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.
Doctor Who is by far the biggest fandom in my life, so I have t-shirts, an adult coloring book (get your mind out of the gutter, it’s just difficult af), and many things I have loved and lost over the years. At Alert Logic I had a TARDIS USB hub that makes the sound when The Doctor has on the emergency brakes. Someone stole it off my desk and took pictures with it all over Houston, then brought it back and sent me the pictures as “Sexy’s Day Out” or something like it. It’s an IT company filled with employees who are all obsessed with sci-fi. Back then, I also identified as Hufflepuff. I figured that’s what most clerics would be, and the clerical description fits because it’s not my job, it’s my personality.
I was nurtured to be that, and not because anyone else wanted it for me. I took it in by osmosis, and am very, very good at pastoral care when I have no emotional connection to the person. The problem is that even one session of pastoral counseling would make me take that person’s pain on as my own. Working in a doctor’s office gave me more clinical separation, but not enough. As an INFJ and highly sensitive person, my emotions were too large even after learning to tamp them down. I would be a horrible pastor or doctor, and not because I wouldn’t be good at it.
I would be incapable of refilling my own cup with energy, because Mrs. Jones is having an affair and her husband doesn’t know it, Mr. Smith is a teenage basketball player who wrecked his knee and his NBA dream is gone, and several Karens want to decorate my house before I get there. It’s always the Karens, because the parsonage is generally the Dear Aunt Sally collection, because parishioners furnish the parsonage with whatever they have on hand. When people have money, they have furniture they want to discard. Let me say for the record that I’ve loved all of it. I’m talking about the negotiations that happen when several families want to get rid of their old bedroom set at the same time.
The best house for me was the parsonage in Sugar Land, because it was gorgeous and in a great neighborhood, plus the church offered to let me paint my room any color I wanted. I chose pale yellow, and decorated my room around Elizabeth Arden’s Sunflowers perfume bottle. I wish I’d thought to get a Van Gogh print………..
In the living room, we had long couches arranged in an L, which created the perfect solution…. Lindsay and I had equal space.
My desire to be a pastor didn’t really come from preaching, though that’s the easiest part of it. It came from going to weddings and funerals from a very young age, learning what it takes to execute them as a leader. I listened in on conversations as much as I could, trying to wrap my brain around the heuristics that run in one’s mind as they try to figure out what to say.
My dad leaving the church impacted me in different ways, but one of the positives was getting away from that environment and looking back on my experiences to see if pastoring was what I wanted to do or what I had done. I decided, in the end, after years of discernment, that I felt a calling but not any drive or passion about it once my mother died. Before she died, it was being full of confidence that I’d succeed and regret….. and not because of other people. Because of my reaction to them.
It was more than being overloaded by other people’s emotions. It was feeling like I couldn’t help them unless I turned mine off. I don’t like doing it because it makes me seem colder than I really am, because people don’t see you protecting your own energy. They see you as distant. And even recognizing when people are saving energy is hard, because when you do, it doesn’t make them want to open up to you… they see their problems as too much for you when it is literally your job. I didn’t want to be a leader and for people to see I was a mess. It’s not interesting when I’m a private citizen, but pastors are known on a much bigger level than that. I’d like to be only capable of handling my own situation poorly rather than inflicting my pain on everyone else. I had enough of that in Portland to last my whole life, and not because I did it. I watched someone else do it and decided that wouldn’t be me.
The final nail in the coffin for the dream of me being a pastor was having watched said pastor go through the loss of her mother and what it did to the people around her. It changed her whole personality and the way she interacted with parishioners. No one would deny this that was in the room, even her, because it wasn’t all negative. The reason it had such a big impact on me is that my mother died, and my personality completely changed as well. The way forward was to write about my God moments here, and let people decide if they wanted to hear them. I could also keep my clinical separation intact, because sitting alone and writing is so much different than being responsible for your emotions while you read.
It’s also grief knowing you’re not stable enough to be that kind of leader when you know you were born to do it and would have been fantastic in some respects. I can’t say I’d have a really good handle on all of it, because I suck at admin and finance. I now wish I’d become a psychiatrist, but I also don’t have a great relationship with math and science, even though reading about them is absolutely amazing. I just have no talent with them myself. How I would have been a GREAT psychiatrist is being able to integrate therapy, but only on a superficial level, and medical school would have been the perfect answer because it would have beat enough emotions out of me that I could have functioned better with patients than getting a license in counseling. I can spend fifteen minutes with you, because that’s not enough time to uncover your deepest trauma, and that’s not a psychiatrist’s job. Medication is just a safety net. Psychologists are the real heroes.
I was born to be that person that listens to you for an hour and helps you relieve your pain, and realistic about how much it would wreck me over time. I know within myself that if I’d become a licensed professional counselor that I would be very much like Doc Martin. He was a world famous surgeon, and just one day developed a blood phobia and stopped. I have a feeling that I’d be the same- counseling people until it was too much and one day just walking away- seemingly out of nowhere because it’s not one thing. It’s compound interest.
Therefore, when I think of collections, I think of this web site, the legacy I want to leave behind. It’s not perfect. There are entries that are angry beyond belief, and entries that show my inner angel as well. For me, the first step to resolving my issues was realizing that I have an entire spectrum of emotions, and I didn’t need to berate myself so hard for the negative ones if that wasn’t my focus. That if I used my mistakes to learn, they wouldn’t be in vain. Therefore, I am relentlessly driven to understand myself (like all INFJs), laying it all out here because other people might say, “I’m going through something similar.” I am preaching the Gospels by living them, not standing on a platform and punching down…… my problem with Evangelicals in its entirety.
Who among us has the power to tell anyone they’re going to hell for any reason? Our religion is based on forgiveness. The Bible is also like the Constitution. There are many, many lessons we can learn from both, and let’s not confuse that by making people who’d be freaked out at the sight of a dishwasher the system administrators of our lives.
I picked up a great line from the Archbishop of Canterbury last week, because it’s fundamental to understanding this web site. In the Bible, there is no argument over the existence of God, there are only people’s reactions to God. What that means to me is that my Gospel is as relevant as Mark’s on a superficial level. That’s because who is to say that Mark’s reaction is more important than mine? He was just a dude.
I also make arguments for the reaction to God, not the existence of them (singular they to indicate nonbinary). I have said over and over that my God is the space inside me that tells me what to do…. That God lives in me, not the traditional Grandfather in the Sky. God runs through every piece of nature, because it’s not about whether God is present, but whether we are.
Having a relationship with God doesn’t require them to show up. It only matters that you do. God also brings many names. I believe in all of them. Allah, Ganesh, and Ra are all the same “person.” That’s because again, spirituality is based on your reaction to the divine, not because it’s really there. Wiccans tap into magic and nature the same way Christians pray and Buddhists meditate.
In that way, spirituality and magic are inextricably related. Even the Episcopal Church calls it “the mystical body of Thy Son.” That’s because when we access that spiritual place within us, we don’t know exactly what happens….. God is not the Actor, God is the Responder. When you get what you want in life, it doesn’t mean that God is a line cook at Waffle House. You don’t just order smothered, covered, chunked, and topped. The decks are random, and you just have to play your hand. God is what helps me decide whether I’ve won, and not by serving up the right answer. God is the place where I am allowed to struggle.
God can give me all the attention in the world when no one else should have to take on what you’re thinking and feeling. In that way, it is like an imaginary friend. There is no better comfort than an objective listener like a therapist, and when you don’t have it, your brain creates it. So, whether you believe that God is a figment of your imagination or a living deity, it still helps to pray. My philosophy on God is very, very much like AA. God’s function is to get your ego out of the way, so make it whatever you want. Your kids. Pepsi. Whatever.
How God helps me in particular is wrestling with other people’s emotions without the inconvenience of their feedback, because it’s not time for it yet. It’s time for me to struggle on my own until I’m not feeling uncertain anymore. It is because my feeling is that God is big enough to be your punching bag, and your very real friends aren’t. The argument for prayer is exactly the same as watching a candle flicker until it is still, trying to control it with your mind. The flame is a visual representation of your thoughts. If there is a grandfather in the sky, the way that image helps me is praying to someone with a tremendous pedestal so that they can see everything and how it works. It doesn’t help to believe they own the chessboard, but it does help to think about how objective a view God has.
Where organized religion comes in is that Jesus didn’t come here to comfort the distressed, he came here to distress the comfortable. (He was the embodiment of power with, not power over, and people hated him for it. He bitch slapped them with words, so they killed him. Seems legit.) No man is an island, so people gather to spread that message. It’s great when your community is focused on being Jesus, and not taking his message and turn it into the same one reflected by the people he hated. If Jesus saw the degree to which his name was used to justify wars, he’d have people’s heads, theologically speaking. Jesus and I are the same person in that our battle plans only include a strongly worded letter. And even when he chased the tax collectors from the high temple, I think the Gospel would have mentioned him physically whipping them. His answer was not violence, and for me, his message is concrete. If you have to fight people, use intelligence and not violence.
And people wonder why I love CIA and Doctor Who the same amount. Please. There’s even crossover, because both CIA and MI6 have been in Doctor Who over the years. Men in Black is the perfect marriage of Doctor Who and MI6, because their hierarchy is based on British intelligence, for some reason. But I swear to God, if you look at the way CIA and MI6 started, it is a stunning portrayal of both.
It’s also funny to me to think of Jesus as an asset and God as a case officer. I’ve been trying to put together a sermon for years on the ex-fil op it took to get Jesus away from Herod, but I just don’t know enough jargon to make it as hilarious as it ought to be. It could be argued that God gives Jesus alien intelligence…. and that did make me laugh…. this is because there is a direct correlation between God and The Doctor, or who we think God should be. We want God to be the person that shows up and saves the world just before everything ends in disaster, and not that disasters happen and anger at God is some people’s first reaction…. or more acutely, that they think God is angry with them, when that is literally impossible.
When God is angry at you, it’s not God who’s telling you what you’re doing is wrong. It’s you. If you feel anger at God for your situation, you’re angry at the world and attributing it externally, mostly because people don’t like to believe they’re capable of negative reactions and own their actions as much as they should because it makes them feel like a bad person…… not that they’re trying to let go of their own guilt and shame because surely they didn’t cause something bad to happen. God did. In no way do I mean natural disasters. As far as I can tell, Hurricane Katrina was caused by air and water- not gay marriage.
No, I am talking about the damage we cause other people without thinking, because when you don’t pray (the function, I don’t care about semantics), you don’t see anything from a third person view. You don’t talk about what your actions might have done to someone else, and that’s the best reason to pray, because it is literally the forgiveness of sins through the practice of forgiving yourself and trying to do better in the future. It all comes from you, raising your self confidence because emotional resilience is key to survival. Alternatively, if you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you always got.
Praying is a way to change that dynamic. Most people repeat the same patterns over and over because to embrace one’s true self causes conflict. You’re not acting the way you always did, and it’s uncomfortable, especially when other people are used to being able to intrude on your space and now they aren’t. Most people don’t think of relationships as a privilege. That someone is giving you their time, so treat it as sacred. Notice when people aren’t doing the same for you. Don’t let resentment build. If people don’t want what you want, acknowledge it and walk away. If someone also values your time, they will make no mistake about letting you know it.
But you just can’t make those decisions based on never looking at what’s really going on and counting on external validation of your behaviors, because then you’re not in control of your emotions. You’ve put it in someone else’s hands. I am firmly on the side of internal validation, and deeply in control of how other people make me feel because I talk about it. Prayer flows from me without ceasing. Just like Jack Lewis in “Shadowlands,” I can’t help it. I look at what other people are doing to me and how I need to change every minute of every day, but I can only do that in isolation with a 50 foot view. I don’t base my relationships on what people think of me, but how much they value my contribution to their lives, because I have a concrete idea of how long I’ll feel like I’m a problem before the relationship is too fraught.
It took too many years with my beautiful girl because as I’ve said before, she did so many things that made me light up from the inside that I believed we were building something and tearing it down simultaneously, and over time, the idea that we were tearing it down won because it was so confusing. We both proved to the other that we’d step in front of a bus for each other, no questions asked. I thought I was part of her support system because she didn’t have a partner, but when I found out she did, he was immediately folded in. He could also call me at 0200 and say something’s up. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know, because I had this wrongheaded idea that gender and sexual orientation were relative on the internet because without context, neither of you are thinking about the other’s body. Intimacy comes from sharing pain, not visual cues. This is because it had happened to me before, so that heuristic was way off when it came to her. This is the most mortifying thing ever…. I thought she was the same way because she said that if she was religious, she’d be pagan. I’d also never met a pagan woman who wasn’t bi, and now that thought makes me laugh so hard I can’t even breathe. That is because my pagan friends bear no resemblance to Outlander. God, I’m an idiot, but that’s the funniest reaction I had to something serious…… but if there’s something serious about it, it’s that we love the same things. Outlander is based on Doctor Who.
Even Jamie Fraser is named for one of The Doctor’s companions. So, we don’t love the same books/shows, but we love the same concepts when we tap into our God moments. For her, they come from magic, for me, they come from spirituality and faith…. not in God/earth magic, but in us and our reactions to them.
You can find evidence of it in everything I write, my collection and legacy that I existed…….. and hoping mine is the story that sticks.
There will never be another moment in which I think I’m not productive. If anything, I am prolific. My ideas about writing flow through me, and I am just standing by the river. Speaking of which, I thought of another fictional character that is just like me. Literally the spitting image. It’s Norman McClean from “A River Runs Through It.” Never have I wanted to marry a fictional character (in terms of the movie, not the person) as bad as him. Most people love Brad Pitt. I love Craig Sheffer, because he explained me to me in such a deep and profound way. Norman McClain is the Mr. Darcy of my life, because every woman I’ve ever known who reads literature has told me they pine for him on a spiritual level.
Norman’s dad was a minister, caring for people and me with a liberal perspective. He had the same idyllic childhood I did, but with the same pressures. He was also the oldest, and the bag that comes with. They literally acted out all the “my brother’s keeper” plays. Norman’s ideas, and his father’s, flowed out of them best when they were fly fishing. I chose to believe it’s because rivers talk.
The best preaching advice I’ve gotten has always come from my dad, but I had to adapt it to my own style and not his… for two reasons. The first is that I wanted to be fierce about establishing my own thing. That I was doing it because I wanted it, not because I was jumping for his approval. The second is that we couldn’t be the same preacher because my perspective was so wildly different from mine. He didn’t wrestle liberation theology to the ground like I did because he didn’t need it. He didn’t need to believe that “the cross and the lynching tree” extended to him… that I would be rescued from horrible oppression by setting my sights on the one who came to liberate me. That is very much the best of what the black church has been able to do for its people, and James Cone criticism is where I start any sermon ever. I want to take being responsible and mindful to the next level, freeing you from your bonds so that you can love yourself. That you have strength to move on, because your prayer life is telling you what to do. You can trust your intuition, because your brain will do everything it can to protect you from harm. You just won’t allow that protection in if you can’t sit with yourself long enough to contemplate letting it in.
It is when you become God, to let in that protection so your intuition is accurate. But in order to receive it, you have to look at your emotions in third person. If you don’t, ego gets in the way. You’ll just run on lizard brain because you’re surviving and not thriving. Praying is a way to clear the obstruction. In your prayer life, when you are asking God to give you relief, you find that you already have it because you prayed about it. It doesn’t matter if God is listening. What matters is whether you are.
I’ve talked a lot about God on this web site, but I rarely talk about what I believe. Here is my creed.
Heaven and hell were created to keep people in line. The resurrection could have been literal or a marketing campaign, and there’s no way to know that because there are no eyewitness accounts. The gospels were written down long after Jesus was crucified. But to take the Bible seriously is to pick up the lessons we can learn from those stories whether they’re factually accurate or not.
In my prayer life, I use a person as an image so that God feels like a literal person instead of a green screen. That was the moment I connected to David Morse’s character in Contact. Incidentally, I also loved that movie because Matthew McConaughey played me in a movie. That connection is very, very deep. My dad was Matt’s pastor and my mom was Matt’s middle school choir director. If you ask Matt’s mom, she’ll say my dad was amazing because he was the first one to pronounce their names right before she told him how…. and according to my dad, Matt’s dad was a mess, in that Texas way- completely affectionate the way good ol’ boys talk.
When we lived in Longview, I was a toddler. He wouldn’t remember me from Adam, but he’d remember my parents in a heartbeat. My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suit.” Then, when everyone expressed excitement, she’d say “of course, he was 12 at the time.” Sometimes I wonder what kind of interactions we had. Whether he’d ever asked to hold me or joked with me in a memory I can’t recall. That’s because if my mom went to a pool party at all, I was also there.
Swimming has always been where I experience God the most, and my dad reminded me of it the day I preached my first sermon. He said “it’s a river. When you get up there, just step into the flow.” Here’s the even bigger part. I didn’t have my cell phone on me, so he called the church. I wasn’t the one who answered it, so when I was sitting there borderline panicking because I couldn’t ask for a blessing, someone came up to me and said, “Leslie…. it’s your dad.” I’m crying right now just feeling that relief.
Some of you may not know that when I preach in person, I do a pastoral prayer before I get rolling. It’s not for them. It’s for me. I need to know that I have the confidence to lead people by being humble. That opening up won’t hurt, because I might be able to help people more than hurt. It is asking God to work through me so that hopefully, my words resonate instead of making them feel like they have to listen to me to be polite. I want to be worth their time, because nothing is more precious to me than time. To waste other people’s makes me feel terrible toward myself. Letting myself suck until I got better was a necessary evil, and I apologize for ever misstep ever made.
Here’s the most intimate moment that has ever happened to me with a parishioner. At our church, we only did communion once a month. One of the Sundays when the senior pastor was going to be out of town fell on it accidentally. Before the service, I was so nervous I could have thrown up, because I’d grown up in a church that had very strict requirements on who could and could not do communion, and the United Church of Christ doesn’t have any to my knowledge. But it didn’t matter. Someone I wasn’t close to gave me the biggest moment I think I’ve ever had.
I was on the Worship Team, and we were the people gathering before the service to make sure it was going to run smoothly. The question at hand was whether we should skip over communion, because it was already in the bulletin and I was freaking out. It was something I wanted to do because I knew I could, and knowing that it was not a moment I could take. I needed it to be given. I needed someone else to tell me I was worthy before I launched into something that shouldn’t have been done in the first place according to the tapes in my head.
I was standing next to a full length mirror when a woman came up behind me and placed a rainbow stole on my shoulders. She said I should look like a minister, but holy God. In that moment, she became my only ordination to date. It was worth getting raked over the coals by the senior minister when she got home, because I didn’t ask to do communion, I just hoped I would be allowed it. I was, because my support team said that it was more important to follow the bulletin than it was to leave something out. I had my moment not because I asked for it, but because said pastor didn’t proofread…. so she couldn’t take it away from me even if she was going to beat a dead horse for all eternity. She couldn’t steal the gift that I’d been given…. self confidence.
The United Church of Christ is not what’s called a “creedal church,” one that sets in stone what should be said for every occasion… see “Book of Common Prayer” for details. 😛 Since there wasn’t a template, the United Methodist words of institution floated off like I’d been doing it my whole life, completely comfortable in my skin because I knew I wasn’t stealing anything. I was serving everything. I held he literal body and blood of Christ in some traditions, an honorarium in others, right in my own hands. My faith allowed me the strength to believe that I was worthy enough to give people that gift of resolution and redemption that comes with believing in the risen Christ. That rainbow stole was everything when it came to believing that I was both the Moses that killed the teenager in the desert and the one that led the Canadian houseguests out of Iran. I wanted to know if I had enough strength to take on the mantle of being able to lead people rather than follow. I didn’t.
But Brenda did.
She let me know in 60 seconds that my words had value. The table had been laid. I was present in an intentional way. The river was flowing beside me, and all I had to do was step in.
I posted the audio yesterday as well, but here is a transcript if you’d like to read instead of listen.
I know you guys generally don’t know or care about the Revised Common Lectionary OR the Book of Common Prayer, but the people who steal my sermons DO and I let them because I don’t care. I want my words heard all over the world whether I get credit for my ideas or not. If I hit a home run, it’s always because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants- Jesus, most notably. Use all my stuff and forget about the brand on the ball. Also, I post late in the day so you can’t use it this year. The Bible is put together by the Church universal so that you go through the whole thing in a cycle, complete every three years.
Here is the gospel on which I am basing this entry/sermon. It’s one of my two big holidays, just roll with it.
Every sermon I preach, when I am preparing I realize that Jesus and I are the same person (within reason). He was Jewish, I am Christian. He chased tax collectors from the temple with a whip, and I feel that way about anyone who excludes anyone. I’m also older than Jesus now, so I know that had he lived longer, we would have been more alike. We are both judgmental dickheads, and not because we’re not correct. We just get angrier than everyone else… ok, maybe not everyone. Jesus is the kind of empath that I feel he popped off and regretted a lot, another hallmark of people who know you’re not doing life right, because that’s what our personality does. We don’t want to rag on you. We want to build you up. We want you to join us in our utopia, and you will get there if you listen to us. But if you’re going after people with a whip to do it, I’m guessing there had to be a game of “Let’s Be an Asshole” somewhere.
I do what he does with language. My words are often harsh because I don’t feel heard, and neither did he among his family and friends. Nothing good could come out of Nazareth because they couldn’t see him for what he was and is…. an INFJ with anger management issues. Tell me that’s not me sitting on a Ritz, because nothing good has come out of DC, either.
If you’re lost right now in terms of the phrase “nothing good can come out of Nazareth,” it’s emotional shorthand for strangers listening to you easier than your own family and friends when you have big ideas that seem crazy. According to a Chiat/Day commercial, the only people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do.
Jesus was insane. Just batshit.
He thought he could take on everyone who would listen, and like me, if you miss the message, he will flat school you. To me, he is also very funny. Anyone who can make a fig tree die just by yelling at it is familiar with my work………………… #shatnerellipsis
For me, the message has always been his. Widen the net. It’s the biggest message there is. For God’s sakes (literally), the symbol that best represents him IS A FISH. Here’s why. Wearing a crucifix is focusing on his death and not his life. It’s skipping over everything he was trying to accomplish and focusing on everything he didn’t. Do you think it really mattered to Jesus that he was sent to die? He ALREADY KNEW it would happen. So he made the best of it. Out, loud, and proud in terms of knowing what he was here to do….. “I’m here to help the shit out of you. Roll with it or don’t. I don’t have time to want people who don’t want me.”
Tell me THAT’s not me sitting on a Ritz.
If you think that I am trying to say that I am also literally the child of God, remember that I have always said that I do not identify with his divinity. I empathize with his humanity. My heart is continually broken that he didn’t get to live out his entire life naturally, speaking in plain language so that people could understand (Aramaic rather than Hebrew). He was an Idealist painted as someone trying to overthrow the government when he just wanted to feed people.
Besides, God might not be my father, but I was born to upper management. My street creds are solid without any letters. I don’t need them because I’ve been steeped in these stories since I was born, and when I’m preaching, I do every bit as much research as can be done from one Sunday to the next…. the interminable march of Sundays back through the ages and forwards towards our own deaths and resurrections. It’s just that we don’t take resurrection literally, and it’s the one thing we should. If you take nothing else away from the Easter story, it’s this one. Your story matters. You are every bit as capable of telling it as Jesus was. I got a line from an Atheist that I’ll use today, on the most holy of days, because I find absolute truth anywhere I can get it.
At the time, there were lots of people claiming to be the Messiah. His is the story that stuck.
Holy God. “His is the story that stuck.” I went dumb and mute (dumb being a double entendre, for the record).
I was talking about how the Bible is an ancient blog at best, the story of how Christianity was born according to the people who lived it. We can argue all day over whether it’s real, or we could stick to the story that stuck.
Today’s gospel is the story of Mary Magdalene running to tell Simon Peter that Jesus is gone.
Skipping over the OUTRIGHT AND TOTAL MISOGYNY of this passage to focus on other things (this might be a clue we’ll use again later), both Mary and Simon Peter walked into a tomb and saw that their best friend’s body had been stolen. Let’s leave Jesus’ resurrection out of this. Imagine the horror of losing your friend/possible husband to death and not being able to bury him. Imagine the sheer panic of finding out that the grave of their loved one had been robbed, the logical conclusion. Some of the disciples went home. They didn’t stick around long enough (no guilt, they couldn’t have known) for the rest of the story and had to endure that shock. In this moment, the resurrection doesn’t even matter. I wonder how long they sat there and kicked themselves over Jesus saying that they had to walk with the light while they had it. The Disciples are often portrayed as dumb guys, but here’s what I’ve learned in my 45 years. It’s not that anyone is stupid. It’s that the message doesn’t mean anything until you’re ready to hear it.
They did not hear “you have to walk with me, because my life isn’t going to be very long.” At this point, I start wondering what messages I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.
Even The Book of Acts reads like “holy shit, what do we do now? I know there were instructions.”
Their best friend has just died. In that moment, I’m surprised they were capable of any complete thought….. and then his body was stolen.
It’s a miracle that Jesus even ended up in a tomb in the first place. He was poor and the Romans wouldn’t have cared about burying any of the people they crucified. The only reason that Jesus was buried is that he had a very powerful friend that the government needed, so he could ask for something large and actually receive it.
Here’s the moment that judgmental dickhead became divine.
He told you that. He told you that you could ask for something large and be powerful enough to actually receive it. Grace and mercy are free of charge. So is forgiveness. You can let go of anything that is keeping your body in a tomb, graduating into the promise of new hope.
I have so much to write about that nothing is really sticking in one place. I am about as stoned as one can get on OTC medication- real Sudafed and Zyrtec together was a bad idea. All morning I’ve felt like I am walking through wall-to-wall Jell-o. I can’t pick a flavor. What seems right for a Friday? Leave it in the comments. Oh, wait. It’s peach. Friday peach (inside joke just for Meg [holla!]).
I should have bought the Sudafed PE instead, but in the past I have always told people it says, “does not work” right on the box. It is the deodorant crystal of sinus meds. But at the same time, I think it works better than the credit I’ve given it in the past. For instance, it does not suppress my appetite, and in my case, that’s a bad thing. I’m trying. I really am. For breakfast I had two pieces of rye toast smothered in margarine made of coconut oil because we don’t have any coffee. If you don’t get the reference, I thought it might be a good compromise for Bulletproof Coffee. If it doesn’t taste right, I’ll get the Kerrygold and a jar of real coconut oil. Everyone I know who drinks it is an evangelist (sometimes literally [shout-out to Casey, a real evangelical pastor]).
As I have said before, I feel better when I eat vegan food, so I’m trying to buy it more often. That’s not to say I’m a true vegan. I ate the hell out of some ribs and chicken on Memorial Day. I just pay for it later. Something’s not right with me, and I am going to make an appointment to see an internist to re-do the urine and blood tests for rheumatoid markers since Jacob isn’t my doctor anymore and I need to establish one here. It’s time. I can’t be passive about it. I have been out of fear of finding out what’s wrong with me. It doesn’t make any sense at all except that I’m scared of the reality of being sick. Samantha was brave enough to face her treatment plan head-on. The least I can do is follow her lead.
I watched her get angry, really really angry. Sobs and screaming to such a degree that I thought she’d gotten fired or something. If only she had been, because it would have been better news. Her dad said, “I thought you’d gotten engaged, won the lottery, or gotten pregnant.” Again, if only. I don’t want to share her diagnosis to protect her privacy, but I think she’s starting to write about it herself. If she does, I will link that bitch up. She is almost as funny as I am. 😉
Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.
Getting over Dana has been so much easier with you guys. I can vent, I can cry, and you’ll still love me afterwards. Of course, you’re not here for the crying part, but I know there are parts of my writing where you know I’m feeling something. My hope in writing about this mess is that it continues to let me bless and release this relationship without being bitter and angry. It has gotten me nothing in the past. I really do go out with joy in terms of Argo and Dana, because I know I was the problem in many cases, not just one. At the same time, though, it is feeding me to feel joy that the relationships happened in the first place, rather than being an angry asshole that they ended. Not every relationship is supposed to be lifelong. Nothing is stopping me from sending good energy so that if they come here and read something that strikes as true, we can pick up later on. I do not have hope, but I do have peace, if that makes any sense at all. I just know that if they show up, they’re not going to be received in anger. That’s the best I can do in a situation like this, because they both mean so much to me that it doesn’t make sense to hold on to the bad feelings. It makes sense to hold on to the good. Not that it will make them any more likely to show up or not, just that I have peace within myself and the direction I am going without them.
I workshop all my feelings to go back and find what is truth and not what is said in the moment. In the moment, I say things that may or may not ring true later… that’s why you see so much difference in the way I feel day to day, and sometimes they’ll give you cognitive dissonance unless you hold on to the fact that it’s just a snapshot and not the whole picture. Timestamps MATTER. It’s kind of like walking the Bible, in a way. That’s why there are opposing views in it, too. You have to know when the books were written and in whose voice to really understand it. The difference between my blog and the Bible is that there’s only one voice, and in the Bible, there are many.
I just had an epiphany. “Stories” is my blog. The Bible is theirs. Moses, Mark, Luke…. Pick a voice. They’re writing what they see in that date and time. Interesting. It may not matter much to you if you’re not a God person, but it struck me as important. Like, the Pentateuch is Moses’ blog. To me that is accurate AND hilarious.
Paul is the biggest blogger of them all. He writes letters to every church you can possibly imagine. Ephesus, Corinth, Caesaria Phillipi, you name it. Paul was ON IT.
Man, that was a shot in the arm of energy. They wrote their books of the Bible. I’m writing mine. What makes us think that our words about the works of Christ in our lives (or Moses, for that matter) are any less sacred? They may not make canon, but neither did Tobit, and yet, his words are accepted by some congregations, anyway. Still meaning to read Elaine Pagels’ seminal work on the gospel of Judas that didn’t make it, but it’s on my to-do list. Also, I am going to read every word that Karen Armstrong has ever written, because I’ve seen her on TV and I think she is one of the best theological minds in the world. She posits that the reaction to the divine is more important than the divine itself, and has been since the beginning of creation. It’s why you can forget about disproving God with science, because science and religion feed different things. I feel sorry for the Biblical literalists that can’t see it, because I think they’re being left behind in this realm, much less the Rapture (still giggling over “Come the Rapture, This Car Will Be Unmanned” and “Come the Rapture, Can I Have Your Car?” Didn’t write ’em. Still funny.).
They’re being left behind because they are taking an ancient society and trying to fit their rules into ours. Will it Blend? I think not. The best we can do, and I got this line from Susan Leo, is to take the Bible seriously, but not literally. The Bible is the lens through which those people saw their world, and we can use it as a living document, much like the Constitution. As the UCC so eloquently says, “God is still speaking.” I’m just trying to figure out what God is saying to me. I have a lot of work to do. Knowing the direction you need to go and knowing the concrete steps to get there are two different things. Putting one foot down on holy ground was asking Starbucks to donate coffee….. but where does my other foot go? I am not afraid. I am confused. There’s a difference.
Luckily, I have people who believe in me that I can go to for help. Like you. Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep listening. Keep praying for me. Keep supporting me. Keep seeing the vision, and if you want, ask me how you can help. I will put you to work, that’s for damn sure. I can’t do this alone, and I’m not. When I put myself out there, people listen. I’m not used to that sort of thing, but I’m getting there. I’m taking back my power from the weakling I’d become due to my own unworthiness.
You have no idea how much you’ve helped to erase that feeling. All your donations, all your love notes, all your prayers and PRESENCE. Presence is the biggest thing. If God works through us, then I see God in your eyes. You matter to me, Fanagans. You gave me self-esteem and confidence at a time in my life when I desperately needed it. You reached into your own godspaces and treated me with everpresentlovingkindness that stemmed from your own willingness to give of yourselves.
As Gracie Allen so famously said, and another slogan adopted by the UCC, “never place a period where God has placed a comma,”
My comma is happening right now, in this very room. Downsizing into staying in someone else’s house so that I could manage less and think more is propelling me into a different Leslie than you’ve ever seen before. I still slip and slide through life what with my cerebral palsy and ADD and running into things, both literally and figuratively. At the same time, though, I am thinking through different things than I ever thought I would. I have a bigger capacity for growth. That only happened when I let myself into my innermost secrets.
I am so glad I decided to invite you along for this glorious ride. We’ve been through the valley together. Let’s go to the mountain top. I’ll bring the champagne. You bring the hugs.
Stories That Are All True 