I have always needed special accommodations to succeed and called myself a dumbass instead. I’m completely done with that. I’m not dumb, you don’t understand my disabilities.
What cultural backgrounds or identities do the characters represent?
Lindsay and I are mostly of Irish and English blood. All Europe, all the time. I think Zac is the same, although he got the redhead gene and I’m jealous. Supergrover is a minority, but I don’t think she would call herself that because she’s biracial, white and Latina. Most of my friends are white, because my black friends have moved away and we haven’t kept in touch. Because Hayat had so many rooms, I have shared space with a Cameroonian, a Liberian, and a Nigerian. The funniest part of this is that the Cameroonian invited his mother to stay with us. She didn’t speak any English at all and fell over laughing when I said “francaise c’nest pas comfortable pour moi” (French is not comfortable for me, one of the only sentences I can put together because of Michel Thomas). So, we spoke in hand gestures and fed me until I exploded. I loved her. She could have lived with us forever. Franklin was my housemate, and in retrospect I fell in love with him and wanted to marry him, I just couldn’t say it. We had a lot of chemistry, but he was determined to marry an African woman……………. who steamrolled all over him. The match wasn’t hard to see. He’s a doctor. We could have crushes, but it was inappropriate on multiple levels to act. I do wish I’d said my piece, though, and not because I wanted the answer that he loved me, too. I wanted the answer that he heard me when I said she was emotionally beating him up and I was trying to stop that. Realizing I loved him was just a side effect. I just didn’t have any jealousy, so him making a choice wasn’t my call. It never was, so even more reason not to tell him.
Do the characters have unique hobbies, interests, or passions?
Supergrover and I both like to read and write.
Zac and I both love fictional spies, and he was going to go with me to the Mendez lecture and got TDY (temporary duty).
Bryn likes to garden, be “witchy” (she is weird in the most wonderful of ways), and work with dogs. She also likes house sitting for people with kids when parents need a break, so that is a thing you know now…………. Bryn doesn’t want to adopt, I don’t think, but I’ve told her I’d have a kid with her any time she wanted. It’s not about the whole fairy tale romance of bonding over the baby. It’s that I can be a decent coparent whether we’re involved or not. Plus, she has a boyfriend now. Many hands make light work, especially if we lived together. That would be infinitely possible because Dave’s house is huge. This is not a reality in any way, shape, or form. This is just saying that if Bryn wants kids, don’t let being single stop her. She’s not now, but it was the thought that counted at the time….. one I actually meant. I feel like I’m too old to be a biological parent, but still young enough to coparent a kid that didn’t come out of me. It is fun to dream whether it comes true or not, like inviting Supergrover to spend time with me in Viet Nam. If she doesn’t have the bandwidth, cool. But I wasn’t wrong for asking. Trying to stay grounded, remember?
Are there any character arcs that stand out?
Yes, but only within me. I feel that because our relationship has always been virtual, it allowed us to say things to each other that we wouldn’t have told anyone else, then got mad we did it on both sides. The arc has been how to come down from autistic meltdown and burnout to allow myself to move past all of it. Whether she comes back is not up to me. Whether she’s changed her behavior is up to me. I have to think about what I will tolerate as a blogger and as a human.
Dana went from my favorite person in the entire world bar none to the one that hurt me the most, because even though I’ve had big emotional fights with people, I’ve never been hit until she did it. I had a black eye and phantom pain for weeks. As I have said before, I have forgiven her and that has come to comfort me. However, it is interesting to note that when I said I had “phantom pain,” my nerves started to burn in that part of my face. I found out why you never hit a girl with glasses because it wasn’t the hit that fucked me up. It was my glasses smashing into my face.
Zac has gone from a casual friend to my favorite ally in life. Because we have a special niche instead of relying on each other for everything, I can see this relationship long, long into the future. We just really don’t have much to fight about because we work hard at staying on the same page. He’s only been a bad hinge once in our entire relationship, and that’s not bad. It was just growing pains. By “being a good hinge,” it’s protecting me by not telling me about problems in any of his other relationships except for the barest minimum. So far, he hasn’t even asked me opinions when the issue has to do with me, because he knows that’s not my business to handle. It’s his. What his other partners think of me is none of my business, because I get to date him whether anyone else likes it or not. No one gets veto power. We just go parallel and stay out of each other’s way. Nothing matters except that Zac and I are solid. Anything other than that is above my pay grade.
How do the characters interact with each other?
I have traditionally kept up with Supergrover through Gmail, because it catalogues conversations just like instant messages and it’s easier for her to get e-mail on the go. She can pick it up on her laptop or her phone that way (as opposed to using iMessage or SMS). When we’re both online at the same time, e-mails fly fast and furious. When we’re not, I write long letters because I like to imagine that she puts down her favorite novel to read me. I am not wrong.
Are there any morally ambiguous or complex characters?
Everyone in the world, no matter who I write about- from Margaret Cho to Bryn and Zac is morally ambiguous. It’s human nature. To exclude anyone from this is devaluing what the meaning of “human” is in the first place.
What motivates the characters’ actions and decisions?
I can only speak for my motivations in writing, because I am not responsible for anyone else’s reaction. What motivates my actions and decisions is reading my own blog and picking out the things I need to rethink. I need my own character to grow and change more than the proverbial “them.”
Do the characters face external obstacles or internal struggles?
Yes, but only with me. Anything else is hearsay and useless. I only want to write about how I handle a situation, not how someone else is handling theirs. I call people out on behavior when it hurts me, but that is not a way to “get back at them.” It’s being able to remind myself long after I’ve supposedly forgotten why reaching out is a bad idea. If they’ve hurt me badly, there’s no chance in taking another risk. They become memories as I gain empathy and remember people fondly again once the anger has passed.
Are there any character-driven conflicts or rivalries?
One that’s really cute:
I talked to Jonna Mendez at the release of “In True Face,” and I told her that one day I’d write something as good as she did. She deadass looked me in the face and said, “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that. There was a gleam in her eyes. I said, “I’m going to be laughing about that for three years,” because she didn’t know I spoke “migroaggression” and nearly spit out her water. She teased me as a writer. I would follow that woman into the ocean no questions asked. I think her employees felt the same way.
One that was really obnoxious:
The man I wanted to marry spun out on his own after I went to bed and thought I was being a hardass for not responding. So, he broke up with me while I was asleep. It was the most nonsensical thing I’d ever been through, which is why I shut him down when he said maybe later in life we could try again. No one gets over that kind of anger and abandonment in a short period of time, enough to end a relationship in two hours because he was so mad that he told me he goes off the grid when he’s in the middle of something and not to worry if he disappears. Then, he exploded at me for not contacting him for a whole day. I pointed out his hypocrisy without saying he was a bad person, and he tried to hit me emotionally with a sniper bullet, saying he was a better writer than me, that if I kept writing about him he was going to create a blog specifically designed to take me down (why would I care? Everyone is allowed to tell their story), and he was doing me a favor by not posting it on my blog. That’s the only reason I posted it on my blog. I don’t give a fuck how I come off in his letter, because I know what’s truth and so do you if you’ve been reading what I’ve been saying. Because he and Supergrover have so much in common, I’m betting he took a whole lot of offense at nothing. I was showing why I didn’t want the same toxic cycle with Daniel I’d already been living for 10 years. His behavior came off like an angry little boy, and he got mad that I told him that. He extrapolated that into namecalling, but that’s not what I meant. It never is. Someone’s self-esteem tells them what they hear. Someone’s self-esteem being in the trash basket tells them you mean they’re a piece of shit whether or not it’s true.
How does the author create empathy or connection with the characters?
By being as organic as I can possibly be. Telling you what grew out of what even if correlation is not causation because I hold no authority over what someone is really thinking, but I do hold authority over trying to figure out what went wrong. I know that by doing so, people come out of the woodworks to tell me stories that they were thinking of as they read. I don’t create empathy or connection for my characters. They write their own, because my observations give you a view into their lives when I am able to see it. What they are is what they are. If you have gone through something similar to them, you will feel empathy and you will feel heard.
Which character resonates with you the most, and why?
Supergrover, because half this blog is just ripping her off blind. Because she’s a 3D character. She is present whether we’re in each other’s lives, or a ghost that comes to sit with me when I need her the most.
I will never have a relationship with anyone the way I have previously. I have too much information about myself not to completely change the way I interact with people, both in having words for “a list of what’s wrong with me and why,” and in listening to another person in a different way, knowing everything is in Mandarin on my side and English on theirs. We may have to go three or four rounds for both of us to get our stories straight, because in the beginning we each thought the other was saying something different. I do not have patience for those who do not also realize the same. That the translation layer is not just mine to own. Neurotypical is “standard,” not “correct.” Therefore, a neurodivergent brain does not mean that I am incapable of understanding. We are both struggling under the same communication issue. The problem is that neurotypical have an air of superiority about it, which leads to anxiety-filled neurodivergent overexplaining. Very, very few people in my life have realized I’m different, but not stupid. No one would ever say that, of course. They just don’t want to talk to me because it’s too hard. While they’re feeling sorry for themselves that I just won’t “get it together” and “not live up to my potential” as to what they need me to be, I am generally left alone. It’s a major reason why I blog. People love how my brain works unless they’re talking to me, because when I’m in front of them their air of superiority over being neurotypical takes over no matter how brilliant I seem from my writing. Neurotypicals infantilize you, full stop.
I’ll give you a for-instance. I don’t remember how it came up, but I said something like “I’m autistic and my special interest is intelligence,” or something like that. It was in context to the conversation, I just don’t remember what it was. The leader of the group was like, “aww, that’s so nice. Do you have lots of cool spy gadgets in your room?” I didn’t react to it, but the tone made me think she thought I was nine.
As for “do I have spy gadgets,” the answer is no. I have autographed hardbacks from spies that became writers after they left CIA. They don’t make “cool spy gadgets” for people like me unless I had Keith Melton money.
Keith Melton is the largest private collector of CIA and other intelligence agencies’ UNCLASS gadgets that sell at places like Sotheby’s. You’re not going to be paying six figures until trying to buy an Enigma machine or something similar. I also like really small houses, so if I did start collecting stuff like that, it would be on loan to the spy museum just like him. But if this is what his public collection looks like, I’d give an arm and a leg to see his private collection. I don’t think he’s going to part with everything precious long-term.
I would sacrifice holding all my “cool spy gadgets” at home.
I have sacrificed friends to the natural consequences of my blog. I have freedom of speech, not power over whether people are attracted towards me because of it. I did not sacrifice friends with whom I had problems, but friends with whom I had problems about this. If you care that I blog about my life, then you cannot be my friend. It is as simple as that. I have enough on my plate without worrying about how I’m going to be criticized in advance when I was never supposed to be responsible for your reaction in the first place. And if I write something you don’t like, you’re going to be a lot better off coming and talking to me about it, rather than talking behind my back. You’ll actually get results because we have resolved our conflict. Art imitates life. I am not going to make up the past to fit your narrative of my experience, but I am going to change as we do.
There is a difference between loving a writer and supporting them. Loving a writer means praising them when they do something you like. Supporting a writer means being willing to work things through by accepting my reactions as valid. That I don’t just sit here and make things up. If I said someone had a tangle with me, they did. But I am not looking at it like retribution, because I’m getting my feelings out whether they come back or not. They are not responsible for, nor do they have to like what I am writing. But if they’re offended, it’s up to them to change the channel, because I cannot change the authenticity I show here.
There are two reasons “your side” is not represented. The first is if someone is avoidant. I can craft beautiful sentences even when someone is angry because I’m so grateful that anger is a transitive state. It was easy for Supergrover and Daniel (and all the other friends I’ve lost) to be angry about what I wrote and over the moon about it in one breath. That’s because our stories didn’t match the ones we were telling ourselves. If you give me no information, I am writing about what I think to become settled over it. I never want to come across as catering to people who will not show me their feelings as well. I have had too many lopsided relationships that way, because they hold in their feelings and get annoyed while my love grows deeper because I’m being assured nothing is wrong. They want less contact, and I want more because they save up too much anger and bust my fairy tale without a thought.
Meanwhile, everything that they’re angry about is 100% their fault, because if they don’t tell me anything, I’m just going to write about me. One of the things that Supergrover said to me that kicked me in the stomach was, “as if everything I do has to do with you…..” It’s not that at all. It’s that this is a personal diary, and I’m not going to root through your head. I’m going to say what I think is going on- the story I’m telling myself. Supergrover would have liked it even less if I tried to guess what she meant.
It’s a group project I’ve carried on my back, because I didn’t know the real story. I take everything literally, so I didn’t start getting mad at Supergrover’s avoidance until it was too clear to me what she was doing and I couldn’t ignore it anymore, because my self esteem just kept getting lower and lower as she pegged me as the only person who ever had problems with her and I was the only person who ever criticized her. I think what she means is that she has a lot of people around her who will do what she says without asking any questions. I am not one of them. I speak truth to power and she doesn’t think I have that right, or at least she doesn’t anymore. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get her to see the things that are in her blind spot in hopes of helping her, anyway. It’s not because I’m obsessed with the idea that she’ll come back, but that her story is inextricably interrelated with mine. I have no doubt that I will have to think about her until I die because of my blog, not because I have this need to own her time.
She didn’t get anything she wanted because she didn’t ask for it, except when she said “please do not contact me again.” Then, a couple of months later, I accidentally texted her due to a glitch on my phone. I knew she’d go nuclear, and she did, because she didn’t believe for a moment that I hadn’t done it on purpose. She attributed suspicion and malice to everything, then read on my blog that my dad was having surgery. After the complete nightmare that was her going nuclear over a mistaken text, it was a surprise that she sent me a note that said “hope all goes well with your dad.” We started talking and two days later, my mother died. It was a whole new ball game.
It didn’t change anything for her. In one of her letters, she said she knew she was sounding like.a dickhead and she didn’t care. You’re not special. I lost someone who was LIKE a mother to me. Why do you get a special day in which I need to cater to you?
It was the year anniversary of my Mom’s death.
I want her to read that e-mail again and choke on it when she actually has to go through the process of losing her own actual mother, when she said that her mother’s death would bring her to her knees.
WELL, IT’S A GOOD THING I’M GOING THROUGH IT INSTEAD OF YOU.
But she is NOT going to be the villain in my story.
If she wants me to be the villain in hers, have at it. I’m not going to be around to hear it, because you’re not special, either. You just won’t know it until you have to deal with what I did. Have fun picking out her coffin.
Today I decided to do a short question and answer regarding the death of my mother. I couldn’t think of anything to do with one of the prompts, but I can combine all of them. This will probably make you laugh, cry, and get angry. My mother is dead. She will not know I said these things. Keep this in mind, that I am just a child reflecting on her parent’s entire life, and that little moments do not define a lifetime. There are times when she was wonderful to me and times that she was just plain terrible. What kind of child doesn’t say that about their parents, especially after they die? I am not out to get her. I am out to illustrate her. By the end, she will be a 3D character to you, and hopefully you’ll learn more about me as you read.
I’m sorry to hear about your loss. Here are 10 thoughtful questions a friend might ask to learn more about your mother and her passing, which you can use for your personal blog prompt:
Can you share some of your favorite memories with your mother?
I think I turned nine the year she threw me a Peter Pan birthday party with tons of activities in our backyard. There must have been a hundred people at my house for that one, because it was a tiny town. If there was something to do, people came. I was not popular in school, and I struggled against my mother being more popular than me (she was the music teacher, the fun one. I have been a 90 year old autistic man for like, 46 years. That tracks. I am 46 years old. I knew the smash hit “Get Off My Lawn” by the time I was seven.). Therefore, I was a lot more relaxed with her when we were just out in the backyard having fun. My grandparents, both sets, also lived close at that time and she was more relaxed in her comfort zone than she was when she was trying to make me into the perfect child. I didn’t get it. She could talk to me about being good because of my dad’s job all she wanted, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t just going to sit there and be weird, anyway. I found Daniel and I was fine. Neurodivergent people travel in packs. If you’re an introvert, they’re just smaller.
She thought I was a great singer and often gave me solos in things. She would laugh until she cried when she told the story about how I was too shy to sing with the choir, but as they were leaving the stage, I decided what the people really needed was a solo.
We were a team. She was my accompanist no matter whether I was singing or playing my horn. She learned monster orchestra reductions (piano accompaniments) just to take me to contests. Then, because she was already accompanying me, she accompanied all my friends as well. The only person she never played for, I don’t think, was Ryan Darlington (he’s a tuba player). It’s not that she wouldn’t have done it, we just went to different middle schools. We both ended up at PVA, but he went to Johnston and I went to Clements. Johnston was the performing arts middle school and I didn’t get it. I got into Clements and we marinaded and grilled their asses at contest. It was memorable because I was the trumpet soloist that helped get them there. I played the opening trumpet call in the “Dances With Wolves” score. I auditioned for PVA when I was at the absolute top of my game. My mother played for me at that audition, too.
At HSPVA, I was a trumpet player. At Clements, I was in Varsity Band and Varsity Choir at the same time, which I loved.
Let me take a quick break to tell you how I did it. I sang for the choir director and she put me in junior varsity. I said, “are you sure? I’ve been doing things like the Messiah for five years now.” She said, “Ok. Prove it.” She played the first four measures in front of a monster exposed lick, I believe trying to prove to me that I couldn’t handle it when I’d had in memorized since I was 12. Please. My opera voice flipped on. Case closed (link is to a humorous clip from one of my voice lessons).
In short, I would not be the person that I am today without the grand piano she bought to put in our apartment after my parents’ divorce. That’s because as long as it was there, she always had a way to draw me in. Draw me closer. Test out anthems she wanted to use with her choir and wanting to play for me because she could hear how it would sound at choir practice. I was part of the vetting process for the programming when she was a choir director/organist. I asked her to leave me her piano in her will, and she did. Now, it’s at my sister’s house and David’s house just isn’t big enough. But when I’m at Lindsay’s, I get really quiet and let my mom speak through the chords. It what she did when she was alive and it worked. Why stop now?
How has your mother’s life influenced the person you are today?
A tape runs in my head that I should be the perfect person all the time because people are always watching. This was true when I was a preacher’s kid, but now I can’t turn it off and I have massive self esteem issues at making any mistakes. I have chided myself for not achieving perfection instead of taking the W at excellence. I’m the person that absolutely is driven to get an A+ on everything and a body/brain that just won’t have it. I can either accept my fate or die thinking I’m the worst person that ever lived. I choose acceptance.
I work with children much easier because I am social masking her, an elementary and middle school choir director for all of her career, except for the time she took off from work until Lindsay and I were old enough to fend for ourselves. I’ve picked up more, noticed more than she ever imagined. She was a saint and also tough as nails. Strict disciplinarian who hid all her feelings because she thought she wasn’t enough, either. It is the plight of women most of the time. Because I needed to break free from that pattern, I see it for what it is. However, I do not think of her as a bad parent, but an overly fearful and depressed one. Her whole life depended on what other people thought. I was basically Chelsea Clinton on a very small scale.
She is the person that convinced me it was better to hide my every need than to display it. It’s part of the reason Lindsay is so outgoing and free, while I hide in the shadows. She doesn’t worry about what people think of her to the extent that I do, and it’s a problem. It’s only now by convincing myself I am a good writer who has something to say that I really value myself as an asset and ally. Again, I mean to come off as confident, not arrogant. Someone has to tell me I’m pretty every day. It might as well be me. I got well when I realized that not saying anything left me angry and resentful all the time. When I began to express needs, no one liked it because I was so angry. So, so angry. I apologize for that, but I cannot apologize for the ways I’ve felt ignored by people who’ve said they loved me. It is on them to apologize to me if they feel bad about it. But if they don’t, I’m not waiting around for an apology. Sometimes you have to create your own closure, and I’m at peace with it.
She is the one that taught me how to treat a wife/husband, basically doing everyone’s emotional work for them and taking all their bad behavior because if I don’t, those people will leave. It took me a very long time to come to the realization that if they leave because you have emotional needs, you’re better off without that person in your life. Be careful in deciding the line where someone else is “needy” and you’re refusing to talk. A mind will only accept that of course you’re too tired to talk for so many days/weeks/years. However long it takes for someone to realize they’re unhappy. But because they’ve been unhappy for a very long time, you’re not going to like it very much. Have clear boundaries on what’s too much so that fights like these don’t come up. Work smarter, not harder.
She taught me that jokes were funnier when you didn’t see them coming, like her making a really sharp comment when she was normally so happy go lucky. I have a feeling that she was probably also autistic because the tapes that ran in her head were that she had to act completely normal all the time, too. It’s called social masking. Because of my family, I have both male and female sets….. as in, what a man would generally say and what a woman would. The female set is unsure and cautious. The male one walks in the world knowing that no one is better than me and no one is worse, either. It’s very important to make that distinction, because basically seeing the way I write convinced me that I had a man’s confidence online, so go with it. Be confident all the time, because it’s not all about you. It’s a survival manual for someone else.
What were some of the values and lessons she instilled in you?
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t say anything for 35 years.
Be kind to everyone, no matter what they do to you. This has had enormous positive and negative affects, because I tend to overestimate the good in people and stop standing up for myself when I feel bullied. On the flip side, everyone is more open and caring with me because I am open and caring with them. It’s a mixed bag, as parental lessons often are.
Be subservient to your partner. Whatever they want to do, you want to do. What you want to do/eat is not up to you, because you have to watch your weight and not seem like a pig (I wasn’t on Adderall til college and had the normal appetite of a teenager), and also his choice of restaurant is always better than yours. I wasn’t raised to be queer. Neither are other women. We’ll talk for an hour about what to do for dinner because neither of us wants to assert an opinion that might offend the other. Same for dating. Lesbians take FOREVER to admit that they like someone because God forbid someone rejects them. it’s systemic, but my personal experience is unique and universal. One of the things I like about men is that they’re direct. It’s easy to ask them out because it’s a yes or no question to them. It’s especially fun when you don’t care about the answer and neither do they, because it’s no harm, no foul. With a woman, you’ll waste years pining over her until someone finally admits feelings and then spend the first four months of dating EXCLAIMING over how much we didn’t see it. Yes we did. We were just ostriches about it. If I don’t tell you I like you, then I don’t risk abandonment. It’s intrinsic to who women are as people. If we are not perfect, our husbands will leave. Flat out. This is changing as gender roles decrease. That information was useless to me then.
My mother’s narrative was never how hard it was for me that I was queer. It was always how embarrassing it was to tell people I was queer. She couldn’t empathize, which is the root of why we had a sometimes terrible relationship. Later in her life, she wouldn’t let anyone get away with a homophobic comments, but she never told me that. I heard it at her funeral, because all of the sudden she was now the cool mom and not the rejected one. She could play up that card instead of being embarrassed, all the while being completely disinterested in hearing how Meagan, Kathleen, or Dana & I were doing. I am glad that she came to peace about it. I am not glad she never told me.
How do you cope with the grief and keep her memory alive?
I have fallen in love with everything Dia de los Muertos and I actually visit cemeteries a lot for the peace and quiet, yet feeling surrounded. The most profound place I’ve ever felt peace is at a neighborhood for the dead in Paris. It’s called Pere LaChaisse (sp?), and it’s got more famous artists of every discipline that you could possibly imagine. If you cannot travel to Paris, there are the same type cemeteries in New Orleans. See them before you die, because it’s an experience in and of itself. In DC, I have now been to sit with Gore Vidal. Good talk.
I wear an ichthus necklace every day now, because the necklace she actually gave me came apart in a million pieces. I got it at the funeral home, and the inside of the fish is filled with her fingerprint. I don’t like how I got it, but I do like that it was possible to create and a powerful remembrance to have my mother’s fingerprint on my heart every day.
Lindsay and I FaceTime at my mother’s grave when I’m not in town, or visit together when I am. It makes us feel closer to her even though we know she’s not really there. The idea is fun. We sit and talk to her, sometimes eat, sometimes drink coffee. It’s a safe space to get away from it all, and we do.
Stories come up at random times, and I never know whether they’re going to be good or bad. Some of them are still so painful that I blank out, like seeing her in her coffin. What is really bad is that because it’s the last image I have of her, it’s the one that’s stuck. My mother got sick and died in about 30 minutes flat. I wore this look of abject shock, like I was high on Oxycodone and completely sober. It was more than a year of magical thinking, because it was so unbelievable.
I know for sure that she got the death she wanted, because she did not want to be in pain and she did not want Lindsay and I to end up taking care of her for years on end. She didn’t know it was coming, but she would have been pleased with the result. It gives me complete peace. I don’t have to worry that there are things she would have wanted that she didn’t get, because I know for sure that given the choice between dying quickly or it being a long, drawn out process she would have chosen to go out exactly the same way.
Other people keep her alive for me. She was such a public figure that people tell me all the time how much I remind them of her. It’s irritating until you realize that it’s the only way to keep your mother alive long after she’s dead.
Were there any traditions or hobbies she passed down to you?
Make a big deal out of people’s birthdays.
Love people until they just can’t stand it. Make it weird. So many people are hurt in the world. See it.
If you are a teacher and you don’t have money, you are responsible for finding it. She taught me that people will support a valuable cause. For instance, she dated a judge after the divorce that was pretty wealthy. She worked at one of the poorest schools in Fort Bend. She never asked him for money. She talked about her life, and he responded. One year he bought the entire class winter coats. You can get things if you ask for them, but only without asking directly. This is not bad advice, because it’s not one’s responsibility to respond to your needs, you’re just asking if they will. The difference is that I don’t take rejection personally and she viewed it as a flaw in her character. However, this is a new development because I finally got tired of not being heard correctly. I don’t do well when I’m talking around something and just hoping.
What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
I have learned many things from my mother, from the tender to the terrible. Every bit of it had to do with focusing on external validation. She was not attention-seeking in the slightest. She was just trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could, because someone, somewhere could be offended.
She gave really good hugs. I miss those the most.
Towards the end of her life, she enjoyed traveling and came to both Portland and DC. In fact, I also met her in Seattle and we went to the Experience Music Project before she and her husband left on an Alaskan cruise.
Giving birth is not for the faint of heart. It’s especially hard if you don’t tell your doctors that you are in pain. She said that she bit her pillow while everyone screamed and no one noticed that she needed medication. There’s no award for that, but if there had been, she’d have won it.
Own yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. You cannot be perfect enough to please everyone all the time, and you will die mad about it. I learned that because she never did and I watched what it did to her. She was still mad at my dad at all family functions 25 years after the divorce. I realize that relationships are complicated. Being a decent coparent is not. At some point, you have to say to yourself “this doesn’t even matter anymore,” like my friends who found out they were pregnant the morning of their wedding. All of the sudden, the wedding was literally a piece of cake because there were bigger fish to fry. Like, we’re having a good time, okay, but we’re not even going to pretend that any of this is now important.
I am a more compassionate person than I would be otherwise, because my mother’s insistence on being polite and friendly has led me to keep going in relationships that weren’t interesting at first, but kept growing. It was a lesson to sit back and keep listening.
It feels excruciating that she would have treated Zac like he walks on water, because he might be a little too much for her, but he’s still a man interested in her daughter, which was infinitely more important than a woman being interested in me. It is not surprising or lost on me that I did not find complete happiness with a man until after I realized she wasn’t there to give “advice.” Even though Zac is also queer and likes me for everything I am, she would not have believed I could tell Zac I was nonbinary and have the relationship survive. Yes, I’m sure that men who like men definitely have a problem with me………. But I only know this from watching how she treated Ryan and how she treated Meagan. Oh, and also I didn’t have any agency. It was all my emotional abuser’s idea and I had been turned somehow. Meanwhile, I’d been crying alone in my room for two years. I’m just not queer enough to exclude dating men altogether. It speaks highly of Zac’s brain that it even happened in the first place, because I do have a preference for women. It gives me a little bit of clinical separation, honestly, because not every conversation digs deep. By the time I talk to Zac, I have worn myself out on my blog.
How did she inspire you in your life’s pursuits and passions?
She loved everything I ever did in the arts, whether it was singing, playing my horn, playing the handbells, or creative writing. She also loved asking me to help her with her room when she was decorating because she knew I was creative at that, too.
She wouldn’t be surprised that I turned out to be a great writer, because I was already on my way in 2016. Therefore, she was invested in my talent. She still managed to bust my balls about my behavior, though. She hated my writing at times, because she thought I was harping on a point over and over. She did not realize that autistic people are governed by monotropic thought processes. It is literally not possible for us to change gears quickly, or process emotions easily. It takes time, because nine times out of ten, it’s trouble with not being able to translate neurotypical into neurodivergent or vice versa. She thought Supergrover was bad for me, that I descended into a world of pain. She wasn’t wrong. That being said, I couldn’t find a friend of mine she did like. Neurodivergent people tend to be queer and run in packs. Therefore, if she didn’t understand me, she didn’t understand them, either. So, her interest in my blog was a mixed bag.
In what ways do you see your mother’s traits or characteristics in yourself?
I am only strong when my back is against the wall. I only use power when I need it, not because it pleases me. Just like my mother in a classroom, I walk softly and carry a big stick. I just don’t have to be as aggressive about it now, because I have friends that respect my boundaries and I don’t feel like I’m being ignored. Your voice doesn’t have to be loud if people aren’t covering it up.
It is easier to be honest on the internet because when I’m in front of people, I cater to the urge to be small in front of them to gain acceptance.
If I’m going to be a musician, be the best musician I can be. Don’t think that you’re incapable of something. Suck until you don’t. And in fact, my voice didn’t get really exceptional until I started taking private lessons every week. It was so good to learn that I was so much more capable and confident than I thought, because I had a great voice, I’d just picked up some bad habits. She helped me work through all of them by accompanying me between lessons.
Take the time to get in a proper warm-up, because you’ll sound better if you’re relaxed. Start a rehearsal with your vocal cords already warm. Breathe deeply. Four measures is a long time.
What do you miss the most about her?
I miss having someone to talk to all the time. We had long, involved conversations about her life, her career, her everything because I was happy to listen to the chatter rather than tell her I wanted to talk about my life, too. I knew she wasn’t comfortable, so I just listened. The same goes for being touched. We could say a lot without saying anything, a safe person to just walk up and hug because they’re used to it. People rarely hug me anymore, and I’m so used to it I forget I need it.
How would you like people to remember her?
As a saint, perfectly perfect in every way, because no one gets through life without making mistakes. With your parents, it’s only a different situation because your first family installs all your triggers. I hope that by not staying silent about them, you won’t, either.
We are all a little bit broken, and that’s where the light gets in.
These questions are designed to be open-ended and reflective, allowing you to share personal stories and feelings about your mother. They can help readers understand her impact on your life and the legacy she leaves behind.
It’s the title of a book I read long ago, and I think I left it at my dad’s house and it just kind of stayed there. I am positive that I could lay my hands on it if I was there. It was a book that applied the lessons of Christ to managing large organizations. I had to vet it before I actually spent money on it, though. I read quite a bit in Barnes & Noble, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have to sit through an entire book full of wackadoodle bass ackwards theology. I wanted to make sure they were scholarly about it.
Unsurprisingly, it was a fascinating exploration of the INFJ personality when it comes to being in charge. That is, in order for Jesus to be a good leader, he had to be vulnerable. That he drew people in by making them listen harder to him, not by making his voice louder. It’s basically the law of attraction. Don’t spend any time trying to impress other people. Learn to be impressive to yourself, and your honesty will flatten people because it’s so rare.
I hear it all the time. “Your candor and honesty…..” I have a lot of candor and honesty these days, because I have given myself the confidence to believe that I communicate my ideas well and I am old enough to have an opinion. Old(er) women are powerful, fierce dragons because they’ve had all the fun they can take.
It’s just one of the reasons I think Hillary Clinton would have made a fantastic president. All her fucks slid off about 30 years ago. It’s not her fault that America watched her get up on a televised debate and call him a Russian asset to his face…….. and still thought the guy wearing ten tons of makeup and a suit that still managed to look cheap while expensive carried the day.
I will never forgive the American people for the 2016 election, or at the very least, I cannot see forgiveness yet. That’s because the facts were all there. The former Secretary of State who has known Vladimir Putin for years is telling everyone in the entire country that there is going to be massive trouble if Trump is elected.
She has not been wrong about that.
What we did, paraphrasing David Sedaris, is hear the flight attendant say the meals available are Salisbury steak and chicken covered in broken glass, and stopping to ask how the chicken is prepared.
The choice was clear, and we fumbled. it wasn’t a personality contest. We let Russia walk in the front door and extort the Ukrainians, then after Trump left office the Republicans were so concerned about the Ukrainians. It was sickening.
If it wasn’t high crimes and misdemeanors, we are going to have a hell of a time defining it in the future.
We’re facing a time in which we’ need to eat Salisbury steak out of necessity, not because it’s our first choice. For people that object to that statement, do you really want to take the risk that January 6th will happen again? Do you want to embolden white supremacists? FBI is already getting chatter that Pride parades are going to be attacked this year. That is not unusual, and what I am trying to prevent is the country being once again, buried in regret. A good episode of Saturday Night Live does not kiss an election and make it all better.
Biden is problematic. I will hear it. I will allow it. I will sympathize with it. I still won’t get mad enough to vote third party. When one party splits, the other wins. I knew it was happening, I just didn’t know how close it was. Conservative and liberal democrats clashed too much for the DNC not to splinter. Now, the same is happening because I can hate Joe Biden for sending weapons to Israel all I want and that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up on democracy itself.
People think it’s a long shot, and most of them haven’t seen polls that say a sizable part of the population is willing to vote for Trump even if he’s in prison by the election. The fact that they think a president working from jail is acceptable is alarming. Common sense has completely flown out the window.
Politics was never meant to be about morals. Politics is about how to manage money. We get taxes in, we decide how to spend it in Congress. It wasn’t really until the Religious Right started taking over the Republican Party that issues of morality like homosexuality became a legislative item….. keeping in mind that homosexuality has nothing to do with morality, but you can’t convince anyone in the Religious Right of that.
They’re not playing the long game. It will get restrictive enough that the people will riot, and I am shocked that it is taking so long. What’s next? Republicans coming to your house to make sure you don’t get pregnant? Abortion is banned at seven days? What is it going to take? And abortion and homosexuality are only two of the issues wrapped up in this crap. We’ve let conservative, rich, white little boys run the show for a long time. I can’t take them on all by myself, and I get nervous when I don’t feel enough buy-in.
What if Donald Trump gets elected and Putin decides that’s the time to band with China and attack us because we’re weak?
They could start by bombing the oil fields in Alaska, but Sarah Palin will see them coming, so it’s okay.
I am usually teasing Zac about this time (what do you believe, as a private citizen, mind you………). I have gotten a series of sly smiles, dumb looks, and occasionally, articles in the New York Times. If he just looks at me, I change the subject, because I know he would tell me if he could, but he can’t. No biggie. I have other friends I can talk to about that stuff where their jobs aren’t at risk. People who have been chatting on the Internet like I have are always hearing unverified intelligence chatter. I had a friend catch a hole in DoDs security and his name went on a list.
Pro tip: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Where I become a leader and how Jesus influences that is to just be the person that takes everyone’s stories in…. that when I make leadership decisions, I don’t just have my employees productivity in mind, but their happiness with the job as well. I have a great reader retention rate, and I would hope that my employees felt the same way- that they wanted to stay with me. I would be the kind of boss that lives to serve. I mean, I probably draw the line at washing their feet, but it’s the thought that counts.
What I mean is that I have more success as a leader by taking in the world around me and reflecting it than I do in real life, because I am not getting up in front of a congregation to say these things. I am writing on the internet, which ups my congregation size tremendously.
I am firm because I have a vision, not because I feel the need to hurt anyone. There is a difference in me setting boundaries and me being obnoxious. The people closest to me got angry when I set boundaries, and I set them because they weren’t listening. They didn’t deserve to hear my story anymore.
I feel lighter and happier than I have in years, and it’s because I’m different. I was happy with being breadcrumbed for a number of years, my needs ignored and dismissed, handling a barrage of emotional live ammo only to find out that the pattern would never change. It felt like a lie, a friendship borne out of pity and a pattern I never wanted to reinstate ever again. Thus, telling her to grow up. I dived deep into self-reflection and I became more secure. She stayed in the same place. The patterns that worked on me before weren’t going to cut it.
You are 100% allowed to miss someone you’ve cut out of your life. I realized that she could not see the magnitude of what she was doing by reestablishing our connection, and nor could we ignore it. We had too much shit to do, and she ignored it. Then, I started writing about what happened, and she threw a shit fit because her side wasn’t represented. I cannot review a book I haven’t read.
So, what I know is that it’s not emotionally mature enough for me. I have grown past her. I cannot stand someone holding everything in and just exploding. It’s too much punishment at once and I am completely overloaded.
And yet on the flip side, she has a practical and precise way of moving in the world. She can achieve more in five minutes than I would in three days. Her brain is built for that.
It’s a yin and yang I always look for in relationships and it doesn’t work out. Practical people hate touchy feely crap. It’s the black cat vs. golden retriever debate.
And in talking about Supergrover, it brings me to another aspect of leadership. Have the right people around you. When Supergrover and I are writing to each other, it’s clear we have different processes to get to a conclusion. I can see where I fall short all the time, because when she talks to me and puts her own thoughts through her own filters, I see “oh THAT’s how a neurotypical person would do that….. I always wondered.”
The other thing is that talking about relationships and talking about organizations is very much alike when you are actually close enough to your employees where emotions get involved. You know how many employees I have to have before there are possible kinks in the organization?
One.
Being avoidant with your emotions is just as problematic at work as it is at home, you’re just talking about much different things. You will absolutely be dealing with hard emotions even though you’re not close to people….. most notably, annoyance unless you’re the type of person that needs a break every five minutes. I can be like that, but not usually. I’m the one with my headphones on and I wouldn’t hear a bear even if it was right behind my Aeron.
However, if I’m thinking of myself as the future CEO of Lanagan Media Group, I’m not the one with my headphones in. I’m the one that’s open and available to jump in and help you, or hire OTHER people to jump in and help you. If not, I will develop a reputation for hiding something. People clam up around other people who are hiding something. People don’t clam up around me because I can instantly put them at ease. There’s no trick to it except vibes. Being personable, approachable, friendly, etc. If I like being with the person and their presence gives me energy, the sky is the limit on how long we’ll spend talking.
I hate small talk, so it’s easier when I get up in front of a group. I can just apprise them of the situation, which solves two problems. The first is not having to schmooze with people. The second is not having to tell each person individually. However, if the other person’s vibe is also warm and approachable, and we connect, you’ll always be able to to count on me telling you what I think, but never in a million years telling you that I think you’re a bad person. Trust is broken in a million different ways.
In kitchens, this is always expressed by someone saying “I’m going to be five minutes late.” It’s always an hour. Always. No one cares if you’re slammed, get used to it. Even if someone tells you they’re willing to work on their day off, the chances of them picking up on said day off are slim to none. It’s why I got so many brownie points at my last job. I was there every time someone called out and every time someone got sick and every time we didn’t know what the hell happened, but someone had to have their ass on dish by five. It might as well be me. I’m the one that doesn’t like days off because it interrupts my rhythm. The brownie points were always the biggest at “let me change my clothes. I’ll be right there.” That’s because I actually meant it….. a rarity in our industry.
Giving up driving helped me to be on time every day because I am bad at transitions. I would get demand avoidance over driving, and have to force myself out to the car. Because I was determined not to be late, I would wake up ridiculously early and get to the office by 0800, when it was just the CEO and me for the first hour. He was the kind of leader I am, the Jesus as CEO type. That’s because he genuinely cared about our work/life balance and team cohesion, like buying us all Orioles tickets and carpooling us all up to Baltimore. He was also a CEO that drove a Honda.
I was very impressed.
Somebody went to Sunday School.
Anyway, I had so much less demand avoidance over traveling because I had a set schedule every single day. I could time it to the minute…. and the entire way, I could play on my phone, read, write, watch movies, etc. It was completely guilt free time to myself because I didn’t have to be in charge of anything as serious as a car while I was exhausted. The train ride gave me time to really wake up.
Which was good, because the CEO’s one failing was that he liked his coffee so weak. I use one level tablespoon of coffee per cup. He used a plastic teaspoon, and there could only be 11 teaspoons of coffee for the whole pot, which was 12 cups. Believe me when I say I am not trying to prove anything. The coffee was weak, I’m not trying to make motor oil.
When I drove, I would get to 7-11 or Walgreens by 7:45 to get coffee or an energy drink out of the cold case.
Telling you all of this…. that I love my friend and I needed to let her go at the same time. That I have just so many diagnoses and “letters behind my name.” It’s important. It’s all important. It’s what makes me authentically myself. That I can extend love to more people because I am experienced in dealing with conflict. I don’t pretend it doesn’t exist and I don’t pretend it’s not capable of developing. I’m also not going to skirt around you. I will bring up a problem, and how you react teaches me what to do. If you come up with a solution to the problem, it’s a green flag. If you can’t do anything, but you empathize with what I’m saying, that’s a green flag. The only red flag is saying “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Neither the relationship nor the company will survive.
I disagree with Donald Trump the most, but he’s not interesting. He’s a Flat Stanley, except Flat Stanley is a book series for children and Trump is a child. Calling Trump a Flat Stanley is just bullying Flat Stanley. Please respect his privacy during this difficult time.
Trump is the one person I can think of in my writing life that I cannot turn into a 3D character. There is no way to show his humanity, compassion, intelligence, etc. He has not given us any evidence to support the fact that he has any of those things.
Supergrover said that I portrayed her as a “Flat Stanley.” That is objectively not true, but that’s not the point. The point is that I had to look him up and it became an apt description for him, not her. When I think of her, my brain lights up like an animation of The Flash running up the side of a building. She’s amazing. She’s also human. People have problems, full stop. I only disagree with her because I have written many times about how many different things I love about her. Talking about both our problems and our successes is what makes her a 3D character. I haven’t talked about all the things I love about her in a long time because she hasn’t given me much to love lately.
And she never will again, I don’t think, because the kind of bravery that she showed in her last letter is what I require all the time. That’s not her. I’m not the person that will walk on eggshells trying to do things right because I’m guessing how she feels. Doesn’t praise me for anything I do right, comes down HARD on me when I do wrong. She can go and make other people jump high. I’m done. Either she breaks the power imbalance between us or she can find someone else to put through her mental marathon.
It’s hard to feel lonely when you’re right next to someone, and yet I felt it constantly- and not because we weren’t constantly in touch. She thought I was jumping up and down for attention by making her feel bad all the time. I thought she was being very selfish in withholding information because it made it so easy to yell at me for things that happened because I guessed wrong instead of actually knowing what she wanted and needed from me. Most of the time, I believe that was straight up nothing, but that wasn’t always the case.
It’s really simple to me.
She has loved me more than I’ve ever realized because she won’t talk about it. She just doesn’t stop showing up. She’s not the kind of person that constantly says “I love you” all the time. From her, “I love you” means “what are you going to do for a paying job now? I’m concerned.” “I love you” looks like no one would ever know that someone who was mean to me is now under her pool. “I love you” looks like “I got you some books for your Kindle.” “I love you” looks like “really great post today.” “I love you” looks like accepting me for who I am. We just have terrible communication despite all that acceptance. Hurt compounds on both sides. Neither of us are bad people, we just set up bad patterns and haven’t done the work. I’m not offended. She probably wouldn’t do the work with anyone, because then she’d have to dig deep into herself to find the answers and it is so scary……. I know. I know it’s so scary. But you don’t find out that you’re walking backwards though the dark to find daylight, choosing to stay trapped where you are.
It wasn’t my job to fix everything. It was my job to participate in fixing everything. I have no buy-in, so that chapter of my life is over. I know that I have an incredible future coming because I am owning my own destiny. I also know she’s invited, but not if every day looks like tearing me down or avoiding me. It’s not sustainable. It affected my mental health to no end, this scrambling to do the right thing while the game was set up for me to always lose. There was never any future, there was only “make me feel good with your writing.” What I know to be true is that she really does treasure the things that I’ve said. That they are valuable to her. But this is what I do. I talk about my life. If we’re not getting along, I’m not going to make it up for my web site.
You cannot stop being a Dooce fan because she “stopped being real” and then throw a shit fit when I’m real with other people. The reason Supergrover is upset is that I based my entire blog on what I think because she stopped telling me anything. I was wandering around trying to figure out everything on my own so that she could sit in judgment that I didn’t divine her needs out of thin air. It cost me more time and energy than I had to give. I hurt her and spent a very, very, very long time trying to heal the rift. She was avoidant at every turn and I became disenchanted because not every problem is because I’m a judgmental dickhead and you’re the most loving person on earth. It’s that she can dish it, but she can’t take it. She can call me a judgmental dickhead all day long, but she cannot hear that her behavior is also problematic.
She told me that she lost the ability to be a decent friend. It would have been excellent if she’d told me that when I said, “is anything wrong? You seem distant” ad nauseam for eight years. I wasted my time, and I know it. I’m not bitter about it, but I know it’s true. I also know that she is capable of monster manipulation if she can say she’s lost the ability to be a decent friend and that her mama wolverine claws are coming in within days/weeks of each other. It’s humiliating, really, because I lived for the ups without seeing the downs.
It did not make her less special to me, less amazing, less anything. She’s human. Just because we’ve gotten angry at each other before doesn’t mean I now want to hug her any less than I did on day one. But what I do know is that if such a thing were to happen, it would be because she started letting me know how she is thinking and feeling so that I don’t have to guess. I’m not in the business of anticipating needs anymore. If you can’t communicate, you don’t get to say that’s my fault. If you won’t communicate, you don’t get to step all over my ass because I tried to open a discussion and you don’t want to talk. That’s not the friend I met, that’s not the friend I want.
For me, “I love you” looks like “I picked up your afternoon coffee.” “I love you” looks like remembering you on every birthday and holiday. “I love you” looks like waiting quietly for the storm to pass, because there’s so much about our relationship I celebrate. And I don’t even mean this storm. I mean waiting between letters. I didn’t want to be stuck in dysfunction junction, but here we are. However, it takes two people to have a dysfunctional relationship. None of this is all her fault. She has her own list of things that are horrible about me and she’s right. Because I’m human. I do just as much wrong as everyone else. I also know that if I was a public figure, I would have said, “me.” I disagree with me all the time. That’s generally why I post.
So, Trump is the public figure I disagree with the most…. but, again…… he’s not interesting.
I update my blog so frequently because of how blogs work. When you update an entry, it sends a ping to search engines, the WordPress community, everyone. The more often you ping them, the more exposure you get. The reason I don’t *always* post several times a day is that Sometimes I think 10,000 words at a time. Sometimes I think 50. I am not known for being terse. Every thought comes with bonus content. When you see something flip to a completely different subject, it’s what I was writing about, then went to something else, then forgot that text was at the bottom. I am not nearly as scrambled as I seem, because most of the incoherence can be chalked up to “I forgot.”
I am detail oriented, but the details don’t come all at once. They come in as information does. I will have thoughts about every new piece of information because I’ll be collating it with what I already know to be true. Things change fast, therefore so does my web site. This is because it’s my space, the one place where I’m allowed to own it because no one asked you to be here. And I mean it. If you can’t recognize that I have agency over my own story, then your beliefs carry no inherent respect, either. That’s because if you don’t think I’m allowed to have an opinion, why should I even bother listening to yours?
I got tired of Supergrover using me as an emotional support animal, only being pleased to hear from me when it was convenient to her. She can call me the asshole for it all she wants, but that doesn’t make it untrue. She breadcrumbed me for like, eight years. Every time I tried to walk away, she got back in touch. Every single time. She was right to be angry and walk off the first time. I got tired about the 30th.
She can say I’m demanding of her time, but she opened up about how she felt and said she was enjoying writing. She also said that she was going to “offer her own psychobabble,” and she sounded JUST LIKE ME. Like, she has my patois dead to rights. Or I have hers. Chicken and egg, but I tend to say that she’s the original and I’m the copy.
It’s a lot to be told you’re a lot, and expect respect without giving it while also ignoring the fact that you’re a lot. She’s never done anything wrong, I’m a dickhead.
Yeah, that tracks. That’s what a healthy relationship looks like, that one person is always wrong no matter what they do. To add insult to injury, me telling her for years that it felt like a cat and mouse game while she continually said that she wasn’t manipulative while she manipulated me. That’s because some of her last words were “I do not want to get back into the cat and mouse game with you.” Which one of us is the cat here? Sometimes, she was full of love. Sometimes, she was full of piss and vinegar. The same could be said of me, but I was willing to talk it through so that we didn’t have these issues anymore. We could start actually enjoying each other instead of both turning into bitches on wheels every time we disagree.
It’s not her fault. It’s just as much mine. But she runs from her emotions, and I don’t. It is problematic, and the only answer was to let her go back to what she’s used to in life. if I’m the only person that ever gives her problems, which I don’t doubt because she’d never open up enough to offend any of her friends, then I am out permanently. You don’t get to walk around in my inner landscape and call me a judgmental dickhead for nearly every opinion I have.
I spent two paragraphs telling her about a situation with someone else and how I’d mishandled it. She responded that I was so judgmental and needed to back off and all this bullshit that I’d explained to her in my letter already. I did not need additional reproach. She reads so quickly that she misses a lot, and gets very angry if I say she’s missed something because she’s perfect. I called her on it, that she was reading too fast and I got these messages in quick succession:
“I read too fast. I meant that I am not angry. If you are, have at it.”
“Don’t insinuate/insult me/something like that I don’t read your stuff.”
I told her that I wasn’t basing my response on anything but timestamps, that I was not guilting her. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. She made a mistake. Obviously all my fault.
Fuck me running.
Now that I can move away from all of it and call bullshit, pings mean more than she does. That’s because I can’t count on a future with anyone but me.
Luckily, I’m turning out to be a fun person to hang out with.
My combination of physical and mental maladies make it where it’s hard to stay employed. I have gotten many jobs in many fields, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. I’ve just never managed to last long enough at anything to establish a career. When you are neurotypical, it does not make sense to you why I would get fired. And then I listen to how you talk about your coworkers and in instantaneously becomes clear. No matter how loving and open you think you are, neurotypical people do not like working with neurodivergent ones. Whether it’s that someone doesn’t like their tone or they’re doing something completely wrong doesn’t matter. In an office, there is very little difference in simply being annoying and ACTUALLY being bad at the job. It matters that you’re pleasant just as much as you’re competent. Not wanting to work with someone is just a valid reason to let someone go, because it’s not the boss’s job to babysit.
However, my survival cannot be dependent on neurotypical people, either. My livelihood is threatened by my own body- demand avoidance, burnout, and meltdown being the big three. I can cope and muddle through in a job. I excel when I sit down at my keyboard to tell you about the world around me. I am not thinking about all the ways I could be criticized, which is good, because If blowback was always my first thought I would not be doing well. I would be over focusing on people who didn’t like my writing while ignoring people who do. That doesn’t seem healthy, going out of my way to focus on the negative.
I keep thinking about what Daniel said…. “Just because you write in bulk doesn’t mean you say anything of substance.” It plays like a tape in my head, and what I have to remember is that whether it’s good or bad, being able to go back and read about what my life was like in years past is invaluable. If you asked me what I was doing five years ago today, I could probably tell you. I just have to remember that Daniel was miserable and trying to hurt me. I notice that lots of people treat me like absolute SHIT and then say, “I’m not going to be the villain in your story.”
I also have a problem with consequences equaling negativity. I didn’t tell you that Daniel or Supergrover was a bad person. I told you what happened. BOTH of them are extraordinarily defensive and nothing is ever their fault and you’re a really bad person no matter what they did, because they don’t like to feel. Anything you do to make them feel is suspicious. They googled it, and they do not like it.
My life got so much better when I decided I was tired as fuck of both of them. I am a storyteller, therefore I don’t need any “friends.” I need actual friends, ones who believe they are capable of making mistakes instead of coming unglued when they’ve hurt me and I said something about it.
According to them, I should just keep my mouth shut because their bad behavior is good. It’s me telling people about it that’s problematic. If their behavior was so perfectly perfect in every way, they would not get mad that I wrote about it.
I am not going to let them make me a victim by insisting that I keep my mouth shut over things they did that genuinely hurt me. Neither of them gave a damn about me and my pain. They wanted to be hero-worshiped and showed up every single day to hear me extol their virtues and lost their everliving SHIT when they realized I was going to treat them like a normal person and not play them up to be gods among men. However, I don’t NOT do that, either. I love the people in my life and I often write glowing things about them that make me cry. But when I’m not being glowing, it’s not that I’m hurt. It’s that I’m a bad person because I opened my mouth.
That pattern seems on brand. You’re only as sick as your secrets.
So, instead of fighting with friends and coworkers, I would rather record my life and move in the direction of my own system rather than trying to fit into someone else’s. Because needing their love and approval got me nowhere, I replaced them with self-confidence.
I am not trying to be hard nosed. I am trying to own my story. The part that they’re angry about is that I am not telling the story the way they want to hear it………………… While never even DARING to have the guts wo write their own. It’s easier to bitch at me…………… But absolutely nothing will keep either of them from lurking and fuming. There’s not a chance either of them will just go the fuck away and leave me alone.
Repeat with anyone that has ever known me, because I generally end up talking to myself. It’s how being autistic is. You rarely have friends because you’re social masking and there’s something officious and off-putting about it. I don’t care if you think that’s annoying. I just ask that you stop interacting with me rather than bitching about my writing. My writing lives within me and around me. You ain’t shit.
It’s not that my friends aren’t valuable. They cannot give me direction and focus. That’s all on me. And until they start digging deep, they’ll never understand how hard it is. They’d rather be locked down, hurt, and lashing out at me. Thankfully, that has stopped because I stopped allowing it.
Supergrover does not get the right to absolutely shit all over everything and then walk off like nothing happened. She participated, and now acts like she’s a motherfucking hero and I’m a mental patient.
I cannot use the daily prompt tag very often because I did 99% of them last year. Please follow me if you’d like to read more. You can also keep up with me on Facebook, where you can interact with me, other readers of the blog, and great authors I’ve come to know in my time as a Facebook creator.
I have had both Android-based and Apple phones. Either way, I use Google Maps because I find it superior. I don’t know why. I just like the interface better than Apple Maps, and Google maps does the same thing on my watch that Apple Maps does, which is to buzz my watch when it’s time to turn. If I have my headphones in, there’s no need for it because the turn by turn navigation is in my ear, but when I don’t the haptic feedback on my watch is actually better than an audio alert.
I started out with my literal answer because the prompt reminded me of something Kathleen told me, the story of her college interview. Now, Kathleen (like every person I’ve ever dated) was incredibly smart. She was a business major at University of Houston, and ended up accepting a position at ExxonMobil in Global Information Systems. That’s how I moved to DC in the first place. Basically, the last person you’d ever think did something like this, which only made it funnier.
Kathleen was trying to get into Simmons, which is a women’s college in Boston on The Fenway. They are known for library science, I believe, but it wasn’t her interest. She wanted to live in Boston on The Fenway. I would like to point out that she DID get in after this, she just didn’t graduate there.
The interviewer asked her what she would bring to the college, and she said, “the blanket my grandma gave me, probably my pot-bellied bear (stuffed animal)……….” I was CRYING, shaking with laughter and so was she because of course she laughed about it in retrospect.
I don’t know everything she did end up taking with her to Boston, but she did take me (later on). She was supposed to graduate in the class of 2000, which she did, just in Houston. But her best friend was still graduating from Simmons that year, so I got the grand tour. The school’s address is literally 500 The Fenway, so we had access to everything right in our backyards. I loved Boston and wished I could have stayed longer.
I remember one souvenir I got that trip- a Harvard medical school sweatshirt for my dad. I didn’t go to a class at Harvard, but I did sit in on one at MIT. I think it was a math class, but I’ve slept since then. Whatever it was, I did not understand it. I don’t remember it because there are no “good lines” to connect me to it. My brain works through echologia. If there’s not a valuable thought or idea attached to a memory, it fades because I don’t repeat it in my head. In my head, good writing runs like a tape.
I can remember snippets of my dad’s sermons and it has been 29 years since he’s done a single service (not counting weddings or funerals). He will do those if someone asks him. As in, when you leave the church you stop doing active ministry, but they don’t take away your ordination. He can still sign legal documents as the officiant, etc. He left the church the summer before my 17th birthday, and went into medicine as a second career until he “retired.” In quotes because his philanthropy work takes up a lot of time. I tend to confuse people when I say I’m a preacher’s kid, because they don’t know my dad as a Rev. Meanwhile, I only had one grade school year in which he wasn’t a pastor.
“Can we cuss now?” -Lindsay L. Lanagan, 1995
I cannot say it was a different direction for my life as well, because like I said, I was almost 17. Not enough time for things to change drastically in terms of what I would do once high school was over, etc. I think those things would have played out the same, because being ADHD/autistic of course I didn’t plan anything in advance. I just took the basic entrance exams for junior college in Fort Bend, then transferred to UH. I’ve never even taken the SAT.
It just occurred to me to say out loud that I tend to have a delayed response to stress, thinking I’m fine until I break apart into a million pieces. It puts my behavior over the last 10 years in stark relief, that I’m fine right up until I’m not. That I will not explode because I am intentionally trying to hurt someone. I don’t realize that I’m overwhelmed, overstimulated, and at my breaking point.
In high school, that presented as a migraine that wouldn’t go away and landed me in the hospital for four days. The only reason I was mad about it is that I had to take my finals, because I had a good enough average to be excused and then I had too many absences. It wasn’t bad, though, just an annoyance at having to go to school longer than my peers. I was freaked out because I wanted to be at home with Meagan, because she’d gotten into University of New Brunswick and was leaving soon….. Another reason I had a full blown migraine. I was melting down due to stress and grief.
Dating a Canadian was really hard, because there was something so FINAL about her going to school in a different country. I knew she was never coming back, and I was right. She has never moved back to the US. Although what I can say is that researching immigration wasn’t wrong, and that I would have been happy if I’d done it even if the relationship had still failed. I have spent enough time in Ottawa with Meag to know I would have liked living there. But honestly, the more I researched immigration, the more final everything became because an autistic 18 year old cannot handle the logistics of an international move. I was overwhelmed by details from the beginning.
In terms of direction, what I knew is that if I wanted to go to UNB as well, I had to like the school on its own merit because people break up. So, I sent for an information packet and got an interactive CD-ROM that included a tour of the campus and some games to get you familiar with living there, like a scavenger hunt. It’s the most clever and creative recruitment tool I’ve ever seen anyone do, and WAY ahead of its time because it was basically the precursor to things like interactive web sites. I didn’t get anything like it from any of the other schools to which I applied, but does it surprise you that UNB got me by giving me something I didn’t have for my computer?
Do I regret not following Meag back to Canada? My perspective has changed. It’s a mixed bag, right? My answer today is very different than it was before the 2016 election, but even as a teenager I agreed with Canada’s socialist policies. People who say “socialist” like it’s a bad word because conservatives have convinced them it is. Meanwhile, Alberta has a thriving oil economy just like Texas and yet the people of Alberta still have nationalized health care and Texas has a lot more money. There is still income disparity, but no one is left to die on the streets. You can have capitalism and socialism.
Ask Deadpool.
Knowing what I know now, I would be horrified to change a thing that would have altered the course of my life away from eventually coming back to DC. The way it happened is just too oddly specific to recreate, and while my life would have been great as a Canadian, I would have kicked the shit out of myself for not going to Portland. If I hadn’t given up on immigration, I wouldn’t have met Dana.
Meeting Dana altered the direction of my life the most, because I’ve lived in Portland twice. I had to move back because I missed her too much; my girlfriend was way too jealous and possessive for me to have any friends. I mean it. She was emotionally abusive, and though she never punched me, she punched through a wall in my apartment (NOT HERS) when I told her that Meag was coming to stay with me……. Even when I didn’t say “Meag is coming to stay with me and we’re going to be alone in my apartment digging up old memories.” It wasn’t some sort of game. I said, “Meag, her partner, and their little girl are coming to stay with me.” She was still apoplectic and told me that it was inappropriate and I should have asked her if they could spend the night.
We didn’t live together.
We’d been dating three months.
And on some level I still thought I was an asshole and she was right. She said something to me that I’ve forgiven, but I’ve never forgotten.
She said something about not feeling secure in our relationship, that I was really committed, and then said “you look like such a flake when you haven’t finished your degree.” She was a middle school counselor, and it was like she’d never seen anyone with ADHD before……… And she’d never pulled that card before, it was just politically convenient and she knew it would hurt.
It hurt because she knew I was brilliant. She knew I’d turned down an internship with the Human Rights Campaign writing national Sunday school curriculum because she didn’t want me to go. She, like me, thought there was something so FINAL about going away, as if three months was enough that I’d just say “I live here now.” It might have been, but it wouldn’t have been “I want to move back to DC without you.” I felt secure in the relationship, not in Texas. For her, those two things were one and the same. I have several friends who are engineers and manage to have great marriages despite being asked to travel for work, often longer than three months. If that little time apart destroys a relationship, then it wasn’t a real relationship in the first place.
It changed the direction of my life, the giving up of that internship to kowtow to my girlfriend’s fears. Dana put the kibosh on that real quick. She was the one who put the puzzle pieces together and saw how I was being manipulated before I did. Dana’s former partner was an alcoholic, and so was my girlfriend. She could tell a lot without me having to say anything.
I don’t have a problem with alcoholics and addicts. I have a problem with alcoholics not admitting that even though they don’t drink, they’re still dry drunks. As in, the problems that made them drink haven’t gone away and they still exhibit the behaviors of someone who drinks, like manipulation, isolation, etc. I am not saying that if you have problems with alcohol, then you are emotionally abusive. I am saying that I do not have time for alcoholics and addicts who think alcohol is the entire problem. That the only thing they need to do is stop drinking. They don’t have to have therapy, they don’t have to go to meetings, they don’t have to do anything besides not drink.
So, you have a sober person who, for the first time in literal years is feeling real emotions again, and they don’t know what to do with them. Whatever drove them to drink or use is still the monkey on their backs and the ghost out to get them. They’re actively running away from their emotions because they’re not used to them. If you have an addictive personality, you have an addictive personality. That’s why so many former drug and alcohol users start smoking half a pack a day, drinking coffee as a water substitute, and/or you’ll never find something sugary that they don’t like. They cannot be addicted to the things they were in the past, so they find new ones.
But please know that I am not speaking from personal experience in an arena where it’s all about personal experience. I am not trying to speak for an alcoholic or addict, these are just observations I’ve learned from being a coworker in the kitchen and having had friends go through the recovery process. Having an addict living in your house gives you a front-row seat to how that brain works, and it is not so dissimilar from ADHD. If you were neurotypical before you started drinking, there’s a possibility your thought processes will go back to normal. Unfortunately, neurodivergence may be your new normal because the alcohol gave you so much dopamine that your brain cannot possibly keep up. It cannot produce more dopamine than what you used to get from the alcohol, so your brain just sits there and screams. It is possible that you have accidentally induced bipolar disorder, or that you were self-medicating to manage bipolar disorder you didn’t know you had.
Chicken and egg debate on bipolar vs. addict. We’ll never know, but it’s extraordinarily common.
From my perspective, an alcoholic and a bipolar person are perfect for each other because they present so similarly. However, that’s dependent on a lot of factors….. The biggest one is that half of the couple realizes they’re bipolar and what it does to you, and the other realizes they’re an addict and what that does to you. You have to speak from a vulnerable place and know you are capable of being wrong. Red flags are only problematic if you’re managing someone else’s. Knowing you have red flags and saying “I’m working on it” is completely different than trying to hide them and hope no one notices.
Your life becomes more manageable when you realize that you’ve been acting egocentric, and find something to get it out of the way. When you are no longer the center of your own universe, things look very different. “Egocentric,” however, cannot be equated to “selfish.” Plenty of people are egocentric because they feel that asking for things is putting someone else out. Being that shut down is egocentric because you have stopped participating in a give and take, making people guess your needs….. Often, when angry, blaming another person for everything you failed to tell them. In no example of any behavior that I’ve given on this Web site am I immune to being part of the universal “you.” The only behavior I don’t have is drinking too much on a consistent basis. If I feel any amount of hung over, I pull back more. For instance, if I had four drinks over the course of an evening with friends and I felt hung over the next morning, the next time I’d drink three. What I’ve discovered is that the best answer is not to drink at all unless it’s a once in a while treat. Because I’m a blogger/diarist, I absolutely hate losing control. I can tell I’m feeling tipsy when this monologue slows down, and that’s not a good thing. I need every bit of creative juice I’ve got.
I have learned that you do not want alcohol to numb your inner monologue unless the play is shit.
Ass I often do, I surfed Facebook for a few minutes. I was looking for a prompt to give me a jumping off point, because today’s prompt was “are there any quotes you live by?” Last year, the title was “many, most of them mine.” I was not saying that I’m the expert, only that I’m the author I read the most because I go back over what I’ve written to see what’s next. Therefore, my own words are more likely to stick with me because these essays are ABOUT ME, which is the topic I know the most about (on most days).
The thing I saw on Facebook is that “worrying is worshipping the problem.” It is every bit as meaningful as something I heard in “I’m a Christian now. That worked.” It’s a group for atheists and I lurk to see what they’re saying, because I am often jogged theologically by the things they say, like “Jesus wasn’t the only person claiming to be The Messiah at the time. His was just the story that stuck.”
Like today, I had to sit down.
His was the story that stuck, which is to my mind one of the greatest theological phrases ever uttered in the history of ANYTHING….. BY AN ATHEIST and I am FURIOUS I didn’t think of that line before they did. 😉
Except for perhaps a line tied with it (being the best and furious I didn’t think of it) “a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” I am not talking about the overwhelming guilt and shame the church is quite capable of handing you….. Wrapped in bread and wine, no less. I am talking about Christopher Hitchens debating Rowan Williams on YouTube and learning they were good friends. Zac and I were actually talking about this the other day because he’s an atheist. I told him that I loved Hitch, but I didn’t love Richard Dawkins because he may be smart but he’s also an asshole.
He seems to me to be a not religious evangelical, and his schtick is making Christians look like they’re stupid even when they’re only out for self improvement and not world domination. Social justice Christianity is left out of the conversation because it’s not as easy to make fun of us. We question everything, including the idea that all Christians are stupid.
In effect, Dawkins is worshipping the problem. He’s so fanatical in his beliefs that he’s trying to change people through force and anger, not ever present loving kindness, which all atheists I’ve met have. Luckily, I have never run across an atheist who espoused Dawkins-like views, and I have to say that it’s partly due to my interaction with them- because I don’t try to change them, I don’t tell them they’re wrong because they’re not (religion is a spectrum and belief in God is ontological…. Essentially, God exists as much as you believe God does. Evangelicals get in the weeds with The Great Commission and think that Jesus thought you were personally responsible for recruiting people. They take it a little too seriously and often become right judgmental bastards because of it. You won’t convert, so they’re angry and fearful ALL THE TIME because their getting into heaven is DEPENDENT on your yes. Otherwise, in their churches, they just aren’t working hard enough.
Meanwhile, I am out there saying that atheists I’ve met, for the most part, left church because they were hurt, angry, afraid, and exhausted. You fucking Evangelicals are cancer, especially walking into a church where it explicitly says they won’t marry you if you are A) not a member of the church II) marrying a Jew. I will not tell you where I saw it because it’s not worth it to have you show up and protest. It wasn’t Joel Osteen, but definitely Joel-adjacent.
Now, non-denominational Christianity looks like rock concerts with homophobia that looks beautiful because it’s Biblical.
Meanwhile, your houses are built on sand.
Peter, the rock of the Catholic church, has probably met way more gay people than you. We just didn’t have words for it until Victorian England. A lot of the preachers after Jesus died would have traveled to ancient Greece and Rome. When you think about history lining up that way, homophobia is INSANE.
Homophobia. I do not think it means what you think it means. The Old Testament was not calling homosexuality an abomination. They were railing against the ancient Canaanite practice of young boys becoming prostitutes at the high temple. They were protesting pedophilia and disrespect for a holy place, not the sexual acts inherent to being queer in the first place.
Jesus did not say a word about homosexuality, “therefore, it [justification for treating queer people as lesser than] cannot be essential to his teaching” (Jim Rigby, Presbyterian Church USA). JESUS DOES NOT CARE IF YOU HAVE MATCHING TOWELS, GLASSES, AND SMALL DOGS.
Evangelicals are cracked when everything I know about Jesus can be summed up in one Disney show tune…… “God Bless the Outcasts.” You are JOKING if you believe Jesus sat with sinners all day long and wouldn’t have been on the side of the queer community, because now we’re the ones being persecuted instead of him, his land occupied by Rome. The “Holy Roman Empire” has a lot of fucking nerve, I’ll tell you that much. Crucifixion was your practice and you killed Jews for sport. Then, a Jew’s story becomes well-known and you somehow take it as “permission” to take over the whole world.
This is not the religion you’re looking for.
They’re worshipping the problem.
They’re creating ways to put obstacles in people’s way based on bullshit Jesus never said.
OCCUPIED BY ROME. RENDER UNTO CAESAR, PEOPLE.
Jesus has met a fuckin’ queer, all right?
Stop worshipping the problem, because it was never even there. You made it up. Stop wrecking people’s relationship with Christ because they don’t think they deserve it.
Jesus said to “walk in the light while you have it.” I hate that so many “church people” continue to live in darkness while the light is right above their heads. All they have to do is stand up, but the church keeps them on the kneeling rails.
It wrecks relationships with friends and partners as a result, because you’re not right……. But you’re certain.
It’s one of my favorite Eminem tracks, and I have done it at karaoke (POORLY). But today I get to say that I had a win, because it made me feel good. I was going to post this in the article about productivity, but I’m neurodivergent. My brain diverged and I forgot. I said that I locked down my personal Facebook page and redirected everyone to my professional author’s page. What I did not say is that I started thinking like an entity and not a person, because now that’s true. Bryn also has an account on this blog, and has the capability to create entries independently of me. She doesn’t always post, yet I have to be prepared for the possibility that she could. I also would have offered one to Supergrover (after I’d added Bryn- it didn’t occur to me before) if I thought she wanted it…. For two reasons. The first is that she’s a wonderful writer. The second is that I would be very surprised if I didn’t give her an account, just access to mine, and you could tell the difference. It would be my voice, just on crack. You’d think I’d gotten better in a hurry, but you wouldn’t have thought I changed style and structure except a quarter of never.
That’s because Supergrover writes fantasy and I don’t. I am so cerebral that the only fairy tale I’ve ever liked in my life is the one she handed me. I think that she thinks I get lost in thinking of her as the evil stepmother when I’m trying to reach “happily ever after.” Every story deserves an “HEA.” I can already see it, feel it on my skin. It just looks different than hers, and I have to be at peace with it. I am.
So, I started thinking of my blog as the beginning of Lanagan Media Group when I added Bryn and became open to the possibility of adding others; I felt an amazing amount of business savvy in locking down my personal profile. People don’t need to become friends with Leslie, they need to become friends with Lanagan Media Group. I am not a person anymore- because I have another author, I’m a brand.
But that brand is not Bryn pedaling my voice and views. It’s being able to talk about those things and discuss boundaries. We just don’t have to discuss much because we agree on most everything politically and neither one of us has a conniption fit when we write about the other. If we had a fight and she wrote I was a bitch that day, good for her. I probably needed to hear it. That’s because I know that when we have an intimate moment that strengthens our relationship, she’d reflect that, too. She’s not out to get anyone when she writes about herself, she’s digging deep and letting the right people go with her….. Because they like her for who she is and not who they think she is.
Sometimes, people don’t notice that it’s not me, so I started asking Bryn to introduce herself at the beginning of every entry she writes. I love it when she posts because she is naturally so much funnier than I am. My entries are not as full of laughter, because when I write, I am focusing on myself. How many of you when you sit alone and think are consciously trying to make yourself laugh? I am, and that’s the only reason there are jokes in here at all. However, no one does it all the time. Bryn just likes making herself laugh more than I do, and it shows.
Bryn is also neurodivergent, which is why we don’t have a problem in communication most of the time. Everything the other says is #relatable. Therefore, I am stereotypically #blessed.
I’m talking about her so much because she gets here tomorrow and I haven’t seen her since way before the pandemic, so the right amount of time to be over the top excited and can’t think about anything else.
I’m also excited to meet Dave, her boyfriend, and get to know him in the flesh as opposed to “this is Dave” occasionally as he walks by the video call. 😉 It’s necessary to get in good with your best friend’s partner, because we both need a person to talk to about her, because we both love her. We want to support her. I am not offering either of them more than that, just that when push comes to shove, I’m Bryn’s friend and not Dave’s. I am not ANTI-Dave. 😉 I am only anti-Dave if Bryn becomes anti-Dave. Just like Bryn would never in a million years be anti-Zac unless I became anti-Zac, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I have both freedom and security. It’s a lot easier to deal with life’s ups and downs when you know you always have someone in your corner no matter what. And both Zac and Dave are Navy, so obviously we both know what we’re doing in terms of picking men. Navy, you are a different breed and we’re here for it.
Zac and I have similar stories- he joined the military because he didn’t know what he wanted to do after high school, but he wasn’t interested in school. I tried to join the Air Force for the same reason, because at the time music classes were the only ones I liked and I wanted to try to get into “Airmen of Note.” I just wasn’t medically eligible and Zac was.
At the time, being in the military and also in the jazz band seemed like the easiest way to work as a musician every single day and not worrying about chair tests, ever, because even if I got last they wouldn’t kick me out altogether. No matter what happened, I could work as a musician, even if I turned out to be a crappy one and did something else for my day job. As it turned out, what I did not like was grade school.
I had a great college experience because that’s the first time academics are on a level playing field with neurotypicls and neurodivergents alike. That’s because in college, they don’t do “daily work.” You are perfectly free to inhale all the reading in one night if that is the way your brain works (and mine does). I couldn’t see the forest for the trees in grade school, but I kicked the shit out of college unless it was something I didn’t understand, anyway, like Logic or Trig.
It’s not school I objected to- it was the system of education. So, if you’re a neurodivergent who struggles in grade school, don’t worry about college because it’s a choose your own adventure. Study every day, or study for 27 hours in a row before a test. Your choice. You do you. Don’t be afraid that you’re not smart enough for college, because “smart” and the way your brain works are two completely different things.
I did a lot better in school when I wasn’t micromanaged and my brain could just be my brain. That I wasn’t set up to fail by not having papers in my bag that day. I was excellent even in classes with the Socratic method, because I would inhale the reading and be able to talk about it, and in classes where reading wasn’t mandatory (as in, we didn’t discuss it), I wasn’t punished for saving up the reading til later because I knew it would be on the test….. So I had to read it at some point and did. Class and the reading were often disjointed when they didn’t reflect each other, because both we as students and the professor would get off on tangents, especially in International Relations (we were obsessed with the war in Kosovo at the time).
So, for all you ADHD/autistic kids it’s okay to stop worrying about what you’re going to do in college because you might find when you get there that college jives more with the way you think than high school did, anyway. No matter how you do it, it’s right.
Just like now, I would have a problem with being required to write long essays every day on a given topic, but I write them to myself because I think they’re important. I am lucky that they have become important enough to other people that the reason I allowed other authors was to increase my reach while I was asleep, because I’m on Eastern time and Bryn is on Pacific. It was a very Pacific strategy.
I am capable of synthesizing and adapting ideas. I got that one from ITIL, which is the Bible on how to run a helpdesk- “follow the sun.” Maybe one day I will make friends close enough to add in New Zealand and Australia rather than requiring one of us to move there. 😉
I worked for Alert Logic, and we had a “follow the sun” approach, which led to one of the greatest victories of my career. The vice president of the company in the UK took a support call and transferred it to me without hanging up the phone. He was absolutely blown away that it was 0300 and I was chatting to him like it was just a normal workday…. Asking who his Doctor was (I asked all British customers that just to calm their asses down before addressing the issue at hand. If they’re calling to say something doesn’t work, they want to fight. Don’t let them. A cappuccino machine in a dress is the one true way). This vice president said that if everyone was like me, they’d have a better company. Unfortunately, my manager did not also think this.
That’s because I thrive on my own structure, which I had a lot of at night, especially when I transferred my business phone to my cell phone so I could answer calls in my pajamas in my home office, which I did when I was the one following the sun, handling international customers from midnight til 9 AM.
It was so intimate to be the only voice in the dark on my end with the busy chatter of their offices in the background. I often got to know people quite well because you have to do something to pass the time when files are transferring, etc. because it’s not enough time to put someone on hold. So, we’d chat to each other. I also got to know my British coworkers in Cardiff better than most because I was the one on the American end who was handing things over.
In fact, I once met a “Davies” that looked very much like Greg, and in retrospect I wish I’d asked if they were related. He’s one of my favorite comedians of all time, and on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” Greg finds out that he’s Welsh. I also had a fascination with Cardiff and “The Doctor Who Experience,” but I did not get to go before it closed. I’m sure that if I’d stayed at Alert Logic, I would have gotten a rotation in Cardiff at some point, but they were not the best with autistic employees who didn’t know they were autistic. Hindsight is 20/20 on agreeing that why I got fired was unfair, and yet it wasn’t their fault, either. I cannot hold them responsible for something they did not know, I can only lament that I did not know to tell them and move forward in a different direction.
Which reminds me- I get so much attention from the daily prompt tag that the next time I get to use it, I will say it again. If you want to read me, you’ll have to follow me, because I don’t appear in #dailyprompt every day anymore. That’s because even if I use it, I don’t have the specific tag for that day to put me into that feed. So many people have gotten used to reading me on that tag alone, because of the number of people that showed up every day back then vs. now. It’s not that I don’t do well in other categories, that’s just a big one for exposure. I got a year of it, so I should be grateful, and I am. What would be more helpful is another year of prompts rather than reusing the same ones.
I suppose I could create another author tag and use THAT account, but I’ve been theantileslie for so long that I don’t think of myself as anyone else, except for possibly “Rev. Argo,” because that’s how Bryn used to address my mail (I did her wedding years ago, am ordained by the church of the Latter Day Dude, and Argo is my favorite movie). If I had thought of it on Dec. 31st, I probably would have done it. It’s too late now. But maybe next year if there are no new writing prompts to be had.
Writing prompts make it easier to blog, just like sometimes Alzheimer’s patients come into lucidity about the past if you prompt them. Details come up for both of us that wouldn’t have come up otherwise. I find that especially the way I write, no writing prompts is ever going to be the same from beginning to end, because it’s going to bring up different aspects of an experience depending on how I view it that day.
I don’t think the same thing about every situation all the time. I make peace within myself by seeing things in a hundred different ways, because there are a hundred different ways to explain what happens when I’m around other people, or two hundred stories total because my 100 won’t match theirs. A lot of it is that autistic thought processes don’t seem “correct” to neurotypical people. Because our pathways are different, they are wrong.
Sometimes, I have to get used to the fact that I’m wrong whether I am or not, because I cannot get people to see that my thought processes are not “crazy.” They’re DIFFERENT, because I cannot even begin to think like someone else and in a neurotypical world, difference is bad. Very bad. They googled it, and they do not like it.
I have known this for a long time because I am not officially diagnosed as autistic, I am in the process of waiting for a diagnosis and doing all the research/online tests I can do until that appointment. However, I have been diagnosed as ADHD, and had I known more about ADHD when I was at Alert Logic and why it’s like autism, I could have been more specific in my demands for accommodation. Very few of the things I need in a working environment are specific to Autism or ADHD. Both accommodations are nearly identical. If I had known that I take in information through sight and that’s why I have trouble talking on the phone and writing at the same time, I might have gotten accommodation for it. I cannot process what one person is saying and process a response and write down my experience while it is happening, i.e. documentation. There are ways around a problem if you know you have it. I could not help myself.
That’s what all this autism talk is about. It’s not trying to “prove” I’m autistic because there’s no real way to do that. We all look different, we all have different ways of presenting. I especially know that you’ve met autistic women your whole life without knowing it because most women don’t know whether they’re autistic or not. It never would have occurred to their parents to get them tested because classic presentation is young boys. That means there are millions of undiagnosed women in the work force and we all struggle a fuck you amount. That’s because they’re caught in a system not built for them, but never taught that it’s not built for them. They’re just angry and frustrated because obviously, it’s not the system. They’re just failures.
Up to 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given moment, and for women, this is mostly expressed in not being able to handle life like a “normal woman.” We are taught that we are failing when we cannot handle being a partner, mother, and coworker/employee all at the same time. However, the more and more roles we take on, the more we’re spread thin without realizing it. The potential for constant meltdown/burnout cycles gets larger, which makes us look like we’re shirking our responsibilities because all wives and mothers are built to handle a million details and you’re just defective. I am so glad that I’m queer, because I have no doubt that if I’d bought into what being a wife and mother really was to a man and married someone to have that life, I would be dead by now. This is not saying that my husband would have killed me, but it is not unfathomable that he would be enraged by my lack. No, I’m talking about not having gender roles in a relationship kept me from feeling like I was failing as a partner all the time.
Life is relentless as an autistic person in an allistic world, because you cannot convince someone that you really didn’t know/understand something. “Everyone” knows. I would like to punch this mythical “everyone” in the face. They’re setting me up for failure, like commercials that try to convince people with no money that they need extravagant cars.
I thrive in my own system, and so do many autistic people. I just don’t think that many women have the language for it. I hope I’m giving it to them straight, because autism is probably a diagnosis they never would have thought they had because no one ever told them it was possible. There’s a woman I hold in my mind when I say this, and I hope she knows it’s her. It’s a face with many, many names when I follow the sun.
That’s because I’m not a brand, I’m an archetype. There are millions of women out there just like me, and I’m trying to find them. It helps not to feel so alone. I am already friends with lots of autistic guys due to the nature of always being online and having been on the Internet since it was born. I already indulge my autistic male side because men are more likely to know they’re autistic.
I have said that I’m enby and I mean it. I have just already met my quota in autistic men and want to get to know other autistic women, because it affects us differently in terms of the role we play in society. There is no room for an autistic woman to be herself unless she ignores a MASSIVE amount of American culture.
I get called “difficult” a lot when I don’t understand. It also doesn’t take much for a woman to be difficult in my society, so I am guessing that whether or not I am difficult depends on your perspective. I have definitely had to turn a negative into a positive, going even further against the grains of what female means in order to understand myself. I am not all of anything. I am a little bit of a whole bunch of things. I contain multitudes, and I’m not a good enough writer to have thought of that first but it doesn’t make it less true.
So, you should follow me because I am not going to be the same person tomorrow. You will perceive a different aspect of my personality then, because Bryn will be here…… And also because I’m a different person every time my outlook changes, because what I present depends on what I pick up.
Therefore, I would also like you to pick me up.
You know what I mean. Get your mind out of the gutter. 😉
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
I did do this prompt last year, but it’s still in my “Drafts” folder. Therefore, I actually get to answer today’s prompt like it’s a real writing prompt day. And yet, I have the same answer- Fourth of July is my favorite holiday because all I like to do on holidays is sit around with beer and talk to people. It doesn’t matter what kind of beer. Right now, I have two favorites. Hare Chaser Grapefruit IPA by Flying Dog and Chelada Nada by Athletic.
Athletic is an N/A beer company, so all of their brews have the same amount of calories as a Coke or less…. and they go hard. You cannot imagine that lime, black pepper, and tomato will perfectly replace the acidic burn of alcohol and then it happens.It’s perfect. I love Athletic because I am more interested in flavors than alcohol. I do not have to feel bad about wanting to try nine of them. I am not the only person in Zac’s house that likes Athletic, so he’s always well-stocked. He also has every single N/A spirit one can find, and my favorite joke right now is that when we were watching “Slow Horses,” I drank a GLASS of whiskey. 😉 I can’t remember what else was in it, I just remember being delighted that I did not have to be judicious with the pour. It’s a mixologists’ wonderland, these N/A spirits, because then I can spend all night experimenting and wake up with no ill-effects from the night before. It’s also good to know that I can make ANYONE an amazing cocktail regardless of their background with alcohol. That’s because I can do just as much with juice, soda water, and citrus garnish. If the person does not have a zero tolerance on alcohol, that opens up being able to use bitters, which make fruit juice and soda water grow up in a major way. I am sure, though, that many companies make nonalcoholic bitters just for this purpose. I need to get some, but right now I’m in love with Angostura, as it makes ginger ale taste like root beer, and Sprite/7-Up taste like ginger ale. If you go to a restaurant that does not have ginger ale and you order a cocktail that has ginger ale in it, it’s a reproduction behind the scenes.
Which reminds me. I have never made a Moscow Mule out of Reed’s Extra Hot, so I should get on that at some point.
This is the kind of conversation I’d be having at a Fourth of July Party before we go to the river. And it’s a propos that Fourth of July has come up today, because I cannot remember a Fourth of July in Portland without her. It’s not that it hasn’t happened. It’s that Fourth of July without Bryn is not memorable in any way.
Bryn, like the rest of my close friends, isn’t a person. She’s an event. When I see her, I don’t just see what is happening now, but all the iterations of her person that have come before this one. I see Bryn at every age, from little kid til now. What I also have to remember is that I would look like a little kid to myself at that age, too. I was 19, which is five years older than Bryn, but at 46 we both look like infants.
That’s because we had a mutual friend that held a Fourth of July Party every year, so we’d either meet up at their house or she’d eventually wander over to my apartment with Dana, which was across the highway (26) from said mutual friend. Or, as I joked with them, “you live on the side of Powell with the Starbucks and without the strip club. I live on the side of Powell without the Starbucks and with the strip club.” Who got the better deal is anyone’s guess, because I got to go to a bar and walk home at night. In the morning, she got to walk to Starbucks in her pajamas and beg them for milk. It all worked out.
My apartment became the Introvert Recharging Station, and said mutual friend was not very gracious about it. She did not like that people came to my house to get away from all the stimulation, and there was a lot of it. Conversation, live music, all of it. It was a lot, and it never occurred to me that she would be jealous. It’s not something we would have discussed, just a rumor I heard over the years from the people that came to my house.
In my own mind, it was not that way at all. I did the same thing when I was young at my grandparents’ house. They didn’t live very far from each other, so when I got bored at one house, I went to the other. Neither grandmother worried about me because they knew I’d be back. To me, everyone wandered in and out as they were comfortable, even me. It was never a divide and conquer, but that’s how she took it.
I am not manipulative by nature and do not realize when a game is afoot. Therefore, if there was any kind of game, I won by not realizing it was going on. People did not come to my house and stay for the whole evening. When things got boring at my house, they wandered back over to hers. I didn’t “steal” any of her friends, I took care of her introverts while they were overwhelmed and overstimulated. But, she was mad, because they were HER introverts.
Never mind that I was also one of her introverts, supposedly.
Besides, when she was having a party, I did not also, in turn, decide that I was having a party. If someone wanted to recharge at our house, it didn’t matter what we feed them or what we drank. The only time I remember Dana and I breaking this rule was a private conversation between us that we had with our eyes. One of her friends told us that he was HIV positive, and we looked at each other. All of the sudden, Dana’s most valuable bottle of wine meant shit and I knew that’s exactly what she was saying to me and I was saying, “you’re right. Get it out here.”
Thank you to Lynn, Jane, and Michael for introducing “Open That Bottle of Wine Day,” on “The Splendid Table,” or else it would not have occurred to either of us that these kinds of days are just what Jane and Michael meant. The announcement of HIV was a reminder to DO IT NOW.
It’s probably 15-20 years since that happened, and I remember it like it was yesterday, so it was worth it.
But that’s just one memorable fourth of July out of 14 or 15 that I celebrated in Portland. Most of what I remember is shivering next to the river watching the fireworks…… Which I do like sitting by the river in DC, because it’s not as cold in the summer. Portland has great weather for fireworks, usually, because the rain clears up. You must still need blankets to keep warm.
It’s best that you go with people you really like, because as it gets colder you won’t want so much personal space. It’s about shivering in groups.
What makes it my favorite holiday is that everyone is relaxed and no one has an expectation of getting a gift. It’s a stone soup holiday, where everything that everyone brings makes it better. Each person has a different type of hot dog/sausage/veggie patty, etc. Each person has that side that makes them comfortable (and I will search out the person that made deviled eggs). We all like ice lollies in red, white, and blue.
My favorite is where the white and blue meet- raspberry lemon. For my overseas readers, it’s called a “bomb pop,” and is stacked with red, white, and blue. The red is generally cherry, and I’ve mentioned that lemon is white. However, in other countries, raspberry would be a darker red, and in the US “blue raspberry” is dominant because we are crazy about artificial coloring and the rest of the world is not….. Mostly because their governments are smart and have outlawed them.
I have found energy drinks that are clear with that same raspberry lemon flavor and they’re just as good as the ice lolly. C4 makes the best, but I can’t remember what they call it. If it were me, it would be something cheesy having to do with freedom, because of the drink’s origin.
Plus, nothing was funnier back in the day to me than “Freedom Fries.”
Why wouldn’t it be? Fourth of July is my favorite holiday.
Stories That Are All True 