What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
When I am not writing, I am obsessed with television and video games as much as I am with reading, because it’s a different style and structure in each medium and I want to learn them all.
My favorite writer on TV right now is Issa Rae, because “Insecure” hit Netflix and all of the sudden, I realized how brilliantly her pilot was constructed when it came together…. but not enough to keep you from clicking “Watch Next Episode.” Maybe the pilot could work as a standalone. Maybe.
But what I learned is that I wanted to keep learning from her, because I wanted to see another episode in which she built up a plot in one way, and then unravels the sweater so that you don’t see it coming. The way she does it is by using emotional intelligence gathering on herself and others, which is every bit as interesting to me as watching espionage, because in both stories, there are things that go horribly wrong by not having the right information and consequences cost a lot more than they can pay….. one literally, the other emotionally.
Issa Rae’s comedy and drama comes from gathering intelligence and it turns out that either her perceptions are completely wrong, or her friends’ are. She digs into the complexities of really trying to own yourself, because you become stronger when you can admit that mistakes have been made.
In every book, TV show, or video game, it’s the writers that draw me in. The second thing is the composers. Once I’m done with a video game because I’m tired of it, I still listen to the score a lot. For instance, the full orchestral version of the Fallout 3 score is as beautiful as “Galaxy News Radio” is entertaining.
Now that I’ve played the intro to Fallout 4, I’m glad that Galaxy News Radio has been replaced by a DJ that plays the same music, but he sounds like he doesn’t know anything about being a DJ. There are lines that are so funny that I’ve fallen over, and I’m impressed at how Bethesda has continued the details that made Fallout 3 great. The reason I’ve only played the intro is that I could tell quickly that it was a console interface that had been adapted for PC. I hated it because I had to learn it, when Skyrim and Fallout 3 had the same game game mechanics ( and I rearranged the keyboard so that it was the same as Skyrim and Fallout 3).
I also would hate to start a game that didn’t have console commands, because it’s so handy in Skyrim. The game is stable on its own with a few unofficial patches, but the more mods you add, the more problems the game has with starting quests correctly, etc.
I am also very, very picky and I will not stick around for bad writing. I either like no writing at all (like match three phone games), or huge, epic sagas. I will look up the intro to Oblivion on YouTube and put it at the end. It grabbed me even more than the opening to Skyrim, because here’s what happened.
Video games are programmers. Most programmers are neurodivergent. Most programmers are also used to extensive documentation. So, Patrick Stewart was hired to do only the introduction, and he showed up to a bigger dossier than he’d ever been given for any character in his life. He said it was delightful…. actually, he’s said it several times, and I appreciate it because it has promoted the game many times. It’s one of the best opening cinematics in any video game because of THAT VOICE. I’ll put it at the end.
I played Oblivion when it first came out and got bored with it pretty fast because I was older, and when you’re older and you’ve played video games since you were a kid in the 80s, the more complicated keystrokes/controllers seem like too many buttons. Believe me, they are. I haven’t even figured out how to favorite weapons in Skyrim for easy access, and it’s been 10 years.
However, I didn’t come across Skyrim on my own. My brother-in-law had an XBOX (I don’t remember whether he’s upgraded or not, but you don’t need to update hardware for that game. Anyway, I was watching him play it and I loved the story, but hated the controller. So, I got it for PC and found the game mechanics much easier. It’s fun to fight the battles, but at the same time, the main storyline has to be compelling for me to even finish the game, much less play it twice.
I will say that since I have played both Oblivion and Skyrim now, I liked the ending of Skyrim’s main storyline, but the ending of Oblivion’s A plot made me fall out of my desk chair…………. just like I did in the 90s with StarCraft (iykyk).
Speaking of which, when it came out (I don’t remember what year, but not recently), StarCraft Remastered was $10 on Blizzard.net, and it was the best $10 I’d spent for the last several years. It’s a great storyline, and it’s so damn quotable. I remembered the interplay between Jim and Sarah like it was yesterday. Sometimes I’ll still start up a campaign just for old time’s sake, like keeping an old NES.
In terms of being able to study structure in writing from books, I find that I get the most and the least out of Stephen King. That’s because we write in exactly the same style. We don’t start with a plot, we find it. His “On Writing” is one of the best books in the world, but I still can’t figure out how to let go and get the story out without thinking too much about it. That’s because I’m not the kind of writer that can think all the way to the end of a story, because I don’t know which direction I’m supposed to go after a while and it all becomes character study.
I want help, and I don’t. That’s because if someone helps me with the plot, then it’s not my story anymore. I want to be able to tell it the way I want to tell it. I’m talking about things like craft and research to have enough information about a subject to know which way it would go in a real situation.
For instance, I’ve been trying to figure out a sermon that makes sense comparing Jesus’s escape to Egypt as a toddler to a modern ex-fil op since “Argo” came out. It came to me during the scene when Tony explains to the higher ups at State that “the only way out of Tehran is through the airport. We send in a Moses…………….” If I hadn’t already been sitting in the theater I would have needed a chair, it hit me so hard. That being said, I’ve put it off and put it off because when I write spy jargon, it doesn’t sound real. I need to read enough declassified operations that would fit my theme, and the most interesting part is that I need recent ones the most because they’ve taken place in the Middle East. It can’t happen, though, so I’m combing through a lot from WWII to The Cold War, both through newspaper articles from the time and non-fiction books.
Here’s why I want to learn what really happens during an ex-fil and how it would go down in The Middle East. My father told me about 35 years ago (and he got it from Harry Emerson Fosdick, then pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan) that “every good sermon begins in Jerusalem and ends in New York, or begins in New York and ends in Jerusalem.” It’s a code for being relevant. Start with the past and connect it to the present, or start with the present and tie it to the past. I have found that the latter works better, because when I start with the news or history, it is interesting, but the people are sitting there thinking, “how in the hell is she going to tie this all together?”
Then, when the light bulbs go off in their heads as to what dog you’re walking, you’re going to get one of three reactions. The first are smiles and excitement like they’ve gotten to the part in a novel where they can see the plot twist at the end. People have known these stories for years, just not necessarily new ideas on them unless their pastors are really digging into different interpretations/criticisms.
The second is tears, because sometimes the message really drives home something powerful going on in their own lives What I know for SureTM is that if you touch a nerve, people will say “it’s like you were only speaking to me.” “How did you know that’s exactly the message I needed to hear today?” In today’s lingo, I have no doubt that as I was shaking hands at the back, at least one person would say, “you didn’t have to attack me like that.”
It’s the point of church to begin with- to have community when those things come up for you…… which is why we had several atheist members at bridgeport and as far as I know, we still do. They don’t have to believe in God to believe in social justice.
The third reaction is raucous laughter, because I have to make sure everyone is still awake. If nothing else, I do two things to make sure even those people get something out of it……. the ones who are weaving in and out, lost in their own thoughts and then paying more attention because they didn’t know why everyone else was laughing….. I also make sure there’s a soundbite. I don’t leave it there, though. I don’t sum up scripture in, what is it for Sorkin? 11 words?
No, I find a way to have several illustrations that all tie back to that one line, so even if people can’t remember the entire sermon, they’ll definitely remember the tl;dr.
However, I haven’t been asked to preach in a very long time, so now my foray into an intelligence operation of Biblical proportions, it would just be a theological essay- as I am wont to do even while telling you about a million other things. I’m just not there enough to really tie a point together like I really want to, because the best way to knit a sweater in a story is detail, the immersive experience of playing a video game, reading a novel, or watching TV. The difference is that it’s all self-help based in reality, not “grandfather in the sky.” Divinity is too close for that.
I hope that, as in past entries, I’m making it clear that theology is one of my special interests, not that it has to be yours. I’ve said it before, but I accept everyone. I don’t care if you’re an atheist or not. I’m trying to impart lessons to an international audience, and Biblical references are something that connects a lot of the world. However, I don’t use Biblical illustrations for everything because it’s not the only way to use a world language as the world gets closer through the same cultural media. The internet and VPNs have changed the way we watch media, both here and abroad. I love setting my VPN to Canada or Australia when my browser will allow me to do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends. It always works on my desktop, it sometimes works in the app.
And sometimes, those illustrations work better than Biblical ones because the Bible is ancient and pop culture is happening right now. There are so many sci-fi TV shows/movies that I think represent the same self-improvement I use in Christianity by quoting nearly anything. I wasn’t kidding when I said I quoted Snoop Dogg in a sermon. My friend Kina was going to be there, and she was in a band called “Twisted Whistle” that did an acoustic version of “Gin and Juice,” like The Gourds except in four part harmony.
So, I knew I could make her smile if I worked it into my sermon, and it just so happened that the lectionary couldn’t have been more perfect. The Psalm that day was particularly beautiful, so, I started with telling everyone that the Psalms were written like poetry, and, like all Biblical stories, have had music set to them for centuries because setting a tune to the words is what helped people remember them before they could write. Then, I said that I knew it worked, because I knew all the words to “Gin and Juice” because Kina had finally slowed it down enough I could understand the lyrics. I got a little closer to the mic, and I sang Kina’s bluegrass version of the very first line, which is the only one I *could* sing in church……..
Then, I told my mother’s favorite memory of her mother. In the end, she had very bad dementia. She could hardly remember a thing, but tears rolled down my mother’s face when a music therapist got her to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” My mother had never heard her mother sing before, but showing again that theology is imparted through music.
Then, I sang the first line of the Psalm from the Episcopal setting I’d learned years ago……. from memory.
So, after establishing how it was finally written down, I explained the context around why it was written the way it was written. No one will remember that part of it because it was just color commentary However, I’m going to bet that if you know any of the songs I’ve mentioned, you started singing them, too. I sang the first line of the Episcopal setting to close as well, because you can get people to remember things if you set them to music….. or so I’ve been told. 😉
The quadratic equation is “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
What “Plotting by Notting” means is that I am taking in a fire hose amount of information when I look at other stories, no matter what form they’re in. Even when it looks like I’m not wiring and I’m just sitting there or gaming, I am still lost in my own head, trying to figure out how this or that plot device will work for me in the future. I have so much energy for writing, though, that the “notting” part takes me a while to det to because it’s so far down on the list of priorities.
The last author that really got me hooked in a way that I couldn’t let go until I’d finished the last in the series (at the time) was Diana Gabaldon. It took me three or four tries to get into Outlander, but by Dragonfly in Amber I was reading a thousand pages in two days. It was insane how fast I inhaled it.”Go Tell the Bees” is my least favorite because Gabaldon told us we’d get answers to questions we’d had since book one, and we didn’t……. and this is supposedly the last book. In a lot of ways, it was a “choose your own adventure” ending…. or, “Monty Python and Quest for the Holy Grail,” I think there’s more story to be told, but no one asked me. I’m sure that there’s fan fiction that addresses a lot of my questions, but I don’t want to wade through the D papers to find an A. I don’t have that kind of time.
What I’ve found with my “Words are Hard” fiction prompts is that I’m pretty good at short story ideas, but there comes a point quickly where I say, “this is as good as it gets.” I think this comes from my father’s preaching advice……. “when you run out of things to say, stop talking.”
I don’t spend time fleshing anything out more than that, because these are training exercises…. or at least, that’s how I see them. I am walking before I run….. this is “couch to 5K.”
Oh, and I almost forgot. Here’s the intro to Oblivion, with Patrick Stewart. As soon as he stops speaking, one of my favorite brass intros in any orchestral starts, called “Reign of the Septims.” This is the kind of music that makes me glad game soundtracks are available so I don’t have to play to enjoy the symphony and/or choir. Even if you don’t play video games, you’ll enjoy this:
Before we get started today, I have to give a shoutout to Susan. When I went back over her comment on yesterday’s entry, I realized what she was actually saying and I laughed til I cried. She said, “I’m surprised at what’s coming up for people in response to this ‘innocent’ question.” I was confused because I thought I’d asked a question in the writing and I was slow on the uptake as to which question she meant……. and then I realized that THE WRITING PROMPT was a question. Face palm. Yes, the writing prompt was completely innocent, and it didn’t take me all the places I could have gone because I have so many food memories.
I stopped taking road trips when I stopped driving, but I do love them. Zac was kidding me about being a bad driver, which is valid. But when I didn’t have a choice, I drove. I got better with age, but my last wreck came from my last road trip. When I tell you the circumstances, you probably won’t be surprised. Just yet another time autism ate my lunch.
I think deeply about things, to the point of the exlusion of everything going on around me. As a driver, this is not ideal. I think everyone is like this to some extent; they get lost in their own little world and then all of the sudden, there’s a car there….. I’d just talked to my first girlfriend after years and years, and I can’t remember what it was about the conversation that had me tripped up- mostly that it had been so long and I had absolutely no idea why she ghosted me in the first place.
She came out of hiding to say she was sorry my mother died, and then nothing ever again. Because basically what I realized is that she had the ability to control my emotions because mine went up and down as hers did. If you’ve read any of my writing in the last 20 years, you know this is not an unusual thing for me. I’m an INFJ. I take on every emotion in the room, good and bad.
I did what I always did back then when I was upset. I went to Waffle House. Or I tried. The one I used to go to when I lived here before was out in bum fuck Virginia, but there was one on my side of the river in Frederick. So, off I go for salvation- which in this case was going to be a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions. It’s my emotional support junk food.
Frederick isn’t really that far; I’m not sure that a Marylander would think of Silver Spring to Frederick as a road trip, but it was memorable. I ended up in the hospital when I took a curve too fast and slammed into a guardrail. I hadn’t been drinking (as opposed to what normally happens when you go to a Waffle House), I was just lost in thought and missed a sign for a 25mph speed limit while coming around…… or at least, I thought I did. The cop who came to ticket me (deservedly, I was really nice about the whole thing and so was he), he said that it wasn’t marked on this side. It was marked on the other side of the freeway. I remained cool and calm, but on the inside, I was livid. How is a sign a half mile away going to help me in this situation?
So, yes, I was driving distractedly, but I surely cannot be at fault for everything that happened that day if a curve was that dangerous at 30mph and unmarked. Seriously, five miles over at the entrance to a freeway and I went up on two wheels. I took my lumps, and I’ve never driven again…. unless I was in Texas and Lindsay and I were going to our grandparents’ houses or something (they used to live in the same town- our step-grandparents lived about six miles away). And even then, that’s only happened once.
Lindsay likes to control the driving and the music. You have no choice in this matter. 😉 I just don’t mind because she listens to things I’ve never heard before. For instance, Charlotte Cardin…. she’s a Canadian who had her premiere American concert at Union Stage, and we got to be there. Just a core memory all the way around.
Oh, wait. I did drive on one of our road trips, and it brings me to a really funny story even though :::waves hand::: this is not the road trip you are looking for.
When I was about 23, my mother went with her church choir to perform at Carnegie Hall. Lindsay, Kathleen, and I couldn’t get tickets for the performance, but my mom invited us to meet her in New York and just bum around. I think we spent the night? Not sure, but I put in a text to Lindsay to see if she remembers. If she gets back to me “before publication,” I might be able to shed some more light. I want to say we stayed at The Time hotel, but I’ve spent a couple nights in New York and I may be mixing up trips………
But anyway, when we were kids, my dad left an entire pound of sliced turkey in the trunk of his car. We didn’t find it for weeks. When we finally found it, my dad called it “Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome.” So, at one point, I think Philly, we stopped at a gas station to get sandwiches because Washington to New York is really not that far. We just needed a snack. So, that was a good move right up until I didn’t notice that Lindsay left half a sandwich in the back seat of my car for like, six weeks, so I know that Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome is genetic. I’m sure I’ve celebrated it more than once since then… Oh, wait. I definitely have because I can’t remember whether it was Dana or me, but she definitely knows about “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome.”
The reason I can’t remember is that Dana didn’t change her name legally, but we were both Mrs. Lanagan to our friends. That’s because at the time we were thinking about having kids. We didn’t, of course, but at the time it made sense for us all to have the same last name and she had cousins with her last name and I didn’t. So, we both answered to “Lanagan” in the kitchen and I don’t believe I have ever been more touched when they called her and she answered to it. Plus, it was fun calling her “Naganalanad.” Oh, and we had two other nicknames. Dana introduced me to one of her customers that always called her “Trouble.” So, when he said, “hey, Trouble,” she introduced me as her wife and he nodded to me and said, “Mrs. Trouble.” I don’t remember what I said, but it was some version of “you have no idea.”
But in the original road trip instance of me showing signs of “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome,”, we didn’t spend much time together. The part I really remember is driving down West Side Highway and the water being so incredibly beautiful. This why I wanted to go to New York, Zachary. He only gets the full name when I’m play upset.
No, I was telling everyone in another entry that I’d like to spend some actual time in New York people watching, because that’s the one thing I’d never done. Just gotten a table at an outside café, probably with a newspaper so I’m not incredibly obvious as to all the staring I want to do. How do New Yorkers live? How do they survive? I think my answer would be to slowly become Fran Lebowitz….. and honestly, I’m not even sure I’m not her already. I am 46…….
I have not had many days lately where I’m not absolutely as cranky as she is, but she’s brilliant so a lot of funny comes with her outlook/attitude. I suppose Fran is a better archetype for me because Harper Lee was much more agoraphobic than I am (though I do get that way sometimes). Fran does speaking engagements that are basically just interviews with one person and I think, “I could handle that. It’s just one person.” She also loves being at home with her books and writing, she doesn’t feel trapped there.
I saw a meme that spoke to me yesterday (the reason why I have trouble in conflicts with neurotypical people), literally to my core because it says so much about my emotional abuser, then Meagan, Kathleen, Katharin, Angela, Supergrover, and to a certain extent, Meagan and Dana (that’s because they were the only two personalities I’ve dated/been partners with that deviated from the pattern and got into it once I was just, so………….. meeee.
The meme said, “you don’t like dominant women because you’re submissive, you like domaninant women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” I can 100 and crazy percent agree that this is why I thought Meagan was right, that we would have been good partners for each other as adults if we’d tried, because she was an athlete and is now a massage therapist. That means she is driven to succeed and also didn’t completely steamroll me every chance she got.
She was in touch with her fallibility, when a lot of women aren’t. When emotionally unavailable people shut down, whatever it is that they’re upset about becomes inflexible and there’s not a lot of compromise. I have come to realize over the years that this is not personal in any way and just to distance myself from those people. It’s not because I don’t love them to the moon and back (even Kathleen, because I’m determined not to be bitter).
The feeling I had with Meagan where there were some things I felt strongly about and some things I did was why my relationship with Sam tripped me up for a bit. I did not feel that I was absolutely steamrolled until I put all the puzzle pieces together. Just wire monkey all the way around when I desperately needed cloth after a bad relationship beforehand….. and there were seven years between Dana and Sam, so it was a very big deal for me to let my guard down even that much. So, the first red flag is that she felt responsible for my transportation because she had a car and I didn’t. Not once in three weeks did she say, “I’m going to be at X. Meet me there.”
In fact, I don’t think she ever would have, because she’s a mom and wants to take care of everyone, overextending herself in the process by putting something on herself that just didn’t need to be there………. and the biggest red flag as to why I originally said no to our first date. She picked on me for not having a car.
I told her that if we worked out, I would think about buying a car because it wouldn’t just be about me. I’d need to be able to get there faster if she was stuck for child care or whatever (I never wanted to be the stepmom unless she asked me, just mom’s girlfriend who lets us get away with murder- relative, because they’re pretty much the perfect kids.
I didn’t have the money to buy a car currently and if I did come into enough money to buy a car, I wasn’t sure it was the safest option for me unless I bought a Tesla, the only way I’d let the kids ride with me because of the technology. I also said that I was waiting for other car companies to get their adaptive driving tools in their own cars because Elon Musk is a tool. So, from the very beginning, me not having a car was a straight up problem……………. FOR HER.
It was a road trip to see her, but not any longer than I would have taken to see Zac, just in the other direction. She lived near BWI, and the train ticket on the MARC was $18 round trip. If Sam wasn’t available to pick me up, or just didn’t want to, it was close enough to Uber without spending an arm and a leg. And not just to her house- it was a small town. I could have met her anywhere, without, I might had, having to pay for or find parking.
The other thing is that Sam told me from the very beginning that she was just starting a successful clinic and she really didn’t have time to date. That she didn’t even know if she could see me after our first date. This did not sit well with me. I said, “it looks like you’re only looking for a girlfriend for a weekend, and I’m not into that at all. She promised that no, it had nothing to do with that, it was only timing both with her business and with the kids’ dad (we weren’t even close to being introduced- that would have been straight up insane). The one thing the kids did know is that their mom was dating someone, and if it worked out they might meet me, but she wanted the kids to know she was dating in case I accidentally left something at their house, etc.
So, I know that Sam wasn’t as shallow about all this as she seemed. She was trapped between two worlds; the one where she wanted a successful business, and also wanted to throw her whole heart into a relationship because she didn’t know how not to do that. Frankly, until I’d been dating Zac for a year, I didn’t know how not to do that, either. It took time and patience to learn, because negotiating emotional boundaries doesn’t wig me out the way it used to.
I was actually talking to Zac about this, that because of the way I was raised, I was taught to see men as an authority figure, as all women are and fight against it our whole lives…. and that me being 10 years older made me realize I wasn’t scared of him. That I actually was coming from a place of wisdom, but not always because Zac is every bit as intelligent and creative as I am. I feel like I have met my match, and because I feel polysaturated at one person, I don’t feel the need to date more because now I’m the one that doesn’t have time for a full-on relationship because I am pouring my energy into all of you.
And we negotiate boundaries all the time, except that most of those are on my end. You get to see what you get to see, but I do have a third dimension…………. kind of. 😛
So, I am of two minds about the breakup. I was trapped in the same world she was- content to focus on my writing and not her exclusively so she wasn’t overwhelmed at work and at home. This led to two issues. The first is that I don’t know how long it had been since her last relationship, but she basically went into it feet first and rushed everything until it flamed out. She was scared she was going to do that with me, and I know it.
You don’t have jokes like me calling her “Wilhousky” if you don’t get each other on a deep spiritual level. I am lyric soprano, and she’s an alto with mezzo tendencies….. so basically, the same kind of soprano as me. Not full of herself, first of all, because most lyric sopranos are. It’s supposed to be my job to be the egotistical nut bag, but I’m not because I’ve watched those absolute bitches for years and I will have no part of it. I already know that with pieces that really fit my voice, I am unstoppable all on my own. I don’t need to compare myself to anyone else at any time…… and Sam felt the same way.
Plus, her house was big enough that if she wanted a grand piano, I could have brought her one. 😉 But that would have taken years to build, and she was so ready and yet not. She felt it was too soon to jump in feet first, yet didn’t have any experience not doing so. Frankly, neither did I. But what I was comfortable with is loving her to whatever level she would accept, because I thought she would make a great friend if we weren’t together……… right up until she text messaged me to break up and when I asked her if we could talk about this, she said she didn’t think it would do any good. To me, that’s not an adult. That’s hiding. But there’s more to lesbian relationships moving fast than you might think. We are terrified of scarcity. We will lock down bad relationships and stay in them for years because it’s so hard to meet lesbians as a general rule.
In terms of queer women, we are very much known for this. My friend Beck and I are both surprised U-Haul has not built an entire ad campaign around it……… It’s not a secret, it’s history. As I said in a queer group on Facebook, “we don’t want to treat women like men. We don’t want other women to treat us the way men treat women. So we do what women have done for thousands of years….. use inference until someone gives or until both people die.” I don’t want to be this way with anyone anymore, because it’s never gotten me anywhere.
Most, if not all lesbians need to be told directly that you like them, because I promise you that most women have self-esteem issues and will not believe it just by watching across the room for interest. So, I feel very sorry for it, but that’s what gave me too much hubris with my beautiful girl. Because first of all, if she felt anything from my letters, I knew she wouldn’t tell me. The second thing is that I didn’t want to go my whole life without knowing the answer.
I was brave, crazy, and a total idiot. I think she didn’t tell me she was in a serious relationship because she knew it would hurt; it actually made things 10 times worse because she waited so long to lower the boom. In my opinion, she didn’t tell me things like that because she was afraid of my reaction…. because I would imagine that she has had to deal with male interest every single fucking day of her life.
With me, she got shy and absolutely didn’t know what to say. In some ways, and please forgive me, beautiful girl, just something I know to be true from other women that have been older than me- their internalized homophobia is stronger because of the era in which they grew up. Just because there are gay people around someone doesn’t mean they know how to react when someone is interested in them. My job was to make sure that it didn’t feel threatening, and at first, it didn’t. She was flattered and appreciated my thoughts.
But I was married, and basically, so was she. But there was a power dynamic between us that made our relationship stronger and different than the one with my wife. But those are all the parts I can’t explain, which is why I was such a dick in trying to shut the relationship down. I really thought she’d block me on everything and that would be the end of that.
She didn’t understand any of it because she wasn’t in love with me. She didn’t freak at seeing my picture in her feed all day. It wasn’t hard for her to see my status updates because she wasn’t reading into them the way I was into hers, because it hurt to be close and not. Nothing about our situation said that we were having the same experience, but that didn’t mean that either was wrong.
She said something to me that I’ve always remembered, because it gave me room in the relationship to be me. She said, “we both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. I don’t know what else to say.” She didn’t have to- that one line was everything and I’ve remembered it for a decade. Most of the things that I’ve remembered, I’ve remembered for a decade.
That’s because those are the days in which we really opened up to each other without putting emotional guns on the table and seeing if they’d go off. What I have learned from this, many, many times, is that she must love me to some extent because no one in their right mind would have stayed and fought it out with me if they didn’t.
Even on our worst days, we still communicated. It might have been angry that day, but the connection was still there. What we didn’t have was my ability to call her out on her bullshit, when that wasn’t a problem before. There was an even more strict power dynamic because she thought I was always trying to rile her up and make her angry.
I always thought that’s because she doesn’t deal in deep emotions and I do a hundred percent of the time. So, what I thought of as opening up and trying to get closer, she thought I was “throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shit storm to begin.” So, when she’d say that, I’d go into fight or flight and it never ended well.
But those angry conversations are the last thing that happened, not my intention for our friendship. She wasn’t always the one who escalated, but it was easy for her to blame stuff like that on me because I’d already hurt her once and she was protecting herself from it not happening again. I respect that part of it. I do not respect holding me to that wrong forever, because if I didn’t really mean that there was no friend zone, that whatever she offered me was great, I would have given up eight or nine years ago.
I feel like I’ve been acting the way women want men to react, to see that there’s more to life than sex with women and really take in that if women won’t give you that part of themselves, that doesn’t degrade their worth as a person and they still have so much to give you. So, if you take your shot and lose, walking off with your tail between your legs, you have probably lost a relationship that could grow into something strong and comfortable if you weren’t such a jackass about it.
My jackass days are over, because I cannot stress enough how my emotions happened completely organically so that even I was suprised by them, both that they existed at all and that they were intense. One year she was going on vacation and I offered to Skype her. She said, “sure,” and we didn’t make it happen. Our relationship devolved into more and more writing, less and less planning to get together as our two stories diverged in a wood, because it was deeper and more emotionally charged due to the wall between us.
But the thing is, if you’re used to really fucked up love, you’ll find it and stick with it because you don’t know anything else. I’m only calling her out on this part because she thought I was jumping up and down for attention by sending her emotional bombs. In reality, I knew that we’d be apart for a long time, so the letters were weighted so she’d actually have something to chew on before we got together again, even virtually.
But because she thought I was throwing emotional bombs, she’d reply immediately and ream me out. From my perspective, none of the messages she was supposed to get actually came across.
I wasn’t jumping up and down for attention by sending her “emotional bombs.” I was trying to clean up our toxic mess by asking her emotionally intelliegent questions, and doing things for her like occasionally picking up her afternoon coffee and sending her presents for Christmas, her birthday, and Galentine’s Day…… because I’m Leslie….. get it?
We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.
The first time I sent Supergrover a Galentine’s Day present, she had never seen Parks & Rec, so it was a cute way to suprise her. She said that Feb. 13th would carry a new connotation henceforth, and it was so incredibly sweet. I knew then that she was my “poetic, noble, land mermaid.” It always makes me happy for her to feel happy at something I’ve done, and I feel all of that got overshadowed over time.
It was all my fault, In the Beginning.™
But again, I cannot abide people who forgive you on the surface and pretend everything is fine. My crush on her was not our only problem. Her problems were also on the table, and if I’m really honest, fed each other and also canceled each other out. I think we would have been a different “chosen family” altogether if we could have stopped the petty fighting and started the real one. There was no way to get closer by arguing over the equivalent of our preferred brand of toothpaste while ignoring the fact that we were both struggling underneath.
Editor’s Note:
I’m beginning to realize how long this is. Please excuse me. I took my Adderrall at 0630 and apparently it has kicked in….. JFC.
Now you know why Supergrover was overwhelmed. This entry is basically what one of my weighted letters looked like- I should have sent less of them, but she was my “first text of the day.” And in all honesty, that was all I needed from her. Just to be that person I could say good morning and good night to before I launched into a relationship that meant having to keep up with all that stuff. I knew she wouldn’t get jealous and wonder why I didn’t do it if I forgot or whatever, and I’m not even sure if she liked it or not.
And that became the root of my problem with her, and my problem with Sam. Because both women were emotionally unavailable, neither Supergrover nor Sam would have gone deep with me and said, “here are the things that are going right. Here are the things that are going wrong. Here’s things we can fix. Here’s things that are basic incompatibilities and we should move on….. because we’re wonderful, just not for each other.” I feel like I should have known this with both women a lot earlier than I did, and with Supergrover and Sam both situations resolved in much the same way.
Sam held in all her feelings about wanting to get close right away and also not having enough time for me and didn’t want me to be lonely all the time. What she didn’t know then that I know now is that we would have been as happy as Zac and I are because since he has multiple partners, he’s not dependent on me or vice versa. With Sam, if she’d wanted to be monogamous, it would have worked the same way. I would have been too involved in my own life to pay attention to the fact that she wasn’t always around.
And in fact, now I have an inside joke with one of his other partners, and I’m not sure she even knows it. I’ll use a fake name, but this is still really funny.
Leslie: No need for you to reply, just dropping a note here so I don’t forget. You are out of Diet Dr. Pepper. Karen and I would like a word. 😛 😛 😛
Zac: I’m just now headed for home after I have to stop for……. something.
And here’s the thing. He’s going to have to go to the store again if Karen won’t switch hit like I will. Zac knows that Karen likes Diet Dr Pepper and I like Dr Pepper Zero. It made me feel even more special when he walked in wiht my favorite (just like he would do for her), because Zac is the kind of man that remembers these things.
One date night turned into two because he bought us tickets for a cheese and beer tasting event.
So, the first night we hung out and watched “Sideways,” only the sexiest film in existence because Stephanie is a bad, bad girl. Then, the next night we went to the event at Fair Winds (it’s great, you should try it. It’s in Lorton.). Good lord I had flavors I never thought I’d find outside of Oregon. But I was good to myself. Too much alcohol is bad for my psych meds, so I tasted everything (a couple times), and then had a short Fruit Punch sour that absolutely blew my mind.
Then, it was still relatively early in the evening when we got home, so we watched “The Holdovers,” because we both love Paul Giamatii. Zac had heard a review (or maybe an interview with Paul) where the plot is basically “what if the guy from ‘Sideways’ was Edward James Olmos in ‘Stand and Deliver?.’ Now, I haven’t seen the movie to the end (I fell asleep because we were watching it on a tablet in bed), so I don’t know if he actually wins the entitled private school assholes over, but what I do know is that by writing that description of the movie, it’s making me laugh so hard I’m crying……. because here’s what I know.
Poor kids experience more physical pain. Rich kids experience more emotional pain because they’re surrounded by “safety.” Safety like a mom promising to take her son to St. Kitt’s for Christmas break, then calling him up while his suitcase is in his hand and saying he can’t go because it’s her honeymoon and she doesn’t want him to come. I think I only noticed one kid (not an American) who actually had a good home life. These kids are in boarding school because their parents have kids as status symbols and heirs, not the cuddlebugs they actually are. And, I’m actually not even sure that poor kids experience more physical violence, because I was talking about their neighborhoods. I am sure there are people across the income spectrum who think nothing of beating their children. Those kids learn to do everything to please their parents, so when their parents dump them, they realize that they’ll never please their parents and to find someone else…….. a large part of “Spare,” by the way. He calls out the African man who actually raised him and says it just like that. I think it would have been a dagger to the heart of any father that had feelings.
That’s why boarding school teachers and nurses are so important. They become the parents, especially for small kids. Very, very few parents send their kids to boarding school because they’re impressed with the education and truly want to give their kids a better life.
Boarding is not required at many schools. Imagine being such an absent parent that you can’t handle your kids sleeping in their own beds at night.
But I’m sure that school is also a refuge for those with alcoholic parents…… and that happens across the board, too, except kids who aren’t in boarding school don’t get a break.
I take all this in from thousands of interactions I’ve had with people over the years, often standing on my dad’s platform as a community leader (his last church was about 1600 members, so not a small sample size). I also read a ton of books on self-help, emotional intimacy, and conflict resolution. I realize that autistic rage and burnout cannot go unmanaged if I’m ever going to live with someone else, even a roommate. That’s because in my next house, I’d like to be closer and actually run a household together rather than every man for himself.
I think Zac and I would be great at this, but there are two reasons why that can’t happen. The first is that he just got a roommate about a month or two ago, and the second is that he has a hard and fast rule that romantic partners cannot live with him. I love this, and I also know that he’s said it’s not a hard and fast rule if I’m only looking for a short-term (maybe two weeks) place to crash if I’m waiting on an apartment or room in another group house (my first choice).
I also wouldn’t want to put Zac out in any way, so it would be perfect if I could crash while he was somewhere else so it didn’t feel like we were living together. The only reason I even consider him being a roommate is that I’d love him whether we were dating or not, and I have that outlook on our relationship. That I don’t know what the future holds, but my platonic relationships run just as deep and I can’t imagine a life in which we’re not coming up with book ideas and flipping each other shit while we do it. So, what I really mean is that no matter how much time we spend together, it is always quality because we’re a lot of fun.
The only thing I’m really trying to convince him of is just how beautiful a human being he is. It is not a “falling in love” sort of feeling, but recognizing a kindred spirit. We’re neurodivergent, so we have the same sense of humor- e.g. “are you suggesting object permanence is a problem?” I said, “Peek-a-Boo, bitch.” I’m laughing now even as I type this, but I still can’t believe he let me get away with that one. I’m lucky in that he’s military, because there’s very little I could say in which he wouldn’t just roll with it. And the best thing is that if something I said crossed a line and actually hurt, he’d be emotionally strong enough to tell me that. And, of course, now since he knows my sense of humor better, his digs at me are getting better and better….. to the point where I can’t wait to see what happens as we get to know each other even better. I think he is as divine as everyone else, and I want him to believe it. I believe in him, both as military, intelligence, and fiction….. plus blogs. It was a kick to be written about, and an honor…….. and then there’s things like this.
He sent me a leftist cartoon where Jesus is at the southern border with all the Mexicans trying to cross, and I said someting theologically literate and flaming liberal. He said, “commie,” and water came out of my nose.
I think it’s great that he’s an Atheist and also not offended by the teachings of Christ in the way that I use them (his criticisms of conservative, white supremacy apologist theology is valid and appreciated. Leftists need to do better at beating this down.). Sometimes, when I use a theological device in my writing, he’ll ask me what the story is behind it because he knows that I like religious discourse as an academic subject and not in any way trying to change him. We both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. 😉
And now we’ve arrived at our last road trip. I need to go out into Virginia and see what’s available. I don’t need to be closer to Zac, that would just be an added bonus. No, it’s more serious than that, and something I can’t let go publicly. I just need to get all my ducks in a row regarding health care because I would be losing a hell of a lot if I couldn’t get reciprocity.
So, if you are a praying sort of person, black magic or white, ponder how this trip might turn out and wish me good luck.
I laughed to myself when I wrote that title, because everyone I write about is a big influence. I can’t think of anyone that has affected me more in both good ways and bad than going back over my years and seeing what happened.
Zac is my biggest influence right now, because for Christmas he got me a box of cards with fiction challenges on them. I may start a different blog for that, at his suggestion for his own site, because it would look disjointed to have fiction and non together. I will wait and see whether I’m actually prone to publishing the results first.
Speaking of Mr. Wood, I had no idea that a comment and a blog entry about me was written by him, because I absolutely didn’t see the play on words with “Mr. Would.” I was reading too fast and I saw “Mr. World.” But even if I had read it correctly, it wouldn’t have helped me, because Zac didn’t mention that he was a blogger. I am looking forward to another blogger in the house, because I need to know how it feels to be written about, and I can’t think of a person that sees more of my range of emotion.
That doesn’t make it not funny that I didn’t know that Mr. Would was actually my boyfriend. This is because I thought I was going to meet someone new in the area, and was surprised to see t hat we’d already met. We’ve been dating for a YEAR and I didn’t know he had a blog. A YEAR. YEAR, people. A YEAR.
Now I’m really laughing.
He was probably gathering intelligence to see how good an idea it was to tell me he was a blogger, and that just makes me laugh harder because of course I’m kidding. I have the same philosophy as Bryn. “Write what you want, we’ll work it out.” He actually took me to the mat over traveling, and that’s what made me think I had a superfan on my hands. He said that I didn’t include places I’d said I’d wanted to go before, and was surprised I didn’t mention them again. So, I have this entire ass blog entry written about me by MY BOYFRIEND, and all I got was a pingback.
No, it is AS IF he listens to me, and I could cry when I think about that intensity. I know I am valued because when I say something, he remembers it. I have never been in a relationship with someone so much like me, with the possible exception of Dana. The thing is, though, she would adore Zac as well because he’s like both of us. Neurodivergent and also in the military. Neither Dana nor I have served, but her dad was a Marine and she speaks acronym. I definitely have a type, and it doesn’t have to do with looks. It has to do with the way someone thinks.
So I’m sitting there reading like, “does he memorize my shit?!”
The only reason I didn’t think of Zac at all is that this has happened before. I know I’ve mentioned it, but for new readers there was Stephanie (at least, I think that was her name, it was years ago). Stephanie invited me for coffee through a dating site (the miracle is that I said yes). I sent her my URL because I separate the children from the adults fast. If you can’t handle that I’m a writer, we’re not going to have much in coommon.
Stephanie proceeded to read back four years’ worth of entries, and then pretended like my blog was law and I couldn’t change. It was an hour’s worth of “now you’re saying this, but four years ago, you said….”
I’d gotten divorced, moved to DC, and my mother died in relatively quick procession. But of course no one changes because of anything as simple as that.
But right now, I can’t dwell on anything in my real life, because tonight is not about me. Jesus is one of the biggest influences in my life, and it’s almost time. Mary can sense it. Her water is about to break. Right now? This very moment? I’m just waiting for the baby.
Tonight Luke will come out in his scrubs, and announce that he’s here. The baby that will one day change the world. Tonight is the night that the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin, we can touch the face of God.
The miracle is not that Jesus was a virgin birth, but that he survived at all. Can you really imagine being a baby and lying that close to cow shit? Can you imagine delivering your son in a barn? It was so long ago that they didn’t know about germs, so it probably wasn’t as scary for Mary because she didn’t know what could happen, but we do.
If your baby got that close to death, don’t you think they’re divine?
On this Christmas Eve, know that it doesn’t take a miracle to make someone a child of God. We were all born innocent, and we make the decision to resurrect ourselves all the time. It’s the message we’re missing in the middle of the mess.
Whether or not tonight means that The Messiah is being born is irrelevant to me, because this is not a story about magic. This is a story about mystery.
Jesus survived, and the odds were stacked against him. So, in remembrance, I’m mentally gathering the layette. I’m buying everyone blue bubble gum cigars. I’m writing the announcement for the newspaper. It’s all I can do, this waiting.
I’m posting this now because it seems the timing is “write,” but I actually wrote this in 2007, when I was living in Portland. If you’re still there, you should go to The Grotto. It was a very spiritual experience.
Dana and I have completely opposite schedules most of the time, which means that even though we live together, we really don’t see each other any more or less than when we didn’t. I find myself with lots of time alone at home with the cats and the Tivo, and I’m very happy with it. Especially as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less willing to put up with an evening of trying to meet people.
But then there comes a point where I know I’m spending too much time alone- a sign I’ve come to watch for as a depression indicator- and I force myself into new and different situations to try and reverse the downward spiral.
On Friday, I came home and looked through the Willie Week to see what was going on. I thought about seeing a play. There are several going on right now that are inexpensive, and it’s been a while since I’ve done the theater. But then something caught my eye that I thought was just right.
Billed as the Festival of Lights, there are decorated trees, a petting zoo, a live Nativity, and many, many different sets of carol singers. It’s going on from now until Christmas at The Grotto, Portland’s National Sanctuary to Our Sorrowful Mother. Sanctuary is kind of a misnomer, because The Grotto is not an expansive building with cathedral spires. It’s more like a labyrinth or a Stations of the Cross-type setup. As you walk through the lighted displays, piped voices tell the birth story. When the Christmas decorations aren’t there, the walk is contemplative regarding the rest of Mary and Jesus’ life (Joseph, fortunately or not, gets very little airplay).
Normally, I am not a big fan of piped voices, but against the backdrop of the lights, it seemed fitting. It felt more like a museum tour with headphones than the muffled sounds of a speaker system whose last job was a drive-thru.
After I took the short baby Jesus tour, I arrived at the top of a hill. From there, I could see a chapel, the aforementioned petting zoo, and a small stage. I made a beeline for the petting zoo, because I am a big fan of those goats that are almost as small as my cat.
I also managed to charm a camel named Fezzic into taking a carrot from me, which was far more entertaining than my last run-in with a camel. When I was a little under five, my mother and father took me to a Nativity play and a camel spit on me. Who knows, maybe I deserved it. In any case, I liked Fezzic a lot and resolved to work on my camel issues.
After I finished at the petting zoo, I went to listen to a quartet of singers that really impressed me. They didn’t seem like paid professionals- more on the level of the best singers in their church choirs. There was something comforting about it- took me back to the days of standing around my friend Suzanne’s piano with all my friends from my own church choir… which brings to mind a memorable year in which I was wearing a sweatshirt that had jingle bells sewn all over the front (Mother, I will take your apology for that shirt now). My friend David said that I “tinkled when I walked,” and started shaking the everliving bejesus out of me when Suzanne started playing “Sleigh Ride.” I don’t think my cerebral function has been quite the same since (shut it).
So there I was, absolutely freezing my bits off in the cold, lost in my memories of Christmas past, and I realized that this was the first time in, well, as long as I could remember, that I was able to take in Christmas at my own pace. I wasn’t worried whether everyone else was having a good time, I didn’t have to be anywhere, the hot chocolate was overflowing and the music just kept getting better.
I ended the night by going to the chapel, where the choir from St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church did a setting of English carols- some even by Andrew Carter, the composer who wrote the solo I sang at Trinity last year.
I relaxed and listened to the music as I pondered the things in my heart. Christmas for the past few years has been stressful. This year, it has wrapped around me and comforted me before I even realized what was happening. It has made me more grateful for the life I have, for the people I have around me. Christmas isn’t all about busyness, though there’s certainly that aspect of it. But my advice is not to get so wrapped up in someone else’s Christmas that you end up missing your own.
It was a worthwhile experience to go to a Christmas festival alone. I chatted with some people while I was there, but for the most part, it was just me and my (cheap) camera phone. I saw Christmas more fully- introspectively, I suppose- as an active observer of both music that conveys sentiments for which there are no words and pictures for which words do no justice.
I used to belong to a group called the “RevGalBlogPals” and we did this thing (a meme, which is where the current picture term comes from, but back in the day it was bloggers who sent each other a writing prompt. We did the Friday Five, and this comes from one that said, “what makes you laugh at Easter?” It’s still 100% true, and I wrote this in 2007:
Dana.
Dana made me laugh so hard that I almost wet myself when I went to lunch at her house for the first time, which was, in fact, Easter 2003.
The funniest thing was that she didn’t mean to make me laugh, and I think she might have even been a little offended that I laughed, but come on. When you hear what I laughed about, you’ll laugh, too.
Dana’s family has LAMB for Easter. It’s a tradition. Apparently, lots and lots of people have LAMB for Easter. I did not know this.
Perhaps Easter lunch should *actually* be roast lamb, fava beans, and a nice chianti.
And yes, it is not lost on me that communion is Jesus’ body and blood as well. Transubstantiation isn’t any less disgusting an idea when thought of literally, either.
But then again, with communion there are no leftover Jesus sandwiches.
This is from Good Friday the week before Ash Wednesday of the same year.
I can’t believe it’s already time for Ashed & Smashed! Such a great time was had by all at last year’s, and this time shouldn’t be any different. In fact, it’s getting bigger. We’ve invited just about everyone we know, and as it turns out, we know a lot of people.
For the unfamiliar, Ashed & Smashed began when Dana (my best friend) came to hear me sing at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. Afterward, we went to Jake’s Grill, a little bar on the first floor of the Governor Hotel (10th and Alder). We had *so* much to eat, and like, two hurricanes apiece. So we started throwing names around for this brand new holiday that we’d just created.
Was it going to be:
-Blessed and Blasted? -Kneeling and Reeling? -Crossed and Canned?
Ashed & Smashed got the most votes by far, and there was only the two of us. Last year, the tradition was continued here in Houston. Dana came to visit and we invited as many people as we could think of. We ended up with a table full of friends, but surprisingly, no sketchy management of alcoholic beverages.
It’s probably because Ashed & Smashed will always fall on a Wednesday. Few, if any, jobs like it when their employees show up smashed, ashed or not. Tis the merriment of the holiday that counts, and there’s always lots of that.
Last year, a minister from Resurrection MCC stopped by our table and said that he could see all of our ashes and wanted to know if we were *celebrating* Ash Wednesday. We started talking and we asked him why we didn’t see HIS ashes. He said, “HELLO!!! I’m BLACK!”
And what do you say after that? We fell on the floor laughing, and went back to our drinks.
Have you ever performed on stage or given a speech?
I have alternated between the quietest and the loudest person in the room for many years. This is because as a preacher’s kid, you have the personality you use with parishioners and the one you use at home, when you’re with your normal family…. the one that already knows you’re weird. I started doing things with music/music theater when I was three. And in fact, if I remember correctly, the first time I was in a choir performance I waited until it was over and then decided what the people really needed was a solo.
A few things that I’ve said have stuck with me, though.
At Bridgeport, I told the congregation that they were my Thanksgiving, and I meant it. Preaching in person is a whole different vibe, and I’m glad I know how to do it, and sometimes be incredible, even if I didn’t choose to go after it as a profession. It is enough to know that I could have, I just didn’t want to in the end. All I wanted to do was speak, and that’s not what pastors do. I’d be horrible at pastoral care and I know this about myself. It’s not that I wouldn’t listen. I would, intently, and then I would spend more time trying to figure out their problems than my own….. just like I do now, but I am only taking care of my family. They’re all over the world and right at home.
I wish I’d gotten to preach with Zac in the congregation at least once. I would have played so far against type that I doubt he would recognize me….. until I started preaching. Because yes, Zac, I have quoted Snoop Dogg in a sermon. It’s also just fun because he’s an atheist and also very, very smart. Therefore, we can have great discussions without ripping each other’s heads off. Religion is desperately, intimately ontological. God only exists as much as you believe God does.
I preach from the standpoint of resolution and resurrection, my faith absolutely secure in the mysteries of our faith, because the things that have been attributed to God are not God. I’m not even talking about The Crusades. I mean that people like Abraham didn’t write down God’s experiences, they wrote a record of their own.
It’s why I’m so glad this blog exists, because it is very much the Bible I am writing. Both in looking out over my experiences and processing them for better understanding (to me it’s a form of prayer), and because no one in the Bible is more important than me. The only reason my book of the Bible doesn’t count is that I was born a little later than the council of Nicea. I honestly treat my relationship with Jesus the way I treat my relationship with Zac when he’s not here. Jesus and I are kind of the same person, so I tease him all the time… and that’s a plural. I tease Jesus and he’s got some sick burns on me, too….. but those are just what I think he would say, and I like the comedic version of Jesus best.
If I had to pick a favorite Jesus representation, it’s the one from South Park. He manages to be relevant and yet the same calming presence he was back then. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, and I’m paraphrasing, “if you can’t laugh at your own religion, you haven’t picked a very good one.” I tease Jesus in his WTF? moments because I know I couldn’t have done any better. For me now, it’s thinking about me being so much older than he was. Having to go through that much, that young.
My whole take is that the best part of the resurrection was not having to do pastoral care. “Screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.” The truth is that Jesus was one of many people who thought he was the Messiah at the time, because the Jews were genuinely looking. If there is a Messiah, I choose to believe he’s it. That’s because none of the self-help he taught has changed for thousands of years. Brené Brown is an Episcopalian. Steven Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jim Gaffigan are Catholic. Trevor Noah isn’t a Christian, but he was raised in the church. Sarah Silverman is Jewish. Even under the Abramic tradition, we find our way in the world doing great things. For Sarah and me, it’s comedy (Sarah believes she’s one of God’s chosen people, and I believe Jesus is magic.) I don’t believe that it is the one true way.
I believe everything comes from us. We are not connecting to an Abramic or Hindu or Egyptian god, we are connected to The Source, the idea in which religion was created. We did not create The Source, we are all subtractions from it. You are a tiny piece of something great, but you block yourself from receiving it with ego.
But I didn’t come up with that idea. Jesus did. The check is in the mail.
What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?
This year I started taking care of me for the first time in my life, ever. People who learn a little bit about boundaries install them with spikes, because they don’t know balancing language yet. So many, many times have I been fed this year on a meager emotional diet, because someone would cross a boundary and alarm I’d never had went off. There has never been anything loud enough in my mind to say that my opinions are valid, because I get intimidated and fold easily………………… in person.
On paper, I am not anticipating someone else’s reactions, so I come across as judgmental when I actually want your input/correction, I’m not dictating to you what our situation might be. My work to do is to learn how to control my autistic brain symptoms, like “I have explained this six times and it hasn’t resulted in any change at all, so that means I only have to explain it ten more ways and we’re golden.” I will absolutely argue with a signpost……… in text. If a waitress served me soup with glass shards, I’d be so mad I’d only leave a 20% tip.
I talk a lot about the first blush of excitement on both ends at Supergrover and I meeting each other, and it’s those memories I focus on when I feel the kind of desperation you absolutely will not admit to anyone, I am fine……… meanwhile, your eyes are rolling out of your head because you’ve thought I was an idiot about it for months why has this taken so long dear Jesus get a life…….. and actually, that’s not true at all. It’s how it feels to write out pain. It doesn’t change all at once. It changes a little every day.
I do not have any interest in telling our story as if it is our facts. No, they are only my facts, and I am a hundred percent certain that our stories are different, but I will never know to what degree. I’ve guessed at the extremes and the middle and been wrong every single time. I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me. I cannot drag a relationship kicking and screaming into the light when I only own one half…… and if it sounds like I’m holding myself up as some kind of beacon, that’s not it at all.
We fucked each other up nine years ago. Our relationship shouldn’t be so dramatic and toxic all the time. It’s not good for either one of us as we both sound like Dorothy Sbornak and Ouiser Boudreaux in text. We are both first children. We fight until someone is bleeding, because we are not used to losing…….. and I’m laughing about it now, but believe me when I say I have seen Oppenheimer and I didn’t even know it was a movie until recently.
I am just as filled with rage as she is. We’re The Holy and the Moly because one day I’m the bomb and she’s the detonator……….. and then she’s got the big red button. We installed them in each other quickly and use them to great effect. After we fight, I will say “this is what hurt.” She won’t. She says, “I was licking my wounds.” I wish that just once this year she could have seen my face when I read it. If there are moments that make me want to reach through her phone and hug her, it’s lines like that.
Autistic people are not here to be nice, because we do not have all the social masks involved in sensitive situations. I used to be very, very practiced at it, but I’m not in front of parishioners all the time anymore. As I’ve been away from being a preacher’s kid, it has been a slow, painstaking process to unmask. Everyone does the public/private thing to a degree. There is a truly marked difference in “show mode” and “autism.” Most people are trying to hide their emotions a little bit, certainly. No one wants to ugly cry if Oprah’s not handing out Beetles. Autistic people cannot regulate their emotions like neurotypical people, and we can catalogue their behaviors by the hundreds, but what we cannot do is replicate them. This is because the reason we thought you had the reaction was different than why you actually had it.
Impasses are frequent because “I just don’t get it,” and I have empathy for how tiresome that is. I really do. That’s because if your’e exhausted, you’ve experienced a few hours of my symptoms and I live this way. Not said to shame you, just to say “I need empathy here.” There are other areas in which I’m stronger than my friends and we trade off….. no one is ever getting the short end of the stick……
And unfortunately, reminding Supergrover of that didn’t go over so well because I don’t think she was picking up what I was putting down. She told me several times some version of “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” First of all, that’s a huge red flag. If you tell someone up front that you have a disability like bipolar or whatever and that’s what they say, that’s not the healthiest response ever. The reason I ask people for help is that they’re the first person to ask me. In this one case, the tables were turned where I needed help first….. so, of course it felt like I “was the one who always needed help.” But it’s 10 years later and those words just don’t hit the same way anymore. Healthy people do not shut you down every time you want to have a dialogue. What would have been perfectly healthy is just to walk away for both of us, and yet neither of us did it. I don’t think we meant to be in a relationship this crazy for 10 years, but those tickets are non-refundable.
In some ways, I felt like it was really hard work and deservedly so. Most friendships like ours end quickly because of who we are jointly and severally. I am sure this is conjecture, but it seems to be that the key words are “friendships like ours.” What I see as trying for connection, she sees as “telling her every bad thing she’s ever done.” Sometimes when my sensory environment is turned up to hell, I do come across like I’m nitpicking. Because it’s all text, she can’t hear my tone of voice and she doesn’t ask for any clarification. So, whether I intended to provoke ire or not, I will have done it.
I have never wanted that for her, and I had to learn not to want that for me. I stepped all over her boundaries because that’s how it works in my world. If you troll someone, they’ll leave you alone. We just both met our match and wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash. I will never be as strident as she is in person. She will never be as over emotional as me in text……………… but not because she’s not capable of it.
She’s my fairy tale author girl. As in, not the author of my fairy tale but the writer friend I have who is interested in creating fairy tales for actual children. I keep telling her that “50 Shades of Gray” was so terrible I didn’t even read the whole first page, but it did prove to me that either one of us was capable of writing a book on our phones while using public transportation. I have more time in a day to dedicate to it, but I will never write something akin to the main quest of Skyrim, and she could. I don’t know what her future holds, but I do know that if she wrote a book, she’d sell a copy.
What I know is that if I keep talking, one of two things will happen. The first is that repetition gives the story less power. How do I know it has less power? When I can write essays like this and I don’t end up sobbing so hard I can’t see what I’m writing anymore. There’s so much to cry about, really, that doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s universal. You lose someone significant in your life, and you adjust- but I do not know anyone who is downright happy about it.
It would also be easier to focus on this prompt at the end of the month than it is right this moment. Finnish Independence Day is always craptastic because it’s trying to replace the parts of my heart that are black with the lights and music of Helsinki. Finlandia, yes, but also Finlandia conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The black parts of your heart will respond to music if you let them.
That’s it. That’s the thing I’ve learned this year. The black parts of my heart will respond to music when I let them. This means that I can author the destruction of someone I 100% regret having to cut out of my life because I didn’t have any other choice. I could no longer make decisions about the health of the relationship based on what only I thought, because what happened on a large scale a few months ago was happening all the time in conversation.
We hadn’t talked for a few months, so she was reading me without responding….. months of posts in which we weren’t checking the stories we were telling ourselves, and that always feels like “WE WERE ON A BREAK.” That’s what makes our bond cemented for life. She has editorial control and I’ve told her that. She also cannot stop herself from reading because she thinks that I’m out to get her……. or does she? Because she says it frequently and then she’ll take a line I thought about for an hour, just slaved over to capture her perfectly, and send it to me with a “thank you for this.”
The main reason this whole thing is important to me is that I have never been this person before. I wouldn’t be as safe and secure in who I am now if she hadn’t been sure of me first.
What makes her unique in my life is that she managed to get past all the barriers I’d set up. All the social masking that didn’t make me look like an alien, all the catering I do to other people to make sure everyone is focusing on having a good time and not the fact that I am standing here, damaged, in a corner because I don’t want to get my crazy spatter on you. I have never been that person on the outside. Why I don’t always come off as depressed, anxious, ADHD, or autistic. It’s all just a bunch of spaghetti code in there.
One day I’ll reach “eof,” and I know it’ll compile……………….. even when there are so many lines I wish I could have commented out. But that’s the thing, right? The first step to finding things that do serve you is letting go of the things that don’t. I wish I could say a lot of good things happened this year, and I know they did in small measures. But mostly this year was about learning to deal with pain and rage. How much I’d social masked away all of those feelings as a child determined not that my emotions were bottled, but how many six-packs.
In a lot of ways, all my social masks failed at once, and then I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had to build myself back up from 12 on, adjusting to new emotions that weren’t there before and mapping out the dead spots. If you have not done this in yourself, it is backbreaking emotional work and depression/anxiety medication make it easier, not easy.
This year I’ve felt infantilized more and bothered less. That is because I do not have a world-ending autistic meltdown if someone doesn’t like me. I just find out quickly who my people are in those cases and move on, because I’m past the point in my life where I want to justify anything to anyone, because I have enough belief in myself to know that I have limitations and to ask for help when I need it. People rush to parent the people with mental processing differences and psychiatric illness, and I have to anticipate it. I have to deal with it, because there’s nowhere I won’t. That’s a social mask I do have, though, because it feels very much like apologizing for your existence because you’re queer or physically disabled.
The hard part is being a realist without being too negative because I can control my environment, but only to a point. I do not like telling people I’m a Christian anymore because it invariably ends up being an image of me in their heads that just doesn’t compute. Either I’m a bad Christian because my exegesis is bad and God didn’t really mean all that stuff about inclusivity, helpfully written right there in the RED LETTERS……………… or their God is about the letter of the law and not the spirit; homosexuality does not occur in most, if not all animal populations……. it is a demon to which I am solely responsible for its care and feeding. If I just stopped queer behavior, I’d stop being queer.
Gay men are widely accepted as priests in the Catholic Church because especially in the third world, that’s where you go not to get bullied. Most families know when they’ve got a priest on their hands by kindergarten. Please know that this is in no way trying to be shady. Gay men are pushed toward being priests because of their sensitive/more effeminate natures, because then their families don’t even have to meet the boyfriend. They’ve been eating at his table for years.
I’m just trying to let myself evolve, and thinking about systemic issues makes me happier than thinking about my own progress or lack of it, because I have so much that’s up in the air and little that’s solid.
That’s just how it is in a rebuilding year. Next year might be one, too, but this is not to be taken lightly. I cannot be my authentic self until all the pieces are together, or at the very least, scattered on the table in front of me.
Pieces, for me, are thought fragments. The most positive thing in the world that happened to me this year, above all else, was that in January of course I knew I’d found a flawless diamond in my beautiful girl……………… but by December, I realized she had, too.
I can get used to any schedule except being awake all night long. Either I go to bed early and rise with the sun, or I go to bed around 0300-0400 and sleep until noon. That was the schedule that worked best when I was in the kitchen, because I’d get home around 11:00 PM, and could spend my “evening” writing. I think it made me a better cook than in the days when Dana and I would go out after work, because 1) when I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was somewhere far, far away 2) I was never hung over, so I picked up all the shifts due to brown bottle flu and was probably the highest paid employee and not because of salary.
Yes, I had limitations. That doesn’t matter when you just need a body, and the one scheduled is less functional than me. I worked six and seven days a week to keep busy; my disability kept me from perfection and struggled with excellence. At no time did it mean I got less hours, because in a kitchen everyone works long hours and compete with it. If I worked 50 hours, I was lazy ’cause you worked 60. It wasn’t just keeping busy, though. The neurodivergent brain does not know what to do in the absence of structure, and I had no idea what to do with time off. If I got out of the rhythm, it was harder to do it again….. disorienting and exhausting, again trading mental health for physical.
I was a permanently exhausted pigeon, but also very happy. Supergrover was a million miles away (which is what we in MD call “Virginia”), which meant that when I wasn’t at work, I wasn’t the same person. I very much had the feeling of the protagonist in Avatar, because of my physical disability and how all of those barriers were taken away on the world of Pandora. It was amazing learning to speak Na’avi, and if there’s anything I will miss about our communications the most, it would be the ones in which I had to say, “I know you’re busy, so is it “‘wink and nod,’ ’emphatic fist shake,’ or “slow finger wag?'” With Bryn, I could shorten this to “Borum it,” because we all picked it up imitating Matt, Bryn’s older brother. That day, it was “SFW.” Duly noted, beautiful girl. 😉
I also feel that Supergrover and I came to the same impasse I’ve come to with every friend I’ve had, which started with the woman who emotionally abused me- it was her deflection tactic….. “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.” I’m a monotropic thinker, human relationships are my special interest, and I basically memorize most of what I’ve read because if it’s not a special interest, you love it a weird amount. I was also completely honest with Supergrover. If you do this, you won’t become “my friend.” I’m an INFJ. That means if we’re going to be close, you’ll be a companion, not just a friend. My personality profile says I only have one or two friends at a time, and I love them deeply. Just unreasonably, and that will always be true of people like Zac and Bryn. If Supergrover wants her spot, it’ll always be open because of the hard out, and as you could see yesterday, I’m not happy about the fact that she is diametrically opposed to this now. That’s because for everything in which I can’t walk away, I understand the assignment and she doesn’t. That when she told me what she did, it would cement our bond for life and we couldn’t be careless with it. So, in short, she’s terrified that I remember everything and call her on it so we can stay healthy.
I know this pattern so well. Your idea of love is so fucked up that you don’t recognize it when people are willing to change their behavior to something healthy, because you don’t recognize it as love. I have so much empathy for her, but it’s time to stop caring if she is no longer willing to engage, because I cannot go without an emotional depth she doesn’t have and not because it’s not inside her. It’s the things she won’t acknowledge to herself, and therefore can’t help me. I know I’ve said this before, probably many times, but watching all these videos about CPTSD and how it rewires you got me to see that Supergrover and I were both extremely damaged people who rushed into a deep relationship before we really got to know each other……….. except did we? I saw the incompatibility within weeks. She is not built to hang with an INFJ, and most people just frankly aren’t. We demand going to a rich emotional place because we’ve discovered it in ourselves and want to drag our friends toward “enlightenment.”
What is stopping me from becoming someone like Martha Beck (interestingly enough, also neurodivergent, queer, and poly) is realizing that’s not really how INFJ works for someone who’s already introverted. I can write about this stuff, but with my processing disorders I am just not as fluid as a public speaker. I can and have to turn on the afterburners when I preach, but I still do not feel that I can process information and speak at the same time.
I thought yesterday about why I was able to transcribe Dr. Wall’s Con Law class when I hadn’t been able to do that before. It was the laptop, entirely. This absolutely is an accommodating for neurodivergetnt kids, and I will take any teacher to the mat over it that I possibly can. Because I’m not Gen Z, I would encourage them to let neurodivergent kids keep their phones. If you don’t have an app to let them respond, then have the kids put their phones in airplane mode so they can use their notepads. Otherwise, if you don’t give the kids laptops, they are in the position of having to buy a second device…… when they are probably already used to the tactile experience of typing on their phones, just like I am the most comfortable at the keyboard.
When I said I was “going to class on my own,” I did not mean that I was going to class while I was in it. I used hyperfocus to drown out everything in the room so that I could hear a voice without listening to it, getting things down without comprehending it….. just like I do with my blog. Stream-of-consciousness is basically “first draft, get it all out.” Therefore, sometimes I’m quicker at crafting beautiful sentences than others. Sometimes, it’s crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff, because that’s how I work. I start at one point and dive, ending up at another. Overthinking makes me a good writer, because while I’m getting the words out, I am not even looking at the screen. I am staring off into space, touch typing as I think about the next sentence rather than the one I’m currently typing. My brain moves just the right amount faster than my fingers, therefore my typing is not lagging behind because I’m three sentences ahead in my mind rather than just one.
An editor at a Canadian newspaper, Janie, told me that once all this was edited, I’d be surprised what I’d written. That made my confidence shoot up, because I think I’m only writing about what I know- me and how I interact with others, and my reactions to their reactions….. and no hearsay. I don’t say “one of my friends told me that Bryn…..” because I can’t verify that it’s true. Just a for-instance, Supergrover or Bryn could tell me that Dave or Michael did something. I would not write about it unless I could verify that what Michael or Dave said was accurate, because then it’s not something that happened to me. It’s someone else’s story.
For instance, I know it like the back of my hand that even if Supergrover walks away thinking I’m the meanest person on earth, it doesn’t mean I didn’t get the story I wanted and we’re not all good. It means that I will take our memories away and be okay with not creating new ones.
Because I think of Supergrover this way, it is very, very hard to switch to past tense, but I know for sure that will come with time if she doesn’t show back up eventually. It will hurt, it already hurts, but yet it is also not my problem anymore. I have explained it to the best of my ability without so much input from anyone else because I don’t talk about our relationship in person and I don’t talk to her about it, either. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s all due to avoidance on her part; it doesn’t matter why. She’s doing what’s best for her, and I’m doing what’s best for me. I hope that she’s angry AF, because it’s the one thing that will lead her to realize that there is a life beyond walking in anger all the time.
I give her so much latitude because of her job. I know that there are times when she’s not able to respond for very good reason and not because I’ve said something wrong. But when she does reply, it’s to point out everything I’ve said that’s wrong, when it’s not my focus at all. My focus is on a healthy relationship, cleaning up a toxic mess that just doesn’t need to be there. I also have the right to step away when I cannot get any compromise on anything ever. At that point, I just need to stop caring, and I can’t……. also for good reason.
So, I’m in a bad way over it, but writing it out helps. It also helps that this is the only relationship that I have that’s in turmoil, so I don’t have to think about it all the time and I have plenty of love in my life that’s healthy in the extreme. It’s all about using my ADHD to change my focus, but it doesn’t mean that a monotropic thought process drops off the radar…… again, do you have a special interest if you don’t just love it a weird amount?
I would think it was manipulation if it wasn’t a learned behavior from childhood. When I said that I wanted that bubble with an older woman and I got it when I was 12 by trying for it since I was born, it’s not because I was sexualized early or anything like that. It’s because adults treated me like a real person.
As a 16-year-old preacher’s kid who’d had many years of running behavioral heuristics on 200-1500 people at a time, the problems of my friends felt juvenile and pedestrian. I didn’t connect with anything they said, because it wasn’t monster dramatic and that’s what I was used to; people call pastors during the worst moments of their lives, and I actively tried to listen in to everything……….. and those times I even understood the language.
Again, I don’t process voices well, so those conversations would repeat in my head ad nauseam, special interest engaged, because there were two operations at play. The first is hearing something without context so that you can regurgitate it later by rote, even if you don’t understand it. The second operation is picking up what’s neurotypical and what’s not, so a lot of my social masking comes from the PTSD that belonged to other people, because those were the conversations I heard. Therefore, in my mind, it was completely normal to have wild emotional swings all the time and to live in that kind of pressure cooker. It’s what makes me able to work with cooks.
You can do everything by hearing and not taking it in, because you hear something, and then you own it. You don’t need to ask for clarification because there isn’t any, just get it done as quickly as possible. You are also, unless you’re on plating, only responsible for one part of a dish. A good example is a steak salad. Grill does the steak, pantry does the salad. I hand you the finished steak to slice over the salad, I am not in charge of presentation. Even if you have six burgers at once, it’s plenty of time to get all six setups and servings of fries done.
Quick, gotta move fast, gotta perform miracles. Gee willikers, Dre, holy bat syllables! Look at all the bullshit that goes on in Gotham! When I’m gone, time to get rid of these rap criminals……
If SCOTUS can quote Eminem, so can I. Line cooks are absolutely rap criminals. 😉
When you work in a kitchen, it’s the same feel as working in a church. Some of the best conversations I’ve had in a church came from cooking together for a pot luck after the service, or the traditional Easter brunch (which Dana and I did with another line cook one year and the three of us absolutely destroyed it…. that’s good, by the way. Just like comics, we bomb and we kill…… nightly.).
On Easter, you’re feeding three separate crowds. The first is the people who want breakfast after the sunrise service (that’s popular on Easter only). The second wave is the musicians who have come before the 9:00 or the 11:00 service (usually 10:00-10:30 in the Episcopal church). This is going to be a larger crowd of musicians than normal, because you probably already have a choir. You probably do not have a brass quintet, a harpist, an orchestra, or whatever else it is that you do to “boost the ratings.”
Church takes many forms, but for me it is ancient…. the interminable march of Sundays back into the dark ages. The Episcopal church is my favorite because I know that other people I love are saying the same words at the same time I am…..
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies…..
I didn’t even have to look it up, and the tears have already started. It’s called the “prayer of humble access,” and it is the shortest and fastest path to getting my heart to bleed all over the communion rail. That’s because it’s The Moment. The communion rail is where I wrestle with the bomb that could destroy millions, my own internalized rage. When I knew that everything was over with Kathleen, I went to church and laid my head on the communion rail, I was so wrecked. As the choir sang “lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” I folded because I had a lot of them.
I didn’t blame Kathleen entirely for her behavior, either, because she didn’t have the skills to deal with me. Just as traumatized as Supergrover, perhaps more so because the effects of her abuse lasted for years in what any adult except another traumatized one would see as wildly inappropriate and must be stopped. No one noticed.
One of the things that I wish Supergrover would take in is that she’s not scarred, not broken, literally perfect. This is because I have enough experience to say that there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just stubborn. 😉 In these moments, John the Gnostic speaks to me:
This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
We do not run from the light because it’s not there. We run from the light out of fear. Fear of not being loved. Fear that the light is too bright. Fear that our sins are too great and everyone else’s are acceptable. Fear of separation from others, thus the feeling of being separated from God while it’s just not true.
Whether I’m in the kitchen, whether I’m writing, whether I’m queer, whether I’m poly, whether I am anything I have more power when I name it and claim it than I do by keeping it all in and having preconceived notions about what others are going to think. You stop attracting light to you because of shame and not being vulnerable about it…. therefore, you’ll never get to a place of acceptance through the torture of cognitive dissonance.
My life got so much better when my priest said “we are all very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, who are also heirs, through faith…” because it was the first time in my life I’d ever believed someone meant it……. after meeting the wrong priest, first, but still.
For Houstonians, Larry Gipson at St. Martins told me I’d never be a priest because I was gay. My revenge is that he’s Catholic now. Karma took care of him, because the Episcopal church as a whole disagreed with him and left him in the Middle Ages. I will not say any more about that except I can think of several people I’d like to go with him. Like, if you’re going to be a homophobic asshole, put a warning sign out, amiright?
There are many Catholic parishes who have quietly ignored The Pope for many, many years. They also have an organized queer group within the Catholic church. Just like protestants, there is a range. I would feel comfortable walking into any American Episcopal church, but I could not just walk into any Anglican or Catholic church (Anglican being the name of ECUSA churches who left over female ordination and homosexual marriage/ordination.
So, if I go to church at all, it’s St. Alban’s (better known as National Cathedral). I will never be discriminated against ever again, and I need that for me. Other people don’t. The “frozen chosen” have in the past had problems with “the most segregated hour in America,” but that has changed so much across the world, especially with the election of Michael Curry. Plus, there’s a lot of immigration from Africa going on in Houston and DC, so Episcopal churches have naturally gained more black members over the years. And that doesn’t all come from, say, Nigerians being active in the Anglican church overseas. Some of it is that you go to church once because it’s in your neighborhood, decide you’re cool with it, and stay.
My grandparents were Presbyterian, but the church in Lone Star they liked the best was Methodist. Ergo, we were Methodists now. I have to say that Paw Paw made an excellent choice. I got to meet Matt McConaughey before you even knew who he was.
My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suit….. of course, he was 12 at the time.” I’ve mentioned this before, but for new readers my dad confirmed Matt into the church when he was a tween, and my mother was his middle school choir director. I was three, so yes, I have met and spent time with him, but I’m going to bet we don’t remember each other and the only reason I keep up with him is because I see him everywhere I look.
Plus, his mom is in Bernie and it was great to see her, too, despite all Matthew’s justified and reported anger at her. I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that Kay wrecked him by giving press interviews about private matters, and it is not lost on me that I do the same thing, essentially, but the difference is that my friends don’t care that I do it. Even Supergrover, who is the maddest of them all, says I’m entitled to my stories and to keep at it, essentially. She doesn’t have to like it, she just has to live it.
That’s because she’s a fucking fan.
The rest of my friends are busy on self-discovery, particularly Bryn and we compare notes. We’re all driven by self-improvement and reparenting ourselves…. not to point out what our parents lacked, but to point out all the times we didn’t say anything and became part of the problem.
I was social masking because maybe if I did, I’d deserve to be loved. That’s the deepest tape I’m trying to get rid of, because that comes with altering and accepting my entire reality as an autistic and physically disabled person. If you compare yourself to someone neurotypical, you will always fall short and berate yourself. Acknowledging I’m simply not capable of some things is necessary because I cannot be held to the same expectations by other people.
I would have no relationships as a result, because they’d all walk off in frustration and still do despite my best efforts. I cannot always be in my body and respond from a place that’s not ensconced in pain. I am human. What becomes a problem is being willing to forgive anyone for anything and not receiving the same courtesy.
This is because I believe neurotypical people are holding me to the standard expectations of a neurotypical person and also get frustrated I can’t “get it together.” When I said that high needs and low trade off, this is what I mean. Sometimes, I am a functional person with a routine. Sometimes, my autism makes me get lost in my own brain and lack of function comes from the inability to change channels.
When I was a child, this presented as being emotional leaps and bounds ahead of my peers and listening to everyone’s problems, then meltdown and burnout after school making me unable to do homework. I couldn’t do eighth grade math when my then lady-love was married to a drug dealer who got drunk at a church party and threw up at one of our best friend’s houses. That stayed with me as a monotropic thought process for years on end, a 14-year-old on a mission to love a 25-year-old through it… another avoidant personality who didn’t know what the hell to do with either my emotions or the situation she was actually in.
As an adult, this presents the same exact way. People are my monotropic thought process and their emotional weight stops me from carrying anything else. So, is the question isolating myself entirely so that I don’t have a jackass magnet on my forehead (the term I use for being on the Metro and someone saying “my dad hit me as a child” or something equally heavy within minutes… the jackass magnet is a reference to the fact that I cannot keep myself from letting it in, not that those people have done anything wrong.
There are two words I could use right now to explain what I mean, and nearly everyone knows them but I’m so mad at JK Rowling right now that every time I say something mean about her, I wish it had been worse.
If you just can’t stand not knowing because you’re not a fan, someone put it in the comments or something. I’m done.
In short, I cannot read minds, and I cannot protect my mind………
People expect me to read minds because the societal response is clear and I am just not on that wavelength. I think big thoughts, and I’m not going to apologize for that. While you’re thinking about how I didn’t do X when you wanted Y, I’m thinking about how the whole company should run and how to change it for the better because my scope is different than yours.
In college, I began to learn how international systems work, the chessboard, and because of my history in the “underworld” of abuse, I was drawn to government espionage (corporate doesn’t do it for me). You’re thinking about the village, I’m thinking about the world. I am not dissimilar from any spy, really, because most of them are truly damaged people who needed refuge in the system…. and that was appealing to me, not a drawback.
The reason spies are generally damaged people is that those are the people who are willing to cut ties. It’s a lot to manage, your real life and your cover identity, so it’s better to be like me and not have many significant relationships so you can keep your necessary lies straight. If you’re an abused kid in any form, whether it’s being young and raped or being 18 and getting shot, you don’t trust anyone.
I listen to everything. I talk a quarter to never. I have selective mutism often. Part of it is that I’d much rather write than talk, part of it is being emotionally abused over many years and having those threads so woven into me that I never know when that woman’s expressions are going to come out of me rather than my own. I sound just like her because that’s who I was social masking as a teen.
Again, from 12-36 years old I was social masking someone who’d been raped as a child, was currently dating a drug dealer, and had a very unstable career because opera is just like that and she was a queer teacher in a conservative school district. My memories of her are crystal clear down to the smell of the air.
As a result, I do not trust anyone or anything at anytime, but I listen to things intensely without processing their voices until after said conversation is over, because I am not both talking and listening anymore. In those cases, talking is limited to sympathetic nods and breaking eye contact when it gets to be too much sensory information…. which it always is. You don’t walk off the Metro with conversations like “my husband beats me” unscathed.
In effect, what’s happening is that I take in information like a doctor, then have my emotional response later. In a neurotypical person’s brain, they’ve “dealt with it and moved on.” I am “lost in the past,” when you’re walking around like a ticking time bomb and I’m trying to stay calm about it.
I am an INFJ, and I’m here to drag you kicking and screaming toward believing in yourselves. I am here to love the shit out of you.
Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).
I got the chance of a lifetime when I got the job at Marylhurst University (mostly online, now closed). I met a great group of coworkers and we had a blast together. It wasn’t the perfect job for me because we don’t get to pick the jobs we want down to the curtains, but it was damn close. The reason for this is that University of Houston had 30,000 students, staff, and faculty when I was there. The labs and helpdesk were buzzing with activity, which was great for my ADHD and hell on my autism. It was a lot to take in, and I managed because I was young and didn’t know any better. Marylhurst was none of that.
I was older by then and thus couldn’t have limitations excused. At the same time, I shared an office suite with three other people, I wasn’t taking up four square feet in a sea of fifty other people. It was massive, in the top floor of a library, and it was more at home and settled than I’d felt in years.
With age comes responsibility. By the time I got the job at Marylhurst, I was in a train wreck of a marriage that started out with so much promise I still have dreams in which none of the last 10 years ever happened. My conscience spaces it when I have PTSD triggers or something like that. It’s only my brain trying to protect me and giving me calming images. I haven’t talked to her in years, but my brain doesn’t care. Dana’s laugh always brings out mine, even if I’m just thinking about her and she’s not in the room.
Absolutely none of it excuses the moments in which she purposefully tried to hurt me emotionally and physically. That’s a big statement, that she did it on purpose, and I will not shy away from it. That’s because whether Dana’s intentions were pure or not- her actions stemming from neurodivergence or malice- the effect was the same.
First, I cannot speak to whether Dana is autistic or not. In retrospect, I did not pick up anything that suggests it, because all of the things that would fall under autism I observed fall into ADHD, too. Secondly, Dana is not ADD. She is ADHD, and why the DSM is so fucked up for not differentiating anymore. I have the kind of ADHD that presents classically in women. She has the kind of ADHD that classically presents in men. As children, we were treated accordingly. You can tell that Dana has ADHD, and mine is hidden until you’re close enough to see my lack.
Our marriage made so much sense when you look at our relationships with our sisters. There’s the same age difference between Lindsay and me as there is between Dana and Counselor, and I’m betting that Counselor didn’t pick up on this because she’s never met Lindsay………… I see it so clearly that I married Dana because she reminded me of Lindsay, and Dana married me because I reminded her of Counselor. That comes out in different ways, mostly because Lindsay has the Dana brand of ADHD and Counselor and I are so close in personality that it’s weird how you never see us in the same room. If Counselor had been queer and I’d met her first, we actually would have been better partners to each other than Dana and me. This is because opposites generally only attract in the short term.
The theory holds up because Counselor and I are more like our dads. Dana and Lindsay are more like our moms. Laser beam to her head, Counselor would agree with me. Ask her if she’d like to be partners with someone like Dana having already lived with her. It’s a mixed bag because there is everything loving and comforting about a relationship pattern you’ve had since childhood, and everything bad about continuing a pattern you’ve had since childhood.
My mother knows I’m just like my dad, and I’m sure in a lot of ways knows better about what happened to Dana and me than anyone else who ever lived. She would not have understood specifics, but could have written an essay on dynamics. She could read it blind.
But, for all my best hopes and intentions, our childhood patterns turned on us. I only once had a fight with Dana that was more explosive than any I’ve had with Lindsay. Variables were transient, pattern recognition was absolute.
ADHD and Autism combine in me, but don’t in Lindsay. That means when we turn on each other, we have equal and opposite reactions….. but when we’re tracking together, it’s so good it’s like we’re the front and back of the same piece of paper. Dana and I had that same pull toward each other and the same negative reactions. Knowing in retrospect that I “married my sister” is valuable for the future because it means that who I’m looking for in a partner is more like my mother than my father, how adult relationships are currently classified (and in fact, how I think they should because the relationship with your parents is hierarchical. You don’t learn anything about how you work when a power structure like that is in place.).
There’s more to that story, but I’m instituting a hard out because to say more is to tell someone else’s story. But from what I’ve written, you’d think that I wanted Dana back. This is not true in the slightest nor will it ever be. I will be sad if I never see her again, but not bothered. We both owe each other too much not to restart with a shit ton of resentment, so even if it worked for three months, you wouldn’t be able to check in on us three years after that.
If Supergrover is any character in this story, it is Uncle Phil. We got in one little fight and I did not want to wait around and see if it happened again, so “Bel-Air” became “Silver Spring.” The real deal is that when I decided to pick up my toys and stomp off, I did not make the agreement not to come back. At the time, I wanted physical distance for safety, but I honestly and completely believed that we’d get back together because we needed to live apart and work on ourselves. Didn’t mean the connection was dead, etc.
Over time, I began to realize that’s not how being hit works. Dana broke the physical barrier and I’m not saying I didn’t hit her back or anything like that. I am saying two things. The first is that Dana instigated. The second is that at the time, she was about 300 pounds and I was maybe a buck 20. Her last punch was at my eye, where there was a lot more force behind her fist than there ever could have been in mine. She smashed my glasses into my face, and it took about two or three weeks so that the bruise didn’t show on my face. I was embarrassed to leave the house (and in burnout/depression). I didn’t get better in two or three weeks because phantom pain set itself up on my face for about a year after that. I didn’t think about calling the police, but our next door neighbors did.
It would have had to be that painful for me to let her go. She is the love of my life, but not that I don’t/won’t have others. I think that we would have been all right with counseling and we were too stupid not to see it….. but the counseling should have started the moment she got out of jail (DUI), not when Supergrover entered the picture.
Dana indirectly cost me my job at Marylhurst and I will not apologize for that statement. She wasn’t rude to my boss or anything like that, so I’m not blaming her. I am telling you the reality of the situation. I have two disabilities that affect my executive function and Dana helped it freak the fuck out. I couldn’t regulate for months.
That’s because when she got arrested, she lost her driver’s licence. When she lost her driver’s license, I had to drive her to work. There was no other option, as there was no bus to get her where she needed to go at 0300 and this was before Uber (it also would have been crazy to spend that kind of money on Uber when we had a car).
I would try to go to sleep when she did, not always possible because I wasn’t actually on her schedule, and try to function at work despite having gotten up at 0200 and gone back to bed at 0330….. every. Single. Night.
She didn’t feel that disregulation because she isn’t autistic and it was her job. What was torture to me was a chauffeur service for her. I’m not bagging on her. It’s not like she didn’t feel bad about it or anything. We both did a better job of beating ourselves up than the other one ever could’ve.
At the end of the day, neither one of us could change how we did things. It was a nightmare, and we had different reactions to it. I started focusing on soda and not alcohol. I moved into a sober house without knowing beforehand because my “host family” is Lebanese, and even though not Muslim, they are Druse, a derivative. It’s not that they disapprove of me drinking. I could have a case of vodka if I bought it.
Alcohol is just not our culture. It’s not what we do to enjoy ourselves, therefore no one is itching because it’s not there. I think once we had a brandy together before Thanksgiving, and this will be my ninth coming up. It’s just not a thing. It’s also returning to the culture of my first family, because my parents didn’t disapprove of other people drinking, but it’s not a Methodist pastor’s vibe (in general).
For a Methodist pastor, not drinking is a source of high comedy.
Editor’s Note:
The Jews do not recognize Jesus as the messiah. The Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the head of the church. Two Baptists do not recognize each other at a liquor store.
I don’t think I even tried alcohol until I was in middle school, and even then it was just a sip of wine because I didn’t know it wasn’t grape juice at communion.
After Dana got her DUI, it changed the alcohol game in only my mind, it seems. I found new flavors in new things. She did not. I wasn’t the one with a DUI, I was the passenger that, according to a police report in Multnomah County somewhere, I was “passed out in the front seat with Taco Bell lettuce on my face.” Being able to do that was the point of why Dana was driving in the first place.
She ran a game on me that I should have seen coming and I didn’t. That’s why in an earlier entry I called her an alcoholic, and I’m sorry if I’m wrong. Sincerely. I can only tell you what I observed. She actively sabotaged my ability to drink to take it for herself by agreeing to be the designated driver. She could not see that if she had one, she would not stick to soda after that and leave me in the lurch. Then, when she realized it, she’d drink more because she figured out she could.
I’d start with a Guinness, she’d start with a double Jameson. That right there became me enabling her by anticipating that she was going to do it to me and just accepting my fate. I was always the DD, and it didn’t occur to me to fight her on it instead. If I wanted a cocktail myself, I needed a ride home and compromising on it became a drumbeat I got tired of hearing because it didn’t change. I should have stood up for myself, and didn’t. This is because it is only in retrospect that I see how I enabled her.
It wasn’t on purpose. I was used to the push/pull of that dynamic of becoming a parent to an adult who wasn’t always pleasant. I didn’t mind being a caretaker because that’s how I was raised. I realized in Houston that a DUI was absolutely going to happen again and I wouldn’t excuse a second like I did the first. That at the very least, I wouldn’t divorce her, but she’d have to move out. I didn’t want to be around her culture, and when she hit me, I didn’t want to be around her, either.
There is a direct link between her and the person who emotionally abused me as a child. They know and have loved each other in the past, but that’s not the only thing. Dana was the first of my partners to recognize that she could love us both all she wanted and that still didn’t mean that __ and I weren’t a toxic dumpster fire. She saw the obsession with which I thought of her, and even I thought I was obsessed with her until I found out I had autism. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with her, it’s that I’m programmed to think about a single interest.
Now, why in the hell would a beautiful opera singer become a single interest to someone who wants that life……. who is also an opera singer, but untrained at that point…….. and still hasn’t appeared in a mainstage role but has been offered one (Penzance). In fact, she was a great teacher, but not the one for me. She didn’t have my high range, so it took a different teacher to unlock it. However, she has amazing music comprehension/interpretation and I’m glad I have her concept of musicality (PHRASING!).
I also loved her like a house on fire, listening to all her secrets and lies. Reading her college journal. Freaking out over her emotions and not mine. She used me as a dopamine source, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. She has manipulated so many women in front of me that I have seen her run the same game on others because their faces looked just like mine on so many occasions. When she turns the sun on you, you feel like the rest of the world blurs. You’re drawn to the web by the beauty of the spider. In some cases, physical attraction to her is right away. In all cases, people hear her sing and fall all over themselves to meet her.
In so many ways, that taught me how to be a singer more than anything else. Watching people fall all over themselves when they talked to her taught me about conserving energy. NEVER believe your own press. Have confidence in yourself, but becoming needy for external validation will lead you down the wrong path because you’ll emotionally vampire the people around you.
Therefore, in some ways from the outside we look like the same person. Our behavior just comes from opposite ends of a spectrum. I’m anxious, she’s avoidant. She needs dopamine, I need stability. Her interest is based on getting adoration, mine is about genuinely caring and catering to her needs. Her manipulation comes in when she knows she’s avoidant and you’re anxious, because your need to be heard will be blocked at every turn when a narcissist only wants dopamine from you.
They don’t want any negatives in a relationship because they really can’t handle them whether they’re narcissists or not. Knowing whether I was a narcissist or autistic was a very important distinction for me because I knew I wasn’t like her on the inside, but my judgmental bluntness made it seem that way and I had to find out why. None of the things about obsession and getting dopamine seemed true, but that’s what everyone thought because I didn’t have either an ADHD or an autistic diagnosis at that point.
People only knew I was bipolar, and figured OCD came with it. For my friends and family, sometimes they have assumed that PTSD and the breaking of my reality has been the forward note in all of this. They don’t know how I’ve made women I’ve loved my special interest since first grade. I was seemingly obsessed with Mrs. Grant, my dad’s secretaries, Meagan, and all the women they haven’t met after that, including Dana.
I made her my whole entire world, yet separate and secondary from __ because I’d known her since I was 12. I regretted it (twice in different ways- leaving her because I didn’t want to have an affair, and coming back because I couldn’t stand not asking the question…. and not “should we have an affair?” It was “leave your partner because we’re obsessed with each other in a way we can’t duplicate elsewhere and we should stop fuckin’ trying.” But we were only as successful as we allowed ourselves to be- I could choose Dana every time over my mom, dad, and sister.
The separation that comes with establishing your second family was secure biologically. That being said, __ also raised me and whether she intended it or not, I thought there was a possibility of romance. I didn’t by the time I moved to Portland having visited several times since she left Texas. I was secure about all of it, but that didn’t mean my monotropic thought process changed. She had 15 years on Dana, and I’d been every bit as rabid about her in the past and was having trouble not scheduling an appointment to talk about penguins (Sam from “Atypical). I didn’t have any way to stop it, so I couldn’t.
It embarrasses me that it led directly to a relationship where I couldn’t hang because I couldn’t acknowledge a monotropic thought process, letting go of depression and anxiety stemming from it because everyone thinks I’m weird and I feel like an alien.
If I wrote an autobiography and was just spitting titles, at least the working one would be “Jesus, Michael Valentine, Aziraphale, and Me.” Or, more accurately, “The Holy and the Moly: A Love Story.” That’s because it’s universal enough to cover history, politics, intelligence, and my romantic/platonic relationships. Those aren’t the only subjects to which it applies. Yin and yang are everywhere.
A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash. -Pete Rollins
Dana and I were an overnight success years in the making, because we’d loved each other so intensely emotionally that it became impossible not to pine for the physical in a way that just didn’t take until I had to live without her. I lasted a grand total of 18 months.
And it wasn’t all Dana’s magnetic pull. It was also that I spent a month in Portland alone and my house was more peaceful without Katharin. For as much as Katharin would hate me for having an affair that lasted eight and a half hours, she didn’t realize what a toxic mess she was and felt perfectly justified in being a lunatic and pulling shit on me for life. It was always my behavior, never what triggered it.
Meagan was my ex-girlfriend and I should have known it was “our” house and to consider her feelings when we’d been together for three months. She didn’t remember ex in high school and we were 28 or something like that. She remembered that if I’d been attracted to Meag once, I still was and she felt threatened. Meanwhile, I’m like “Meag was three girlfriends ago.” Just because I now think she would have been a good partner for me as an adult doesn’t mean she actually would have been, or that I would make the decision impulsively to sleep with someone in which there would be disastrous consequences for both of us…. for years on end, not just the next morning. What I said yesterday about actually sneaking off together was based on one thing- the women who we were with the night she was there both gave us unpleasant breakup experiences- not that we were perfect.
Additionally, after we broke up, Meag and I always flirted heavily and she could see that it had an effect on me and avoided it……. but not enough to stop. until we were much older and wiser. Like, if you don’t want to open Pandora’s box, degrade your pickpocket and sneak abilities, okkkkkkkkk…… I made the mistake that we would have another night together at some point, derailing my ability to move on because sometimes it was flirting innocently, sometimes it rode the edge…….. especially in front of her girlfriends.
I think that’s because it reinforced the yin and yang I had with her beard and it stuck with us. It encouraged competition she thought was amusing, but I didn’t when I learned I was always designed to lose. If it wasn’t her beard to keep her safe, it was the excitement of feeling two women fighting over her without having to suffer the consequences because I didn’t have any boundaries. I know why, therefore I don’t care. What I care about is the fact that I let myself be snowed more than once, going home brokenhearted every time until I went to visit her on her new turf.
That’s because going to visit my parents makes all the ghosts rise from their graves. I couldn’t get over her in the same town where I met her, because grace doesn’t leave you where you were found, a running theme in my life on multiple levels.
The relationship with Supergrover doesn’t make me want to run because I don’t see her everywhere I go unless I’m specifically looking for her. I don’t except at times where it’s possible a shared interest would lead our paths to cross. Because of the insecure connection, I actively avoid those things and will until our connection is secure again.
Because she’s suspicious, if I don’t avoid these things she uses the events as evidence I’m an asshole because I’m trying to look for her or trying to get close to someone because she is. I went to school with a lot of people who are now famous.
She knows a lot of famous people. An analogy would be scaring the life out of her because we both showed up at the same theater to see Matthew McConaughey. I don’t know if she knows him, but he’s the biggest star I’ve actually met in real life (not at HSPVA, attended the same church as kids. I just don’t remember meeting him because I was three at most.).
Because he’s a household name, there’s a bigger chance she knows him. For instance, I could say the same thing about Jason Moran and Robert Glasper being threatening, but they’re not as widely known so she might not have heard of them.
Editor’s Note:
The way Supergrover and flip each other shit runs thusly with stuff like this. I make a joke or observation (here or otherwise). I will have written thousands of words around it. She’ll go for the joke and laugh at my annoyance (that’s it? That’s all I get?). For instance, the e-mail I will get in response to this whole entire ass essay (if it happens) is “I do know Matt. :)” No context whatsoever, pick your own adventure. Luckily, that hasn’t been problematic at all (eyeroll).
In return, I do shit like compare her job to one in the service industry and she says, “I accept tips.” I PayPal’ed her two dollars. All I got back was “Dead.” That laugh is worth more than I’ll ever pay for it.
When it’s good it’s perfect because she’s basically George Clooney. Beautiful and impish.
The Holy and the Moly: A Love Story
I just want her to see that she’s the whole book on her own, and so am I. We’re like a YA novel where every chapter is one of us acting as unreliable narrator, because our problems are adult and our reactions to them are not.
We are talking about serious shit with underlying feelings akin to the love and disaster of your best friend finding a new one in third grade…… not a one-off for me as I’ve fumbled my way through life.
Katharin was a narcissist because she was a dry drunk, another bird with a broken wing who treated me like shit while I walked on eggshells hoping it helped and it never did.
The absolute and only reason I made Supergrover my special interest in my writing is because it was the first relationship in which my partner could be first in my mind. Whether she was a yellow string or a red, there was no hierarchy except the hard outs. I called her on her bullshit as easily as she called me on mine. I felt freer than I’d ever been, and I’m sorry I hurt her because of it, flying too close to the sun.
That’s because we came back together afterward, the relationship was maintained with an anxious/avoidant attachment and history repeated itself. I was seemingly obsessed when Supergrover is one of the few topics where you have to make an appointment with me to talk about whales (“Extraordinary Attorney Woo”).
Another character I love is on Apple TV+ called “Dr. Brain.” I can’t remember the real name of the doctor, but the show starts with a clearly autistic child (relatively low function STEM savant in medicine- brilliant intellectually, not so much with the affection. The way he’s low functioning as an adult is what makes him come off as an asshole who “doesn’t look autistic.”).
Yet, apparently my monotropic thought processes will always be such a mystery :::hold for everyone to roll their eyes:::
I also do not know what happened to Dana after I moved to DC. We talked a few times when I got here, but not since. I feel such pain and relief. I sincerely hope that she prefers Fanta to whatever the fuck that was…… if not for her sake, for her future partners.’
These essays are how I learn what I will not tolerate anymore. I am not a judgmental asshole. I constantly want a better relationship and try to provide positive feedback, but when my sensory issues are turned up to hell and I’m having an autistic meltdown, rage takes over my whole body and my executive function goes out the window.
It is not only because autism chooses to hit hard and fast. It is because I didn’t realize that people don’t rage like that when they’re angry. It looks a lot different and you can’t put your finger on it if your brain isn’t the same (especially, but not limited to you thinking it is). My social masking taught me how to fight, how to express myself, but not the way neurotypicals do it. I could only pick out their patterns, not understand them to the degree I could replicate.
I did not comprehend that when I was angry, frustrated, and overwhelmed so were other people, but their emotions weren’t tied up in their health. When people get angry and defensive at me, I respond. I do not have “a proportional response” because I have no executive function. When I get angry, I get arrhythmia, shortness of breath, and sudden drop in blood pressure that makes me feel like I’m going to faint, but I don’t. I’m just frozen.
The reason I know it’s autism and not PTSD depends on the subject. It’s a PTSD trigger when I’m thinking about the source, and autism because the rage has happened since long before my emotional abuse was a thing. Just like other autistic people, that kind of rage can be brought on by anything during meltdown.
It could be “my parents divorced” or “I have to eat blueberries (every one is different) instead of Goldfish (every one is the same). Not seeming bothered by such a small thing is what we mean when we say “social masking.” Pretending that a whole lot of social shit doesn’t matter when we’re physically and mentally in pain.
We put up with a lot of emotional abuse because autistic kids are treated differently than autistic children and you never grow up whether you’re neurodivergent or not. We are layers and layers of social masking over a six-year-old child, and I’m not the first or only person to make this observation. Because I’m a preacher’s kid, I saw this long before Psych 101. Taking Psych 101 led me to be interested in Erickson, Skinner, and Freud to some extent. That’s because I was not interested in going into early education, but how childhood affects adults. Through education and volunteering (youth director at church), I have learned a little bit about both ends of the spectrum.
“Volunteer youth director” jogged my memory and I remembered the two times I knew I really had a win with them. The first was a parent coming up and telling me how much her son appreciated a story I’d told (sermon illustration I didn’t write) about a little boy flinging starfish into the ocean. His parents stopped him and said “it doesn’t make any difference. There’s too many.” He said, “it makes a difference to this one.” The reason it was a win is that his mother told me the story of him telling her two years later.
The second win is entirely because of who my dad and stepmom are as people. My dad was a pastor. My stepmom is a doctor. The scriptures that week were on the lepers that Jesus cured, and how only one of them came back to thank him for it (that’s on brand for humanity). Where they meet is being able to explain to the kids why the lepers were outcasts. What leprosy did to the body and why it made them look so physically different. Leprosy is now called “Hansen’s Disease, and falls under autoimmune diseases.
In Texas, we occasionally see cases because pro tip, you cannot eat an armadillo.
Anyway, the message resonated and one of the kids….. the one who everyone else considered “a mess….” said, “maybe we shouldn’t do the same thing to the Muslims.” I don’t remember the correlation because I don’t remember which country said outcasts were from, I just remember it was the Middle East.
Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.
You don’t stop having PTSD, you focus on it longer because you’re a monotropic thinker. Once it gets in, you have a hell of a time getting it back out….. and yet when you solve it, you don’t suddenly become “not autistic,” either. Again, Supergrover and I weren’t, aren’t, and never will be a couple, but I learned more about how I behave in one than I have from anyone else in the last 10 years.
I could pick up the “I should be angry about this,” but not “this is how a functional person experiences rage.” I don’t need to learn how to get rid of rage because it’s never going to happen. Disabilities frustrate and anger the shit out of me. It is something that needs constant management, because freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. You don’t have a social mask for something, you better get it.
Autism is a spectrum, and what we mean by “high functioning” is enough executive function to be aware we need social masking in the first place. The classic image of an autistic person is someone who doesn’t, so therefore all people who can social mask “don’t look autistic.” It’s not that I don’t have the same reactions. I have different ways of expressing them. My toxic trait is being in meltdown and it looking like nagging/nitpicking. I’m not, I’m just overwhelmed and headed for burnout and can’t adjust my tone because I’m not thinking about it. So much depends on what happened before I got angry and how many sensory issues are in the room.
The way I manage it is to walk away from a conflict, but reassure the person that I am not walking away because I am angry at them. I just need to process meldown and burnout before I can discuss an issue calmly. That it’s better for me to process on my own so I don’t take out my anger on them.
The added bonus is that while we’re not interacting, they’re still seeing how I’m processing my emotions because I don’t lock them out. Anyone can read here, and I’m sure “anyone” does. 😉 (This applies to many, many people…. like Allison in Galveston, etc.). Whether someone else wants to work with me or not, they get closure if they want it. I’m doing it for myself, but that doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from it.
In fact, sometimes I’m so good at writing about things here that people don’t tell me things because they feel like they’ve already talked to me because I’ve written about them. In their minds, I’ve already “texted them.” It’s not a slam on their reputations because I don’t have much to talk about outside of what I publish to make conversations different.
People don’t have to ask me how I am because they already know. The difference is that I don’t have the same relationship with them because I’m isolated by nature of what I do. Sometimes I’m distant whether I want to be or not because it takes being completely off the grid for me to write. This is problematic when people think of my phone as a leash.
I don’t even carry it most of the time because I have an Apple Watch that will switch hit between Wifi and my cell plan. I turn off the notifications so I have it if I need to call out or if I fall, but my wrist isn’t constantly dinging or buzzing (if you have an Apple Watch, you know the hell of being trapped in a group text). I prefer buzzing to the sound, btw. The reason I don’t carry my phone is that I only need to be able to call and SMS because I use an Android tablet that does everything my phone would with more desktop real estate.
Neither an iPhone or an Apple Watch has a 3.5mm headphone jack, so I don’t get any benefit from better audio when the Bluetooth cards are basically identical. I just don’t have a use case for a phone anymore. The only reason I use my iPad is to watch Apple TV+. My iPad is more powerful in terms of hardware, more irritating in terms of software. If I could buy an iPad and install Android on it, I would. In fact, because I use both tablets as a laptop, adding a keyboard and sometimes a mouse, I could put the entire desktop version of Ubuntu and all its applications with hardware that good.
It’s not that I prefer desktop linux to Android. I can do anything on an Android that I could do on a linux box because it’s the same OS in terms of command line. But there are more applications written for desktop Ubuntu that haven’t been ported to a mobile app (damned inconvenient).
Android has been around for a long time, but really started competing with iOS when Samsung started releasing features that were years ahead of iPhones (and Apple always thinks their improvements are their ideas). I learned the most about Android when I was working for Marylhurst.
It was the storm before the TARDIS landed on my lawn, and the sweet relief of finding my own bedroom.
It’s all connected. The way I acted. Why. How I got to different locations and conclusions with multiple people who all had the same characteristics and wildly different in other ways, leading to me to believe there were no repeats, etc.
That’s why it is such a long essay over a $500 leather satchel (tablet case) I bought when I got the job. It was handmade in Ecuador. I don’t care if I paid too much, the quality makes in an heirloom. It needs conditioning now, and it needs to be worn in even still. But it is the most valuable personal item I have, because there’s way more than $500 worth of joy, laughter, and pain in it.
Even my autism turns up in a joke about it…. that my Satchel is a TARDIS in and of itself. The reason that it connects to my autism is that in bringing up “Satchel,” we have just made an appointment to talk about intelligence.
What details of your life could you pay more attention to?
By writing to and for myself, I pay attention to my life in minute detail. It is literally my job if I want to sell books later. Brene Brown has nothing on me, I swear to Christ. I am betting that we process much the same way in terms of throwing everything out on the table and seeing what it looks like. I don’t know if she’s a natural INFJ, but I do know she’s a professor in a profession to which INFJs naturally gravitate, so even if my letters aren’t hers, we’d be simpatico. I know that, because we’ve spent some time together informally.
Editor’s Note: If I sound like an ass because I keep mentioning it, it’s not because I’m trying to name drop. The answer is twofold. My audience is growing every day. Every single day. That means if you read every day, you’re in the know. Other people aren’t. Secondly, the more times I say Brene Brown, the higher I’ll be in Google rankings for searching her because it has indexed how many times I’ve said it and how many people have clicked on my link because of it. It’s not personal. It’s trying to use her platform to introduce myself to new readers, and not only is a good way to find my target audience, I know for a fact that this is not something she’d care about in the slightest.
I just taught her how to use Microsoft Word, but now that it’s so essential I know I did ACTUALLY help her in her career.
She taught me that it’s okay to throw emotional bombs on the table and look at them, because if you don’t stay silent, there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll resolve the conflict. If you keep silent about your needs, those odds fade to zero either way.
The hardest part is developing the strength to say what you need out loud, because I call them emotional bombs for a reason. If you express a need, people who have low self-esteem will see it as an attack. You’re screwed either way, because either that person’s going to get mad at you and walk away, or they won’t. If you are in any way an anxious person, you’ll put off that conversation for eons. You don’t want to chance it. If you say you need something and they get angry, it might lead to the relationship ending. You have to learn to care nothing about that. This is because stating your needs clearly and walking away when they’re not being met is your only choice. People don’t change because they’re not willing to do the work. You are mostly the age you got married, because that’s when you set up your new family patterns and they repeat. In a lot of ways, people divorce to grow up….. particularly couples who get married at 20 and stay together until they’re 40.
This is why I’m not married and just dating. I do not want to stagnate. If it happens that I find a partner, I still want someone that wants their own space, even if we live together. I want to normalize it not being weird if I’m holed up in my office and they’re not holed up with me. I’m dating one of the biggest extroverts I’ve ever met, and I love it because I can pay complete attention to my own life while he’s off doing his thing, because he knows that partying is his jam and not mine and that’s perfectly okay. I don’t need him as a possession.
Supergrover, Cora, and Bryn are the one I treat like possessions in terms of being a seriously pissed off mama bear. Come after my girls and I will end you, if combat is limited a really mean letter.
I write differently when I want to work things out, I will only say that.
Healing an anxious attachment style is built on learning to believe someone the first time. It is also learning to believe when they’re lying to themselves. Learning to tell when actions and words don’t match, correcting the story that you’re telling yourself. If someone is unwilling to help you correct that story, they should be uninvited to participate. You also can’t hold anything over their heads. You just have to wait it out. Life is long.
If you are thinking of someone else’s needs all the time, you are doing immense harm to yourself if you have low self esteem . You’re making decisions based on your own echo chamber and trying to read someone else’s mind. Those two things will put you in an asylum if you let them.
The hardest part about throwing an emotional bomb over your shoulder is that you have to walk away and see if they come back.
You have to pick yourself up out of rejection sensitivity dysphoria to be able to even trust that they will. So you wait. And you get more unhappy. By the time you do express needs, you’re mad as a wet cat backed into a corner claws extended.
Your conversations will be a mix of “well, that probably sounded better in my head” and “well, that escalated quickly.”
I realized that I had to stop interacting with Supergrover because it was killing me. She was the person that when she talked, my self esteem went up and down. It wasn’t the message, it was the medium. She has lived inside me for 10 years. Her signal is the purest, because her voice is the only one that is always in my echo chamber because our e-mails are all mixed together in my head. Who knows who said what after a while? It’s one story. It just got to where we were alternating between tennis and fencing. We take turns having the high ground, but I can be angry and still think “as you wish” all day. (I like The Princess Bride, despite the fact that it has kissing in it.) That’s because it’s not her worth going up and down.
I threw that bomb knowing she was emotionally incapable according to past behavior, but she can do something about the present.
One of the things that will stick with me is that she said she could do nothing about the past. But she could do something about the present. She didn’t realize that I was saying it as well, in heels and backwards.
It’s the reason we complete each other when everything is going well. Her IQ is higher than mine. My EQ is the highest of anyone I’ve ever met considering how much people tell me how frightening and intense I am.
Dave Chappelle (incidentally also from Silver Spring) once wrote a skit for Chappelle Show called “The Ni**er Family.” It was absolutely hysterical and I laughed until I cried. But Dave said it was a mistake, and the why stopped me in my tracks.
He said:
Everyone was just cracking up in the audience….. but then I noticed this one guy. And the way he laughed, I knew he was not laughing in the way I intended.
It changed his entire career because he left the show and really did the homework on himself. We do not agree on trans issues and never will, but I’m not going to take away from his success or be less proud that he rose from the ash of what he burned down. But the only reason he could do that is that he, Jesus, and I all know the same thing.
The resurrection didn’t happen on the cross.
Jesus went into the garden of Gethsemene the same way The War Doctor wrestled with The Moment on Doctor Who, the bomb that developed a consciousness you had to argue with to get it to go off. There are no records of his prayers there, but here’s what Dave, Jesus, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt: Jesus did not forgive everyone else for their indiscretions without first forgiving himself.
Pretending it is yesterday is important because there is no tomorrow. There is only today and making it through. Every year I think it’s going to be different, but it’s not. The anniversary of my mother’s death hits me like a freight train. I don’t forget my mother is dead anymore. I don’t have the three second heartbreak every morning. It doesn’t stop body memory from throwing me for a loop, though.
I think that’s because I didn’t cry at her funeral. I worked it.
I didn’t fall apart until after I’d come back to DC, because I don’t do public grief. Being in show mode cost me, but it was less expensive than what I would have felt if I’d wept openly. No one would have made fun of me or anything like that. Me not emoting isn’t based on other people. It’s based on how I feel about being vulnerable, because my personality seems to believe that empathy only flows one direction at church. I’ve never been a member of a church in my life. Not really. I’ve never turned off that preacher’s kid mentality where it’s not my turn to grieve, it’s the congregation’s. So, at church (regardless of denomination because I haven’t been UMC since 17) I am always in show mode.
After my mother died, I lasted a few weeks at church. I eventually went back, then noped out a second time. I won’t go back unless I’m a paid ringer in a choir, because I can catch sermons on YouTube (or preach them myself by putting manuscripts here). I can find a lot of things at church, but God is not it. Doesn’t make me less spiritual, or make my belief in Jesus’ message less pure. It’s that church, for so long, has only meant “work” to me. Thus, getting paid to be a section leader instead of being an actual parishioner. I’m great at church as a choir member or lay preacher. I’m am absolute shit at sitting there and just taking it all in. Just being a member does nothing for me, because I’m a preacher’s kid. I can’t turn it off. I am not there to serve. I am there to lead, because that’s what i know to do. I got an F in church member. Periodt. Pastoral care is for other people, those that can look at a church without seeing the sausage being made. That tape starts running the first Sunday I attend, because I’ll overhear someone on the vestry or whatever at coffee hour. I can case the joint in 15 minutes and tell you whether the church is healthy or not, because you don’t have to have a degree to know that. You have to have thousands and thousands of hours of observation.
I have them.
My dad said something to me after he left the church that’s always stuck with me, and why National Cathedral is my church now (via YouTube) and why it’s pretty much the only place I want to audition. He said that after he left the church, he just wanted to be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s because they had like, I don’t know, 10,000 members or something? I don’t know what it is, but it’s a lot. Everyone from me to James Baker and George Bush (who I was not that excited to meet……….. as a president. Meeting the former director of CIA was amazing.) Speaking of which, that reminds me of something Zac said. Just replace “church” with “government.”
When I walk into a church, it feels like when Zac says, “I’m a middle aged white man who works for the government. I’m here to help.”
I fall over laughing because it’s funny, AND I’m 10 years older than him and finding out HE’s middle aged was quite a trip. but the point stands. I feel like that on the first Sunday I visit every church. It was so freeing when I stopped doing that.
So, to anyone who thinks I’m an idiot for preaching about Jesus while also not going to church, you and me? We are not the same. You love it because you don’t feel the pull between “this is amazing” and “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.” I will never fit into a congregation until I can submit and give up an authority I don’t have. That authority was the nature/nurture that raised me, so I’m never going to get there, never ever in my five dollar life, so I made change.
Preacher’s kids come in two flavors. “This is everything I want out of life” and “fuck this shit.” The latter is for second children, and gets stronger the more kids you have. i think the pull to follow in your parents’ footsteps is based on how old your younger siblings are in comparison, because what I’ve noticed is that the longer you spend as the only support staff, the more you feel bound to it. If you don’t become a minister, you’ll marry one because it’s what you know. Do not ever in your five dollar life think I’m bullshitting you about having been support staff, because even if you’re a “fuck this” preacher’s kid, your congregation will still see you as an employee. They can’t help it. The preacher’s kids are divine somehow, way better than their kids.
Having known two of them my whole life, I’m going to go with “that’s a no from me, dawg.” Sending your kids to the preacher’s house because you think we’ll rub off on them is valid………. but what you see is what you get. You just weren’t looking for truth. You were looking at me through the filter of my dad’s platform. I promise that if I’d been a pastor, I would have been every bit as good as he was, because you learn everything by osmosis and then you get a degree you don’t need. Ministry could come through work experience alone. That’s because you’ll learn a shit ton of new things, but old habits die hard. What was modeled is how you’ll be.
The reason I would have been great and not just good is that my father’s forte was going into churches that had been fractured and making them whole, and you can see it clear as day. I am so glad that I did not grow up with a toxic mess of a pastor………. the one who broke the church before him, which has absolutely no bearing at all on my 20s and 30s. Eyeroll (seriously. Biggest one on record).
Pastors, let me scare you a little bit because you need to be aware. If you have the type child that can case the joint like I am, we can tell what kind of pastor you are. If you are a toxic mess, we know it. You cannot hide it. Handle your shit and get help. Do you think we know this because we’re so smart? Fuck, no. It’s because when you’re a train wreck, our behavior makes us political pawns. I know that and I never did anything that as out of the realm of normal teenage girl behavior and I was still in this shit if the finance committee decided to revolt.
They’re mad at you, but they don’t get mad at you. They treat us completely differently as if we can’t read them blind. Their energy has changed. Just because my dad wasn’t toxic doesn’t mean he didn’t walk into a wall of bullshit first.
My mom walked me through that with all the strength she had, so when she died, church didn’t look the same. I didn’t realize how much association there was in it. That when my mother left the church building, God left with her.
I find God through music. Bach is like praying twice. If I have a God moment in church, it’s going to reside in a chord. The ultimate God moment for me is Easter morning at a church like National Cathedral, where they go all out with pipe organ, brass quintet, and full choir. Welcome to my definition of the trinity. Trumpet players act like they’re God, so it’s a shorter leap than you think. 😉
Maybe I’ll use great works in my plans for tomorrow. Listening to music like that heals grief, the only thing I really need.
To close, here is the best Mommy and me moment I own, made for me by my father’s father:
I was just thinking about how I said that the Bible was an ancient blog at best, because there is no argument for God. There is an argument over people’s reactions to God. My ruminations are just as important as theirs because reaction to the divine is individual. You talk about how it influences your life, and it either attracts or repels people upon execution. I hope I act like I’m in touch with my divinity, and lead them to believe that it guides me in a way that atheists would never find offensive. That’s because most atheists don’t actually hate God. They hate what Christianity has become and they’re mad af about it because we keep forcing something down their throats that they’ve thought about for years and decided enough is enough. White supremacy Jesus can only be justified so much.
It would be so much more if Christians hadn’t been overtaken by the Republican party that their set of beliefs is the first thing that comes up in an atheist’s mind. There’s sometimes no room for me in that crowd, because they don’t believe I exist. It’s my job to just keep being me and not judging anyone for anything. Anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t really listening. Zac is. He gets to stay. 😉 All atheists who aren’t offended I’m not are welcome. I love debates between Christopher Hitchens and Rowan Williams. I think he would have loved Michael Curry as well.
Michael Curry added a depth to the Anglican church that they didn’t even know they needed, even after electing Katherine Jefferts Shori as bishop. That was important, but being black is unique in a singular way. White people do not support the black perspective as much as they should, but when they did, Michael Curry brought James Cone with him. Liberation theology hits different, and it is one thing to always preach to a black audience. He got a chance to direct that message exactly where it needed to go. He preached one of the most famous sermons in the entire world- Harry and Megan’s wedding. He said that we could set the world on fire with love if we only tapped into it.
I’m trying to explore what’s stopping me. I have a talent for self destructing. It’s brilliant, really. It’s also not all my fault as I am set up to fail six ways from Sunday. I am learning how to deal with my limitations realistically instead of having the pipe dream of getting better as a cook. There are things I just cannot do that able-bodied people can. It didn’t work out. Doesn’t mean I can’t 100% miss the thing that makes me the happiest in life.
Just like Anthony Bourdain (I know people call him Tony, but he said once that he only likes it when his friends call him that), writing is the thing I love most in the world that can give me the highs and lows of cooking. Just like him, intelligence and cooking are woven together, his in fiction. Mine is real in the sense that I write about my life and I’ve taken the time to listen to Zac and really take in what he’s saying because I’ve been interested in it since childhood, everything I didn’t get to ask my great uncle because he was taken from us when I was too young to understand. And he might not have been taken from us the way it went down, but no one will ever know. It just adds to the mystery, the legend in my family. I could get the public version through a FOIA request, but I don’t think I want to know what really happened. I’ll find it on my own eventually if I keep researching the era of C/DIA I’m studying for dialogue and accounts of real events.
It’s not that the people of the Bible hold authority over our lives. It’s to show that a group of people trying to write a story can succeed. Christians continue to write that story, but more of us write it like we’re in it for ourselves rather than our betterment in order to be in community. You cannot take on more than you can handle, and you cannot expect everyone to catch you all the time. Recognize the hell out of the people who do, because they’re the ones to which you owe the biggest honors and favors.
If you don’t act like a connection matters, it won’t- depending on your tolerance for not being able to fix a problem. Sometimes your rope is very short and you have to apologize for being quick to jump to conclusions. Sometimes it’s enormous because it takes time for a problem to simmer to the surface. The honeymoon phase of any relationship is addicting. Bromance is almost as instantaneous as it was in Stepbrothers. Because of this, it’s really hard to break into a group of guy friends and feel like a regular. That’s because they have five friends from fifth grade so you’ll be FNG until you die. 😉
I’m the same way. I value time and effort. That’s why I value input so much. When I talk about my response to God, you can talk back because I speak in a universal language to express something ineffable (thanks, Neil). Everything comes down to secular humanism, because no one has a lock on what God is or isn’t, but everyone knows how they feel in the Blue Ridge mountains or on a plane with the possibility of going down. I am betting that Zac can describe this fear more than most because I cannot imagine the feeling of being trapped on a ship or a sub during conflict. Even if you love it normally, you’re going to react like a goalie. Most of the time, the play is on the other end of the pitch, but when it comes down to you, it really, really counts. Being a goalie can actually come down to 89:53 of nothing followed by a stunning amount of terror.
It was getting quiet in here, so I put on my latest mindworm. It’s jazz, “RFK in the Land of Apartheid” by Jason Moran and the Bandwagon. It’s inspiring because it’s mathematically complicated, but I’ve been listening to it on repeat for years to get it out of the way. Now the bass is a life blood.
It is another thing that puts me in the correct frame to write because I also hear people dealing with white people Jesus. Apartheid Jesus wrecked South Africa. Every time we talk about it, we reinforce why that stuff should never happen again. Americans need to face the reality that all minorities fear being put under that kind of system. Hopefully it will never be a dictator who think white lives matter just a little bit more. A lot of Americans have proved that’s what they’re looking for in a leader, and it’s our right and responsibility to write it down, but not to add to the fire. To be there as a witness. People are doing it with their cameras, I choose to do it in words.
You cannot always feel a divine presence, but it’s up to you to nurture it in the way you know best. It’s not that atheists don’t experience those feelings of wonder. They just don’t attribute it to God because they don’t see that thread of divinity that comes with acknowledging someone’s humanity. They see it mostly as a grandfather in the sky, because that’s what the church has represented for thousands of years. I, like they do, see morals and relativity through the lens of other people’s behavior. I, like Arundati Roy’s brilliant title, believe in the God of Small Things.
I choose to correlate that to the message in the book of Acts, that resurrection happens in the middle of the mess, or in this case, when you least expect it. It takes work to get down to the smallest part of yourself, not just to be able to acknowledge your feelings but to tell another person as well. Just like the historical Jesus, the message is here if you want it. I’m just never going to say that your way of viewing the divine is invalid and that it’ll land you in hell. I don’t even know whether I’m going or not and I am nowhere near 94% correct as to how God works. Neither were the people in the Bible.
Old Testament is all of us on a bad day. New Testament is all of us on a good day apologizing for it. Feeling saved by God/Jesus is the same feeling as being saved by friends or family when you’re in the shit. God is not the grandfather in the sky. It’s the audience I talk to when I’m alone, because especially when I’m writing here, I can’t be sure that God is listening, but I can be sure that you are.
It also helps my friends understand me better because they see me talking about both them and others when I can’t be sure they’re listening or care. They, in effect, see the way I talk about them behind their backs, but not for malice. Because both good and bad reactions are valid. It takes work to resolve a conflict without either party feeling slighted. Depending on who’s in office, we’re better at it or worse. Some administrations, frankly, just like the dollar signs that come with being pro-war and don’t want to be smart about intelligence keeping conflict down because it’s “good for the economy.” Whose, exactly?
Because when we stop thinking as a worldwide people instead of Americans first, we open the door to being oppressors instead of support police. We end up staying longer than we need because we’re making good money. Who cares what it does to them? And then when their countries have been ransacked, we pull a lot of racist bullshit when we have plenty of room. There are even states that are basically empty.
The huge problem we have in Texas is that when Greg Abbot sends a busload of people to Washington, his supporters cheer. He keeps doing it whether it’s legal or not because it’s popular. You can’t stop that problem from this end without federal intervention.
The problem is twofold. The first is that people don’t actually come together to fix the problem. They sort of kick the can down the road rather than hiring enough people to handle that kind of influx. Meanwhile, if you don’t know anyone here, you could get a higher priority if you’re willing to settle where we put you. That way, we have more infrastructure and tax base in places that need it to survive.
No requirement to stay, of course. Just that it might give you a better chance if you were willing to live in a smaller city.
We fail ourselves by telling us that we are so much better apart than together. Being apart creates separation from God, because we make God in our own image. If people are displeased by us, so is the divine. It’s the only thing that can inspire true change in behavior, because you have to want change to come and you cannot process it properly without looking at it from a third person perspective. It doesn’t matter to me whether people have access to that concept through running or prayer. It’s not the semantics, it’s the protein.
As I went down in the river to pray Studyin' about that good old way And who shall wear the starry crown Good Lord, show me the way.....
I started this morning by singing.
I am not sure that it brings my housemates peace, but that’s not my issue.
Yesterday, I got some clarity about the relationship with Supergrover that I hadn’t had before. Her reactions looked like they have for the last eight years. She dismissed everything I was saying except the worst of the worst, when it’s not important. The things I say that are positive are every bit as powerful if only she’d take them in. But she’s not looking for that from me. From me, she wants something she can rail against, or at least, that’s how it comes across to me.
Not once has she asked me why I wrote something I did.
Not once in all of this current round of fights has she picked out anything nice to say about me. Yes, I will absolutely lose my shit at times. I will also freely hand over a large amount of love. But you can’t take it if you don’t see it. I hope that I’m getting through to her, but what I have realized is that it doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be happy with a relationship that consists of me writing something and her telling me how horrible it is that I’ve said something instead of trying to comprehend it.
You can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go, and I’m done letting her bang her purse on my head. I’ve tried too hard, and it made no difference. She is allowed to think the worst of me, because I have now done enough within myself to know that her words are complete bullshit because she’s taking everything at face value and writing off the negative as something I’m doing to spite her.
I’m not describing my emotions and my life in 3D, I have been hurt in some way and must feel like I need to destroy her.
You don’t get sentences as full of love from me as mine were if I think you’re a villain in the story. She’s not the villain, but she is definitely the antagonist. Instead of talking about it, both presenting our issues and reaching a consensus, she has walled off at every turn. It’s demoralizing to an enormous degree, because to me it’s like she became a totally different person. She couldn’t see my love and attention as a good thing.
I’m tired of having my peace disturbed, and yet there’s always going to be one more thing before she goes. Always. I could be more consistently loving if I felt it back, because there would be so much less anger involved. I could stop saying that I’m done and not done, because there’s something about the relationship that’s truly worth saving. I wonder all the time how we got to this place. How many twists and turns the path has taken, all of them good in retrospect and hell on earth then.
The thing that will stick with me is that over the last eight years, I have had fewer and fewer instances of days where she was genuinely happy and willing to reciprocate the good stuff. She has no problem expressing anger, and I hate it when I’m the target based on something I wrote with absolutely no context for what I was going through when I wrote it.
Exhaustion has set in. I think of her as the past now, because she doesn’t want a future and has told me that too many times, while also reaching out. But I’m not innocent here. I’ve also called it quits and reneged. What is interesting to me is that we kept up that fight for years without truly walking away.
I had to need peace bad enough to say the relationship wasn’t worth it. That I couldn’t live with shitty communication no matter whether we were at fault or whether it was a reflex of being virtual, not having the smarts to change mediums when it was possible.
It leaves me with a sense of panic as I move forward, but that’s because everything is unfamiliar and new, not that I’m incapable.
I have said all of this before in a hundred different ways, but it’s not for her. It’s to remind me to stay strong, that my complaints were valid…. that just because it’s not important to her, that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Her life is so big that I can see why I’ve always been in last chair, but I didn’t think I had a leg to stand on until I did.
Breaking the pattern of trying to please her so that we both got what we needed was the wrong answer for the relationship, but the right answer for me. That’s because she’s not listening to me, but I am.
I cannot tell her that I love her even when she’s angry, because she wouldn’t believe it. She stole my peace. I was writing some of the best pieces to ever come out of me whether they were angry or lovesick. She’s bound and determined to treat me as if she has low self-esteem, because if she didn’t, she would believe the positive things I say.
She would believe that I think she’s absolutely gorgeous.
She would believe that I love her anger, because when she stands up for herself, I teach myself my own value.
One of the most painful aspects of our relationship is that I’ve written this set of entries more than once, and either something I say will bring her back around, and perhaps part of seeing all the negative for her is having the will to walk away when she didn’t before.
It makes it easier to walk away when you’re angry, but it doesn’t bring you peace. I think that’s a large part of why we’ve tried so hard. Neither one of us really wanted to leave things unresolved.
I let out all my anger, she keeps hers in. I don’t think it’s personal to the two of us, necessarily. I just think she keeps a lot under wraps and this is just part of it.
This is because there is an instance in our past where she didn’t tell me something because she wasn’t sure of my reaction….. but that once became all the time.
I cannot fault her for this because I made it happen, but I can say she does bear responsibility in shutting down two-way communication. She doesn’t open up, ever, just blames me that I want those things from her. Everything is not good enough for me, when I just thought it was time to fish or cut bait because I was tired of my thoughts and feelings being invalid. That I could either walk on eggshells or not have a relationship with her at all. This is not a one-sided problem. My anger management is just now coming to fruition, because I literally needed years of distance to get over what happened between us.
I changed, desperately seeking self-compassion because I knew I could not get compassion from her while she was angry. While I was changing, she wasn’t. She’s still in the same emotional place I left her, because I realized that my anger needed to tamp down on its own, and part of the anger was everything she wasn’t saying.
She didn’t take in that our agreement was stepping into a river and going with the flow. My positive emotions were getting dammed at every turn. She stood in the negative emotions, bathed in them, took them as fact.
The entry she referenced said something about her not being able to steal happiness anymore, but she didn’t ask me why I said it. I needed to stop the neurodivergent urge to explain things more and better, and if the person isn’t listening, to try and keep explaining until you’re understood. I didn’t do anything by explaining it one time, so surely six will do it.
I learned that I needed less of all of it, because I could find the things that made me unhappy. I could not find the things that gave her joy.
As I went down to the river to pray, I learned when I studied the good old way, it just wasn’t that great.
When we should have baptized each other and walked away clean.
I put a moratorium on writing about my beautiful girl yesterday, and then I get a prompt like this. Whelp. Here we go. Hold on to your butts.
When I said before that there is a place in everyone that feels infantile and defenseless and I’d given mine to my friend, it was that in 20 minutes worth of talking together, I’d made her God in my mind. Do you remember the movie “Contact?” That when the aliens reach out, it’s to a little girl, so they project an image of her father to explain everything so she is not afraid. What I love about this scene is that it’s not frightening to her because she’s been told that it’s just an image to make her listen harder.
That’s who she was to me. The image of God that made me listen harder, not that I was putting her on a pedestal and thought she was more important than me. It’s true that if we hadn’t been so incredibly different, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We’d have developed a Venn diagram on friends that would have made us lose the stranger on a train feeling that made me crave her. I can’t even explain that part of it, only that our conversations were so full of emotion that at the time, my favorite song was “Your Love is My Drug.” I was the most complicated 808 percussion rhythm in existence. It was exactly like doing a concerto at Carnegie Hall, where people only expect the highest level of musicianship, or perhaps a music jury to keep your chair in a major orchestra. In the orchestral example, I was a soprano hanging off a ledge with a cadenza to rival Kathleen Battle. The music jury is realizing you’re last chair and learning to roll with it. You’re just happy you got in.
Plus, I’m an INFJ. I am built for people to trauma dump all over me. It makes me want to fix all the things and I will put lots o energy into it because they’re helping me find myself a day at a time. What she never knew that I did was how many hours I gave her while she wasn’t in the room. Therefore, I think she thought I was always winging it, when I was running things past her to correct the story I was telling myself.
She didn’t, and it made her say things to the effect that I never missed a chance to tell her how much her problems were a burden for me. If I’d thought about it, I would have replied that I think of her with every term of endearment that has ever existed, particularly “mulkvisti,” which comes from Suomi and means “one I hate less than the others.” What she couldn’t see is that I was pouring my heart out to her and telling her how much her words affected me. She thought I was rejecting her, when I was telling her that my empathy was so large I was hurting for her, and please recognize that I made sacrifices, too. If she only knew how much love I send through the chord that runs between us (in the geometric sense of the word, not a typo)………. sometimes I put Red Bull in it just in case she’s running a quart low. Those metaphysical images give me life, and I’m rebelling against the way I have seen her treat everyone else and how I am not in that group anymore.
She can tell other women that they’re beautiful, that she loves them, sign off with kisses and hugs. To me, that is what is keeping my mistakes over my head and making it drip on my face every day. That would mean we were getting back to normal, because it made me feel that she couldn’t tell me those things because she thought I’d overreact and think she’d been touched by an angel or some shit. She doesn’t know how much it means to me when she sends me heart emojis, even. To me, showing up is often hearing that I am beautiful and loved despite all my flaws and failures, too. Showing up big would be acknowledging all my love and care as much as she’s recognized my ire.
She doesn’t recognize that at times my love for her is fucking feral, and I know she feels the same way about me because she went apeshit when Sam dumped me. She doesn’t know that I allowed myself the absolute luxury of falling in love with Daniel and my queer as folk “boyfriend,” in quotes because I don’t know what the fuck to call him at this point, only to say that he’s my first thought in the morning and will be on a friendship level for life. This is because she gave me everything I needed in terms of girl power energy everywhere I looked. There is nothing hotter to me in this world than a woman with big dick energy.
Wow, it’s a good thing my feelings aren’t that intense.
So, it was no surprise to me that within days I was completely gone. I love her for everything she used to be, is, and will be. She has said it as no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. I really believed that until she didn’t tell me that the position of partner had been filled long ago, so I hoped too much that she was one of those women whose sexuality changed based on how much they felt demisexual/sapiosexual, not where they were on the Kinsey scale previously. It was a bad pattern to set up, because I’ve kicked myself over what I didn’t know for ten years, especially the part where my brain chemicals made backing down off that nerve scream in pain. I made myself a mixtape like a fucking child, and I will not apologize for going to that place, because acknowledging those feelings helped them go away faster, and I know it. It was easier to ask and move on than it was to pine for her, because I would have done it forever and I know this about myself. I’d be eighty years old without ever being vulnerable with anyone else. It’s not her, it’s the way my personality works.
I didn’t date for a long time, and the most vulnerable reason is that I didn’t want to make anyone else a priority over her. Sam would have been fucked, and now I know that. I couldn’t acknowledge it before, but my attention didn’t turn. I chose emotional intimacy over romance for years, which is why I felt starved of it after I fucked up everything. It came across as pouting that I’d been kicked out of the popular kids’ lunch table, because she was filtering it through her experience of dealing with younger people. Our age difference doesn’t show much, but that is where it pops up most in my humble experience. That feeling provoked comes from the heuristic that I’m so much younger, I’m using girlfriend tactics to goad and provoke her like she’s a senior jock and I’m a freshman.
I had that relationship when I was actually in high school.
I had enough emotional bandwidth to sit down at a table she prepared for me, at first filled with promise…. taking off the last silver cover to reveal absolute confusion……… when all I’ve ever wanted is to be her personal chef- for real, not a euphemism. I want to be a chef, and I wanted her to be my sous. I was working toward that goal by being emotionally vulnerable so that we both could heal and move on. But recognizing that we had issues didn’t come across as goading and provoking until she laid into me and I didn’t take the time not to respond with an absolutely proportional response because I was triggered too badly at being thought of as a nuisance…. and at the same time, it being held over my head that I wrote from a different perspective than what she was actually going through because I didn’t know what it was.
By the time she actually did it, she ended with being exhausted by everything. I thought, “no girl is worth this.” No girl is worth wrecking my life over, even if I do think she’s the face of God. If I left, I could use that without her. Through looking at her picture and telling it how beautiful she is, I could imagine her thinking the same thing even if she couldn’t say it out loud out of fear.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Bible, it’s “love people out loud.”
What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?
One of the things I’m pondering this week came from a Twitter thread on habits…. that neurodivergents don’t have them, and that’s what neurotypical people can’t understand. Neurotypical people can make things happen automatically by repetition, and for neurodivergents, every task takes the same amount of energy as it did the first time, because every routine you have is a conscious decision. I have no executive function, nothing that makes me form a habit in the same way someone who doesn’t have ADHD would.
If you have no ability to create habits, life is exhausting. You are spending so much energy remembering what it takes to get out the door and you’ve been doing it since childhood. When your brain is unmanaged attention-wise, other thoughts invade while you’re trying to make a memory. That’s why I, a Virgo, am classically great at creating systems of organization that don’t last very long. Every “Back to School” was so much hope.
I am deeply in discernment about what my definition of having it all means, because it has shifted in quite a few ways. It’s great because my sister and I are having some of the same epiphanies, and it’s great being able to share. I saw her for lunch the other day, and she looks great. I was going to go with her to a thing where she was speaking, and I backed out because I couldn’t find an outfit. It was impossible. I’d lost so much in the fire by having to evacuate my room and I haven’t had time or need to replace anything until now.
Part of having it all for me is nice clothes, which is why I have a black belt in Goodwill. I can take a thousand dollar outfit and have it for $40, because it probably cost $20 and needs hemming.
In terms of clothes, I dress like every tech nerd in America, I just have sensory perception issues and would rather have an old shirt that was made to last two generations than fast fashion because it feels better. It’s the difference between a Target button down and Brooks Brothers.
I already have it all in one area of my life- this web site. I’ve made friends from it all over the globe, and it’s tremendously validating that I got here just by being myself. I didn’t set out to teach anyone but me, and ended up connecting with everyone else. To be honest, I post an entry frequently because I’ve come to visit this web site and it is now boring. That blogger sucks. Then I remember it’s me and get back to work.
I’m sorry that in some ways, entries seem repetitive if you show up every day, but to me it feels like I’m workshopping an idea. Clarifying. That’s what I mean by teaching myself. Reading myself closely and seeing how I come across to the outside world informs what I do next, and that feels right, because none of my ideas are coming from external validation and I am not trying to please an audience. I can see structure over time where I am woodshedding, purposefully running selected measures over and over until the tempo is right…. when I feel my inner Aaron Sorkin kick in. A phrase rises from being able to hear it in your own cadence to being able to hear it in mine.
Having it all is knowing I create reactions in you when you read, and you’re not shy about letting me know how you feel. Even when you disagree, I know I’ve made you feel something, which is so much better than nothing. It’s been such a rewarding relationship over the years, the one between you and me. I strongly believe it’s the only one that will last the rest of my life because I’ll still be able to write even if everything else goes away. In fact, I need it more when things go sideways. That’s how I teach those things not to hurt. I don’t approach every relationship thinking it’s going to end, I just know that I’ll be all right if it does.
Having it all is being open to the possibility of having kids in my life, which is to say that Cora already is, but it would be different living with her or any of the kids I would come to love. I’m also at an age where many of the people I meet have grandkids, because either they had kids early or they’re a few years older than me. That’s exciting to think about as well. I wonder all the time how it would change me, because I’ve had to think about it before and it all made me smile. I’d even be up for pregnancy and childbirth as long as it wasn’t mine.
I would be the greatest dad ever. I am already an old grandpa on the Internet. I already make terrible jokes, and I’m not offended by dating someone younger if they’re aiming for kids or already have them, because in that case they’re already better at adulting than I am, so why worry? I am not aiming for a young trophy wife, I’m just saying that I can’t know what circumstances people are in until I talk to them. Who knows what my next love will bring to the table? Whether they’re older or younger, childless or have many, none of that matters. I want someone who has an exciting mind and doesn’t care that I’m a bit of a homebody who needs to sit alone for long periods of time if they can’t sit quietly. That’s how to be a writer. To have everyone understand that they know where to find you in an emergency, but please don’t interrupt. In exchange, when I am not writing, I am completely and totally available. This gets easier when the other person is really busy.
It would help if my next partner had as big a worldview as Zac, because it gets me out of my own head to talk about things that affect countries and not me personally. I often need to be dragged out of thinking about myself, because it informs where I’m going on this blog. It’s developing ideas on what to say so that I’m not threatened by a blank page. It’s having more to talk about than just me.
I also feel like I’m the authority on me, but I don’t want to presume I’m an expert on anything else. Some of my assumptions are flat out wrong, because I don’t have all the information. When I do, my opinion changes and I write about that, too. I process emotionally pretty fast, which leads people to believe I am up and down mentally. In reality, I just let go of what I think quickly because new shit has come to light.
My mind moves fast, and it’s hard to keep up. Sometimes I’m proud of that, because it gives me self confidence to an enormous degree. I am literally not carrying around anything, because I talk about it here and then I’m done. Everything else I do to prepare just feels like writing a letter into the void, hoping that someone a hundred years from now will find it interesting. Knowing for sure that people who have crossed my path will live forever because I think that highly of them. That our story goes up and down because life can’t do anything else. I embrace change now in a way that I haven’t before, because I have a repository that tells me how strong and resilient I’ve become. That I have a place to fall that makes good stories out of bad situations. Future generations will read it like a novel, or a collection of letters in great grandma’s trunk.
Lately, happiness has written white for me, the ink not dark enough to be memorable. Having it all has been adjusting my expectations so that they’re much smaller. Noticing how good a cup of coffee tastes, even the day after with ice. Having the world’s most comfortable bed, surrounded by friends I never would have made had I not moved here. When Mother’s Day manipulation is not raining down on me, more of my funny moments with my mom shine through, because there were so many. It’s just that when shit goes down, you’re not always thinking of the sunniest thoughts, and that’s okay. My dad said something in a sermon once that’s stuck with me to this day, which has to be almost 30 years by now. He said, “death is 50% anesthesia to the living.” That when people die, we tend to saint them and not talk about what they were really like.
My mother and I are both full characters. We laughed, loved, lost and found each other. None of that can be contained with mere words. I accept all her love and genuine homophobia (she was never a bigot, just uneducated and afraid). Those things are not mutually exclusive. They are both true, and always will be.
I hope that with all of my entries, you can see that I hold the same opinion of all people. I accept that people do things that make them come across like an asshole, and so do I. They also do things that make them come across like an angel, and so do I. Sometimes I’m so focused on trying to resolve my issues that I forget to acknowledge how blessed I truly am, the only words I also love and hate. I want to talk about Christianity, but with the same foul-mouthed academia you’ve come to know and love, not Christianese.
I like that when I’m angry, I can still count on Jesus to have had a similar experience in which things also sounded better in his head.
This is another way of having it all, and it comes from the blessing of one person in particular. Love me or hate me, I was this way before Nadia Bolz-Weber, and then I got worse. 😛 Finally, someone who preached in my style because she used to do stand-up. Her sermons could make you roll in the aisle with laughter, which came as a relief because you were sobbing a second ago. It opened me up to hear that being human was a viable option. She didn’t inspire me to follow in her footsteps, only that being a regular person with a full range of emotions didn’t make me a less serious academic when it came to research and the humor I attached to it. Seriously, it was like Moses whispered in my ear that he killed a guy. A blog didn’t render me less worthy to talk about God. But it was a much bigger sin, just to be clear.
Stories That Are All True 