Tag: grief

Evening in the Garden

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

One of the refrains that tends to stick out to kids in childhood at church is “And he walks with me, and he talks with me… and he tells me I am his own.” This is because nearly all ministers have told the joke about the supposed child, and in every telling it’s every pastor’s own child, that said child asked who “Andy” was… you know… “Andy walked with me.” Kind of like the joke about God’s name being Howard…. so old it has hair on it, and not attributable at this point.

(Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name….”)

Also, the tune to that hymn is particularly catchy.

I’m reminded of that hymn this evening because it starts out “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses…” It’s not early morning, but the room has that kind of vibe- sitting in the quiet, talking to an old friend. It’s kind of neat that my old friend is you…. but also me…. but also you. I could go on, and I’m surprised I didn’t. Sometimes, you have to play against type.

I am sitting out here in my office hopping mad because I fell and hurt myself badly while I was walking Jack. It’s not as bad as Zac’s bike accident, but I hit the heel of my hand so hard on the pavement that there’s still pebble indentations hours later and I’m in pain despite Tylenol and aspirin. However, it has taken the edge off. No need to go to the doctor to get something more substantial. I’ll live.

But it’s something I need to keep an eye on, because I also managed to bang up my knee pretty good. It’s not funny when I fall in this neighborhood because it’s uneven and gravelly with no sidewalks except in a few places. I was listening to a podcast while I was walking Jack, and I should know that I can’t pay attention to both Rachel Maddow and anything else.

Beautiful women always hurt me. That’s because when I think they’re beautiful, I trip over things.

There are stories out there. Most of which I’ve told. I love self-deprecating humor. I even love it when people tease me, as long as it’s not too mean. However, I have a pretty thick skin, so I pretty much have to let other people tell me their boundaries. The neurodivergent sense of humor is dark, as is the physically and mentally disabled. Plus, I’ve been a line cook. If I have not offended you yet, you haven’t been here long enough.

Or, you don’t know me personally and can’t actually be paid to care about my problems, you just like surfing. That’s even better. It’s hard to feel deeply about people you don’t know, and I don’t mean the way we fight on the internet. I mean that it’s very hard to get other people to genuinely care about your life because they have their own. That’s appropriate. But what people can handle is a slice of my life. Watching me entertain myself by entertaining you. Or, some of it’s entertaining. Mostly it’s cathartic. I can be funnier when I feel lighter, and I feel lighter than I have in a long time.

I sent Supergrover a note that said she really needed to let me know whether she was focusing on moving on with her life or whether she wanted to fix our relationship. That she said it was clear I didn’t want a relationship, and I said that it wasn’t true. That I’d given her my heart 11 years ago, and I don’t remember asking for it back.

She hasn’t responded, and if she doesn’t, all er e-mail will eventually go to Spam again. It’s not because I don’t want to work on a relationship. It’s that I don’t want to work on a relationship in which both of us are unhappy enough to explode after a week. She’s punishing me with some sort of silent treatment, because people are only as busy as they want to be. I feel like if I cannot have closure from her, I have to get it on my own. I can’t keep looking back across the river to make sure she’s okay, too.

She is not okay, and neither am I. I’m not blaming. We both come by our poor reactions honestly. It’s just at some point I cannot take these ups and downs of “don’t talk to me anymore” and “it’s unfair to compare me to Daniel.” That one actually did go to Spam, so I didn’t realize that she didn’t really want to have a conversation. She wanted to berate me for what I said. I felt like an idiot because she sent an e-mail to a different e-mail address asking if I’d gotten her e-mails, because she’d sent some a while back. I said that I hadn’t been looking for e-mail from her, but that I was so excited to hear from her………..

Then crushed when she forwarded me everything she said and it was a shitstorm.

I got mad about it and we worked it through. We were doing okay. And we both went right back into “I can’t do anything right for you.” Because that’s the game, right? If she doesn’t have any boundaries, then she can pick anything she wants as a boundary after the fact. I can be wrong a hundred times out of a hundred.

I cannot keep a rhythm, much less dance a quickstep.

I feel like I am laying out my boundaries the way I know how, but what I don’t know is how they play to a neurotypical audience. I know she heard “everything is over, go away” when I meant “I’ve seen everything you don’t want to talk about and I can’t find anything you do. Tell me when you figure it out.” She was on me like white on rice, saying that I was the judge and jury. She had no intention of really working on anything. It was an escape hatch. It’s like everything I’ve been saying for 11 years registered with her in a whole new way, and she’s not sure that she likes it. She’s not even sure that she likes me. But of course, I can only say that is my impression of her. I cannot remember the last time she gave me any affection at all.

Yes, I can. It was last September.

It was a heart emoji in response to a sentimental message she left me and I took a screenshot. It was very, very old. But I still keep it in my digital memory box because it came from her.

I remember saying that she reminds me of new life, new hope- the color green in my assessment of what would go on a soundtrack to fit her…. even though sometimes she reminds me more of Morton Gould’s “Jericho.” It’s as warm and dissonant as our relationship.

I keep saying that it’s no skin off my nose to keep waiting, and it’s more anxiety driving me to write than anything else. It’s not as if her writing back will make a difference. Even if she says “you’ll never hear from me again,” she cannot possibly mean it. I want to feel settled, and there’s nothing anyone can give me but time. Yet, as time goes by, it gets harder to maintain the cognitive dissonance. It’s clear she doesn’t want what I want, because nothing in her list of things to talk about included any direction I wanted to go with her, because if she doesn’t want to talk about her childhood and healing, then it’s going to be a whole lot more of me telling her what I’ve learned while she’s sitting there bored because it’s not what you want to talk about and overwhelming because I talk so much.

There’s an answer to this problem, and right now it’s waiting for the moon. She will arrive at the moment I need her most.

That’s Not Healthy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 23 Comments

Write about your first crush.

My first crush was a 23 year old woman who lovebombed and discarded me for the next 20-odd years. I still think about her from time to time, and it’s never pleasant. I would rather not spend this morning diving into that wreck. I feel like I did all of that when it happened. If you’re interested, you can search for “When We Were Young” and “The Cost of Shame” to learn how the dirty and the divine intermingled. There were genuine moments, but it was always a game. I know, because I always felt the energy in the room when I had “competition.” I would try to adjust my behavior because I thought it was something I was doing wrong that made her want competition for me in the first place. I’d known her longer than any of the people in her current life, twice as long as her spouse. Doing the wrong thing was too easy, so when I started doing my own thing and she couldn’t control me, she resented the hell out of that, too.

I absolutely vomited up all my emotions about that relationship about 10 years ago, and I feel like I have gotten closure over it- including the ways she set Supergrover and me up for failure like a parting shot that would make her name endure forever. I failed Supergrover because she failed me. Full stop. Supergrover got caught in old crossfire, and now that I’ve separated her out, the memory of it is too painful to be vulnerable all the time for either of us. The thing that I have over her in offering her understanding of me is letting her read all the thoughts I have when I’m not with her. She wouldn’t be able to do that if I wasn’t a writer- a benefit of who I am, not who I am trying to be for her.

I don’t need her to lay out her feelings publicly. I need her to lay out her feelings to me. Because to me, it redeems a whole lot of bullshit in my life, that this thing I learned from an emotional abuser was something that could be overcome with time and space. That has proven to be true, but not in terms of her communication of it. She wants to continue writing to me, she wants to continue supporting me. And yet any time we try to continue writing to each other and supporting each other, we hit an old land mine from either one of our pasts and it blows our future to hell.

Then, eventually, we start over and the cycle begins anew. I have learned to accept that, because I’m a writer. There’s no way that she can’t be in touch with me while I’m writing about her. It’s just tricky because of the emotions that come up in me when she writes. When she’s only responding to my blog, it makes me feel like she just wants to be a fan that’s glorified. When she responds to what I say in private, she reinforces that we are not putting on a show, that this is a real friendship that I am writing about and not trying to paint her from memory.

When she isn’t the Supergrover from Wish.com. Jim Henson made her for me personally. It was a gift he didn’t knew he gave me.

In terms of boundaries, it is cute to me that now she’s just lovable furry old Grover struggling with the implications of “near” and “far.” On its most basic level, of course. Everything I’ve ever known on its most fundamental level has come from a Muppet.

In terms of Sesame Street, my news junkie nature makes me feel like Kermit, because he’s empathetic and yet also reports live on Sesame Street news. In terms of being a preacher’s kid, I think of myself as Scooter, the one behind the scenes helping things work. As a preacher’s kid, you take on all the jobs at the last minute that no one else wanted and the show must go on.

I cannot stress this enough, and I believe it. Worship is not about perfection. It’s that we showed up.

But there’s still that energy that runs before a performance in hoping that everything goes as well as it can. That people are still receiving the grace and thoughtful prayers we mean for them despite our human imperfections. When I do a pastoral prayer (the one before a preacher gives an actual homily/sermon), I speak to this. “Speak through me, or move me out of the way and speak your truth in spite of me.” In short, if I don’t make the connections that I need to make to get them closer to the divine, that doesn’t mean the divine won’t move them in ways I won’t see until people greet me after the service………………….

Which ranges in feedback (I swear it) from “your skirt was too short” to “my God, you were on fire. I was crying because you made a connection I didn’t.” What I do not say is that I see all of it in real time as I am talking (even if you try to hide in the transcepts, choir and peanut gallery…….), and need no external validation. It’s just so nice to hear it out loud. That I did indeed make the difference I thought I did. That they weren’t crying because the regular preacher wasn’t up there. 😉

My favorite thing is going to sing with the choir after I’ve finished preaching. As worship leader, I always stay up front until the sermon is over, and then move between the choir and the pulpit for singing and leading rather than being on the front row all by myself. Singing with the choir after I preach is how I know I did well, because I don’t need to hear anything out loud but the vibrations of their emotions when they’re singing. If everything is joyful, they’re telling me “thank you.”

And I can hear it through their smiles while they’re singing in a minor key. I don’t intentionally design the service this way. The entrance is supposed to be glorious, whether it comes with a brass quintet or not. The hymn in response to the sermon is supposed to be repeating what I said in musical form, because people will remember the take home point of my sermon if I present it to them as a tune next.

Then, the hymn at the end is when everyone goes wild, filling up with energy until we meet again. I like it best when it’s a jazz arrangement of “Joyful, Joyful” or “I’ll Fly Away.”

In both of those things, I learned to accept them from my first crush. One of the few genuine moments I’ll carry with me throughout my preaching life, because she taught me how to integrate music into worship when my mother decided raising a gay child was harder than she thought it was going to be.

It does not escape my attention that when she became a preacher’s wife, she really, really became the friend I needed if she’d actually acted like it. I needed a preacher’s wife type until I had my own partner- someone to direct me and be a sounding board. It’s why I think her partner is my archetype, the older version of me. I have no idea what we would have accomplished together, but I can for damn sure guarantee that it would have been fun.

But that would have been dependent on me staying blind, and not realizing that the relationship was making me smaller every day as I tiptoed around her land mines, actively trying not to piss her off.

It’s one reason I won’t tolerate it from Supergrover, but I will tolerate her as emotional support that acts like it. She knows how to do it because she’s done it so long. There just need to be changes so we don’t step all over each other’s pasts trying to find a road into the future.

But because my first crush gave me so much emotional bandwidth to be able to wait it out, it’s no skin off my nose just to relax and see if it happens. I already have everything I need, and there’s no need to feel unhappy overall when I’m only unhappy in one area of my life. I miss her, and I cannot miss her because missing her only feeds the problem of giving her what she does not want, which is to be written about.

The difference between my first crush and my last is that the last is worth it. The first was just doing prep in the back of the kitchen.

Happy Birthday, Carolyn & Dana

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

Like Mossad.

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

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

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

Again, edutainment through chat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirituality and Carol, My Personal Digital Assistant

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here is the string I gave Carol:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol Just Won’t Shut Up

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve already answered today’s writing prompt, so again, I had to turn to Carol (shorthand for ChatGPT). Here is the string I asked it, important so that if you’re a blogger, you can see how I did what I did:

Read https://theantileslie.com and ask me 20 personal questions based on what you’ve read.

Certainly! I’ve explored your blog “theantileslie.com” and here are 20 personal questions based on what I found:

  1. In your post titled “Untitled Entry,” you mentioned being a blogger. What draws you to blogging, and why do you prefer this medium?
    • What draws me to blogging and why I prefer the medium are two different things, but they both feed into the same goal. I am attracted to blogging because my personality is built to lead by laying out my own vulnerabilities first, never having top-down kinds of power. I do it through writing because I am good at letting ideas flow through me, then picking the wheat from the chaff. Being a blogger is very much like being a verbal digital photographer. You take a thousand shots, you keep five. Out of all my entries, I can honestly say I like a handful. Praise that I’ve gotten comes from other people, but not in terms of valuing my worth. In terms of seeing which of my personal ideas read universal and which don’t. I prefer the medium because I take in information through sight, which means that anything I read is going to stick with me longer than if I heard it. I feel that I regurgitate information best in the same way I took it in, ergo the manic rambling spiral you see here.
  2. When you decided that DC was your home and left Texas behind, what emotions did you experience during that transition?
    • The thing about getting a writing prompt from Copilot is that it’s objective. It doesn’t care whether it hurts your feelings with a question or not. Even reading the question, I curled up into a ball. That was not a good time in my life at all. I was going through a divorce with my wife in addition to a friend divorcing me and getting back together weekly…….. the friend didn’t understand me that well, either. Leaving Dana was cathartic in that I was finally able to see our pattern for what it was- a great one that had become toxic over time because we stopped paying attention to it. It got too hard, and certainly problems go away if you ignore them, right? I also realized in retrospect that though the relationship with the friend was rockier, it was the one that was worth my energy. If Supergrover had not lived in DC, we would not live in the same city. Period. I came back here because I fell in love with it when I was eight, lived here in my 20s, and think of it as Portland, Oregon without the shitty weather. There was a period of time when Supergrover made my move all about her, and it put me on the ground. We are still recovering, but remember that scar tissue is stronger.
  3. Describe your ideal week. How do you balance time between close friends, family, and your writing?
    • I already have my ideal way of writing, and it wouldn’t change no matter what I did for money. That’s because I write before everyone wakes up so I can see the sunrise in my office (when Supergrover e-mails me between 0300-0600, sometimes I’m already up. I have never needed much sleep, even as a child. So, I knock myself out with sleeping pills between 8-9 PM, because it takes about an hour to kick in. That way, even if I only sleep five hours, I’ve gone as deep as I can possibly go in that amount of time. I use melatonin to fall asleep and Benedryl to stay asleep. People don’t think of them as two separate problems, but they are. Oh, and the reason I try to be in my office by dawn is that there is a distinct separation between my work and home life now. I used to write in bed, without really waking up. I am still not really awake, but I’m at least sitting up. 😛 The last truly important thing to know is that I view WordPress’s web site as easier to use than the JetPack app. I love working in Microsoft Edge because I can edit an entry and access Copilot with one button….. but again, I am not using ChatGPT to create art. I am using ChatGPT to help me create art.
  4. In your writing, you often explore emotions and relationships. What inspires you to delve into these topics?
    • In writing, the axiom is “write what you know.” I know myself and the way I interact with others. I am also not telling you a story with a beginning, middle, and end because people weave in and out of my life for all different reasons. I also don’t feel like I have to live in fear of expressing my opinion, because no one’s is more important than mine as long as I remember that no one else’s is less important than mine, either. If I expect to be able to show up as my full self, you should expect to get that from me as well. It’s not about trying to make each other fit in another’s mold, but trying to be giants together with room for all our fallibility.
  5. Can you share a memorable moment from your journey as a blogger?
    • Several, some of them long ago, some of them relatively recent:
      • When I was first getting started, a blogger no one has ever heard of named Wil Wheaton read a piece I wrote about singing- that hitting high notes felt like flying over the mountains. He responded that it was how he felt after he nailed an acting audition. Later, when I went to Powell’s to get my copy of “Just a Geek” signed, I told him who I was. At the time, my blog was called “Clever Title Goes Here.” So, I say I’m “Leslie from Clever Title” and he hands my book back with “Dear Leslie, Clever Inscription Goes Here. Love, Wil.” I don’t remember what happened to that book, but if there is any justice in the universe, Dana has it because she’s a bigger Star Trek fan than me. I don’t know Wil through anything but his writing. She’s watched his every episode of TNG. In my head, Wil is my fan and she is his.
      • I had been following Tony and Jonna Mendez since 2008, when “Argo” came out. I love action movies, but there was more to it for me. Tony was a real person? I should totally read about this real person. I fell in love with his books and later learned that Jonna was an author as well (they’ve collaborated on several, and Jonna’s first solo work, “In True Face,” just dropped). So, I didn’t get to meet Tony because he’d stopped doing public appearances, then died in 2019, which would have cut off meeting Tony even if I was a mutual friend and not just a drooling fangirl. So, with all of this in mind, I poured my heart and soul into “The Spy in the Room,” which was a recording of my experience watching Jonna promote a book all by herself that was never meant to be a solo work. I watched as she turned into me, essentially. The same way that Supergrover lives in me, Tony lives in her. She doesn’t have to have new memories with him. His uploaded consciousness is with her every day of her life. How this affects my blog is that this wonderful writer thought I was perceptive and did a great job on the piece. You don’t forget praise like that.
  6. How do you handle the ups and downs of life, especially when it comes to maintaining your writing routine?
    • I am able to handle the ups and downs of life because of my writing routine. I start with my writing, which is basically a personal meditation, before I do anything else. I am grounded before I leave my house. The TL;DR version of staying grounded is this phrase….. “God to head, head to feet, feet to floor.” I am not waiting on energy. “I’m conducting it all while I sleep, to light this whole town.” -Barenaked Ladies
  7. What role does vulnerability play in your writing process?
    • It is often just a byproduct, because I’m writing my internal monologue. I do not see what others are going to find shocking about that, and I am able to go deeper and cover more ground because of it. If I stopped to think about just how much I’ve told people about me, I would never publish anything again. You already know too much. 😉 However, by disconnecting from what other people think and just laying it out there, you learn two things. The first is that people are never going to react to what you thought would irritate them, there’s going to be a whole new set of irritations you didn’t see coming. The second is that no matter what they think, I am not responsible for representing my own thoughts and also their misinterpretation of them.
  8. Have you ever written about Supergrover? If so, what aspects of this character resonate with you?
    • The joke answer is that I’d have to comb through my entries, because that name doesn’t seem familiar……………….. #eyeroll In terms of how she resonates with me, that is a good word to describe us. We’ve never met in person, but we’ve been friends a month shy of 11 years. Everything about our relationship is energy and its resonance. The only thing more interesting to me than my stories about her are her stories about me, no matter how good or how bad. It’s not that her emotions are right or wrong, it’s that I only get wigged about our relationship when she shuts down so that I have no real feel for how we’re doing- the other impossible thing to do by e-mail only. Perhaps when this is all over, she’ll let me take her out for ice cream, but I’m not holding my breath. I am taking each day as it comes.
  9. How do you cope with emotional challenges, and how does writing help you process them?
    • I do not cope well with emotional challenges in person, because my sensory issues are naturally turned up more due to my environment than when I am writing, because my office is a sensory deprivation chamber. The only thing I listen to when I’m in here is the ceiling fan. If it’s too cold, I wrap up, because I like the white noise. To me, it is better than listening to a fan through my headphones….. which I do when I’m out in the world, like writing on the train. I cope extremely well with introspection and conflict when I have the time and the space to stretch out. Having a blog feels like a virtual reality headset in which I am speaking to millions and millions of people. When that is my 10,.000 foot view, trying to craft a narrative that will speak to that many different people at once, it forces me to look at every aspect of why something is happening, including the fact that the problem is often me. If you like Taylor Swift and you are a reader, you’ll identify with this blog a lot. Even our tones are similar- one of her most popular songs is “Antihero.” I swear to Christ your life will not make sense until you can sum up every problem as quickly and neatly as Taylor did by saying, “I’m the problem. It’s me.” The reason you are emotionally failing at life most of the time is that you aren’t empathetic or compassionate enough to see your own role in a problem. I do that every single morning, so I can watch the sun come up in my office. As a result, people are often unprepared for conversations with me, because my blogging rarely allows me to show up with my feelings about things undecided. The art of creative writing has made me invincible, because it is not my job to handle your emotional challenges….. unless I’m halfway responsible for them. Realizing that I am halfway responsible is what makes me invincible. I don’t have to stand firm for a hundred percent. I have to stand firm for a hundred percent of my half. I cannot successfully have relationships unless I allow the other person to own a hundred percent of their own story as well.
  10. What impact has your mother’s death had on your perspective and your writing?
    • “Childhood is the credit balance of a writer.” -David Cornwell If I take my relationship with my mother as her daughter out of it, and am only thinking of her as a person in my writing life who died, I am so relieved. It allows me to say so much more and understand so much more without the thought of hurting her. The most clarity comes from being able to say the quiet parts out loud. Being able to get this angry at the way she was a terrible parent allows me to grieve and move on, making more ways for the room in which she was a perfect one. My challenge when my mother was still alive is not dissimilar from my problems with Supergrover. Because of her low self-esteem, she would have taken everything away that was bad and thrown away everything that was good. Not having to wrestle with myself over how my mother would feel if I published something has taken a weight off me that I didn’t know was there until it happened. It has changed my relationship with my blog to an enormous degree, particularly because Supergrover is the human I love most in the world, and she was a real asshole about it….. not in the moment. In the moment, she was wonderful. Over time, it was not great. I think she’d cop to that. I never told my mother the details of my relationship with Supergrover. She only knew what she read here and my body language. Therefore, she thought Supergrover was bad for me because my personality flipped when we were mad at each other. When things were dark between Supergrover and me, I’m sure I was a delish and a delight to be around………………………. my eyes are now rolling out of my head. My mother’s reactions mean something to me, even more in retrospect because she noticed something that Dana did as well. The only person who didn’t was Supergrover, because she wouldn’t meet me in person. It’s not that we couldn’t have made it happen. We just didn’t, and it cost us dearly. What makes our relationship irresistible is that I do communicate so well in writing that sharing physical space doesn’t matter. She has a job where physical space can’t matter, because it’s too much of a commitment. In effect, less is more. I get to be with her wherever she is in the world because my love doesn’t depend on her being with me in a restaurant. It would just be nice…. adding to the color commentary and not a solid requirement. I choose to believe that this is happily ever after no matter what it looks like, even if I never got any further communication at all. I stood up for myself and broke the toxic cycle between us. I stood my ground, and I won. I got the girl in the end. Everything else is just icing. I wish that my mother could see us now, and know that our relationship is funny and full of love and how over the moon I am, because we’ve created something lasting instead of each of us walking into a wall of bullshit every time we talk to each other. I know that Supergrover reads me wherever she is in the world because of web stats (I thought the flags would give it away). Because we are capable of both standing our ground and being authentically us again, I would follow her into the ocean no questions asked. That’s because she met me where I am, and accepted my terms. She could send me a diamond ring and it wouldn’t mean as much as this emotional concept. I never gave up loving her. I gave up trying to communicate. If you love someone, let them go. If they come back, you know it’s right. Those words seemed trite to me until this conflict. Now, I’m the most grateful for those words than I’ve ever been.
  11. Do you find solace or catharsis in writing about grief and loss?
    • Yes, but only in retrospect. It doesn’t feel good when I am shaking through those kinds of moments, but it brings me great comfort when I go back and read things like “The Visitation.” It’s so important to me that I’ll make an exception and link to something. That piece is so real and so raw that it still creates a visceral reaction in me when I read, and I have more empathy for the author because I see myself as a different person now than I was then.
  12. How do you balance authenticity with privacy when sharing personal experiences online?
    • Because I’m a writer, I can pull from millions of pieces of other media and explain what is going on through metaphors, essentially being able to talk about my life by quoting other people. I try to be as non-specific as possible. My story is my story. Your story on this blog is only your story with me, not your story with others. If your story is with me, we will have conversations about it. When you stop having conversations with me about it, problems arise because I won’t give people editorial control over me. You let me know your boundaries, or you don’t and regret it. Because you’ve stopped telling me your boundaries, you can get angry at me all you want, but it’s not going to help. You chose to walk away without telling me what I needed to keep tight and what I didn’t.
  13. What advice would you give to aspiring bloggers who want to write about their own life experiences?
    • You will never be any good at it, but you might get a lot of hits by being a gossip columnist. Good blogs are built on your emotions, and people can tell whether your writing has them or not. People can tell the difference between passionate writing and canned responses to life, like “live, laugh, love.” The problem, and this is where most people fail, is that in order to make others feel your emotions you have to know what yours are. Very, very few people are willing to spelunk into their own minds. It’s so much easier to talk about lighter things. Meanwhile, the more oddly specific I get, the more each individual person feels connected, because they’re not all connecting to my writing on the same points. People are also aching for truth. Truth does not come from you telling it. It comes from the emotions that come up in people when they read, applying what happened to me to what happened to them. I have to use a lot of metaphors with my writing about Supergrover because what happened between us is oddly specific and not universal. That’s the hardest balance in terms of privacy, the part I don’t share with the class. I just have to hope that as readers, you’ll respect that some things are above your pay grade, but not because I hate you and I’m trying to hold out on you. It’s that not everything is below my pay grade, either. I would tell you if I could, but I can’t. Therefore, I won’t. To do so would be to show Supergrover that this really was a game all these years, and I was out to get her. Have that balance in your own life as well. Only own your story, and be careful about irritating other people’s boundaries on what can be said and what cannot. If you know there’s a boundary, you’re a hack of a writer if you can’t think of a way to explain your feelings without crossing it. I am serious as a heart attack. You are an absolute monster if you constantly defy your friends’ boundaries for more content, and too many people are guilty of it in pictures and video (which started, unfortunately, with “mommy-blogging”). I am trying to avoid that trap of creating unlicensed videos in people’s heads. I can pull from a million different illustrations at the drop of a hat. There is no need to go after something that they’re not willing to give. I will say, though, that the show that most accurately represents our relationship is “Carmen Sandiego,” and not because her job has anything to do with hers. It’s that not meeting in person makes me feel like “Player,” her virtual sidekick….. especially when she told me where to guess where she was and I used reverse image search on Google instead of just enlarging it to look for flags. To be fair, it was a 136K file, and I couldn’t stretch it that much without it blurring to hell, anyway.
  14. How do you handle writer’s block or creative slumps?
    • I deal with both things the same way. I pretend they don’t exist. I have proven this by committing to write every day and publish it no matter whether it’s compared to Shakespeare or the dumbest shit imaginable. The reason why is that if I wait for creative ideas or the desire to write, I will put it off in favor of other things. I change my mood from the inside out. Recently, I’ve experienced a ton of growth as a writer by using Copilot to read my blog and ask me probing questions, in effect, making me examine what I think. “I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.” -George W. Bush (“Shrub” if you’re Texan)
  15. What motivates you to keep blogging consistently?
    • Internally, I understand so much more about my thought process because I have laid it out in front of me so that I can look at it. My memories do not change over time, but my perspective does. Reading my own words forces me to realize when I’m being unfair in a conflict because I am departing from the story I told myself. It changes the way I walk in the world. Externally, I get a lot of praise and validation just for being myself…… which feels much, much better than being praised for everything I’m not and never will be. I don’t treasure adoring fans. I treasure people who tell me that their lives were absolute hell and they didn’t know why, but reading me helped them to see something in their own behavior that they didn’t see before. The same is true for me, so why should I expect other readers to react differently? The other (humorous) reason I blog so consistently is that I have had it drilled into my head that a web site cannot go more than 24 hours without changing content to be effective. So, I’ll read my latest blog entry, and the next time I come to the site, I think, “she hasn’t even updated since the last time I came. This blogger sucks.” I can’t remember who said it, but thinking that working for yourself as a way to get away from a terrible boss is not the flex you think it is. Holy shit, I am such a bitch to me sometimes. I better get me something nice on Boss’s Day…………… shiiiiiiiiiiat.
  16. Are there specific themes or recurring motifs in your writing that you intentionally explore?
    • Of course, but they all happen organically because people tend to repeat behaviors over and over without realizing it. I am capable of enormous emotional change because I can call myself out on repeating behaviors in a way other people can’t. That’s because most people don’t have detailed accounts of what happened years after the fact…. or if they do, it is not accurate. It is squished in with a hundred other memories that may or may not have bearing.
  17. How has your writing evolved over time, and what lessons have you learned along the way?
    • I think that my writing has evolved because emotionally, I have gotten stronger. Meeting Supergrover was the catalyst for all of it, because the more we dived into each other in writing, the tone between us reflected itself here. In a lot of ways, at times I am saying my words with her tone. I have picked up her writing voice, and now it’s inextricably interrelated with mine. If I go back to my original entries, I am waffling around trying to find out why I’ve been a victim of trauma, and now I sound relaxed and settled into myself. Feeling relaxed and settled comes from her teaching me how to establish emotional boundaries. We just weren’t happy until I used the lessons she gave me on her. It has been a marvelous journey of author and muse, one I hope will continue for years to come as you see the lighter side of us and not the “hell is other people” aspect we’ve taken on at times.
  18. What impact do reader comments and interactions have on your writing process?
    • If they’re thoughtful, they stick with me. My readers are often better writers than I am. I am also endlessly fascinated with what emotions come up for people when they read me, but I don’t want to pry. I am only responsible for my half of the relationship.
  19. If you could collaborate with any other blogger or writer, who would it be and why?
    • Jenny Lawson
      • She started her blog long after I did, so my answer would have been Heather “Dooce” Armstrong, because we could have had some great talks about the old days (roughly a quarter century now). However, I feel like we already collaborate spiritually and I think Heather being dead limits her ability to communicate in actual words. Jenny is a great choice because she can hold up her end of the conversation.
      • Jenny is also a Texan.
      • Jenny has a big metal rooster named Beyonce, and though I’ve never met Beyonce, we did attend the same high school in Houston….. not at the same time. Mutual friends and all that. Seriously? Who gets to say that?
      • Jenny and I are so much alike that it’s scary. I have slowly come to realize it’s like we share a brain. My energy is just not light enough to be as consistently funny as she is. So. Lesson learned. If you want to be a successful blogger, throw in more jokes.
  20. Lastly, what legacy do you hope to leave through your blog and your writing?
    • Just that I lived, and these are my experiences. They will not mean much until after I’m dead, but that’s not because I have a death wish. It’s that when I’m alive, people can just come over. If there’s anything I’ve learned about my web site through my mother’s death, it’s two things:
      • Take the picture whether you look like crap or not. The memory is the issue, not your clothing. You will also want pictures in your vault. The same is true of my photography. Just because it’s not a perfect shot doesn’t mean it’s a bad picture.
      • When you are dead, people will still want to spend time with you. Give them a place to go.

A Celebration of Sorts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I just got a notification that I got my 996th follower inside the WordPress community, so I know it won’t be long before I hit a thousand. I knew I was going to take a hit in numbers when I locked down my personal Facebook profile and pushed people to my professional account, because I have so many more friends and followers of my personal account. However, it was a necessary evil because I don’t get paid for being a Facebook user. I get paid for being a Facebook creator. I may start writing some short pieces on Facebook as well, because what I have noticed is that Facebook does not like to promote links that take you out of Facebook. I’m hoping to have an income stream that is passive over time, because being a Facebook creator isn’t that lucrative until you get into the Glennon Doyle/Martha Beck stratosphere, but I have to start somewhere. Glennon and Martha didn’t become Glennon and Martha overnight, either.

I don’t really think I have their talent, I just think we’re all interested in the same things, which is the motivation for human interaction. Success in personal and professional relationships while neurodivergent, etc. Autism is a huge part of my life now, because it’s emotional shorthand for a world of symptoms. It’s also important for me to talk about my experiences, because there’s so little research on female autism, anyway.

Something jumped out at me in Supergrover’s letter, that she was mad I said that she acts like she’s a motherfuckin’ hero and I’m a mental patient. She went to the place of literal hero, like cape and tights Supergrover! ensemble. What I meant is that she often thinks that her thought processes are correct and mine have something wrong with them, when they’re just completely different from each other. Again, Mandarin on my side, English on hers. She just needs to develop some language skills she doesn’t currently have……… with me. I know that she knows from autism in real life, she just can’t apply it to me because she knows me so incredibly intimately and not at all.

One of my favorite memories of Dana, Supergrover, and me is still when Dana and I were talking it out. That I knew I was falling for Supergrover, and it could never be. So please just be patient with me. Dana was so incredibly sweet and kind. She said, when it comes to her, I am not threatened. I think I have more than proved my worth. God, she so did. Every day. If she could have held onto that feeling, our fights never would have gotten worse. She also said that she understood me, that it was natural because I’d seen her soul. She knew how it felt. She was married when she started crushing out on me. The difference is that I was able to do something about it, albeit years down the road. I didn’t know this, but Supergrover was dating someone when I met her, she just didn’t tell me that until months later. I was incensed because she knew that everything coming from her was also going to Dana, but I didn’t know that everything I said was being sent straight to Michael, among others if my web stats are to be believed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it did the least bit of good.

Dana was angry when she said it, but she knows me better than anyone else. She said, “you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to prove that you’re a good friend, and she’s always going to see you as a mental patient.” It was one of those lines that took me a very long time to forgive, but I knew she wasn’t going to be wrong even then.

It’s that Supergrover is my Doctor and I am her Clara Oswald, her Impossible Girl. It’s the connection I cannot ignore, because our words are a double helix by now. She is also equal parts Malcolm Tucker and The Doctor. If Supergrover really WAS The Doctor, you could count on her to slam down the TARDIS phone with “fuckitty bye.” 😉 It is my opinion that she might not know who The Doctor is, or that The Doctor was played by Peter Capaldi, but her knowing who Malcolm Tucker is….. probably a sure bet she’s in the loop. I never gave up because it was a connection I couldn’t ignore. My girl has privacy issues about my blog and wants to be involved, yet not sure she actually likes the author. Or, it feels that way to me. I’m not a judgmental dickhead, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even really kick her out of my life. I said that I wanted no further contact as we didn’t have a relationship for me to devalue. Prove to me that we have one, and I’ll play ball. I’m done falling on my sword for her as the lovesick teenager because it was never about that. It was a fantasy created to cover up reality. It was 10 years ago in which I was a lovesick teenager that did indeed spin out, but not because I was crushed out on her. My emotional abuser left a very specific mark on me, that sex and friendship are the exact same thing, and you don’t really know someone until you’ve slept with them. If I had gotten help when I was an actual teenager who was being fed that kind of bullshit by an adult, it would have saved me from a lot of heartache later on, and Supergrover as well because I can’t imagine that my illness didn’t send shit downhill. But I was never sick because of her. I was sick because of my emotional abuser. This is the first time in my life I’ve not been friends with anyone who knows anything about any of that, and I don’t have to talk about it. I am finally free. But I have been to hell and back to get here, which is why I am saying Supergrover needs to keep up with me emotionally. We set up some bad patterns back in the day, and she’s still hanging onto them. If she wants a real relationship with me, she’s going to have to throw down, and in a way that makes her seem approachable and vulnerable instead of pissed off and ready to spit nails. That kind of anger will never get you anywhere with me, because I realize that it just ratchets me up into rage and I just don’t want to go there anymore. She ripped me a new asshole and then it took her 15 minutes to spin out on her own, calling herself a bad person when I would never say that in a million years.

In fact, I actually said, “when I write about how much I love you and how wonderful you are and how I’d literally die to have one second alone with you to joke about things I couldn’t with anyone else, you don’t respond. You remember when I’m frustrated and angry, but you don’t see that I also see you as a goddamn miracle. If there is a God, they smiled when they put us together.” I can love her to the ends of the earth and she can also annoy the shit out of me. It’s about balance. It’s just that her response is “take care of yourself.” She feels deeper than that, but it would kill her to let me know. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t hang on my words the way she does, because she proved it. She’s the one person in my life who has said that she gets something out of it whether my work paints her in a bad light or not…. that I always have something worthy to say whether she agrees with it. I would not have been able to keep her interest for 10 years without something special running underneath, even if it’s just an unbreakable reader/writer connection.

I also know that she used to tell me she loved me. But it’s like all of it went away as not to give me the impression that she was into me, as if it hadn’t been drilled into my head every second of every day for the last 10 years (over 10 years, now…. coming up on 11 in the summer). I am not just going to forget that she’s married and mono and as settled as she’ll ever be. You’re never in the friend zone if you value having women as friends. At least that’s what they tell me. That’s what I’ve been working towards. Not a great love story, but yes. A great love story. Oprah and Gayle….. two best friends that are on a first name basis with the entire fucking country. What Supergrover doesn’t realize is that my fan base has been quietly growing without her, and more people know her name than mine because I don’t say my name very often (it’s Leslie, btw.). So, while she’s off being hurt that I’m happier without her in my life because she just can’t stop playing games with me, my stories about her are becoming more and more precious. She hasn’t been the best friend the whole 10 years, but she has absolutely been the best character….. a Siren.

Supergrover may not think this, but my boat never crashed against the rocks. I dragged her into it. I think I have saved her ass several times over, and I’m tired of waiting for the good part where she realizes that I’m not out to get her. As she said to me, “it seems like you’ve only taken away the bad.” That is objectively not true. Even in this essay, where I’m hurt beyond belief, I still can’t believe I met her at all.

People have problems, full stop. It’s how you handle them that matters.

I took a shower.

I got dressed.

I did my laundry.

I did my shopping.

Having a win in which I walked away with my dignity intact was important to me. Demand avoidance was not so strong today. I am making progress, however slowly.

It’s not huge, but it’s a celebration of sorts.

Too Many/Too Little

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What sacrifices have you made in life?

I will never have a relationship with anyone the way I have previously. I have too much information about myself not to completely change the way I interact with people, both in having words for “a list of what’s wrong with me and why,” and in listening to another person in a different way, knowing everything is in Mandarin on my side and English on theirs. We may have to go three or four rounds for both of us to get our stories straight, because in the beginning we each thought the other was saying something different. I do not have patience for those who do not also realize the same. That the translation layer is not just mine to own. Neurotypical is “standard,” not “correct.” Therefore, a neurodivergent brain does not mean that I am incapable of understanding. We are both struggling under the same communication issue. The problem is that neurotypical have an air of superiority about it, which leads to anxiety-filled neurodivergent overexplaining. Very, very few people in my life have realized I’m different, but not stupid. No one would ever say that, of course. They just don’t want to talk to me because it’s too hard. While they’re feeling sorry for themselves that I just won’t “get it together” and “not live up to my potential” as to what they need me to be, I am generally left alone. It’s a major reason why I blog. People love how my brain works unless they’re talking to me, because when I’m in front of them their air of superiority over being neurotypical takes over no matter how brilliant I seem from my writing. Neurotypicals infantilize you, full stop.

I’ll give you a for-instance. I don’t remember how it came up, but I said something like “I’m autistic and my special interest is intelligence,” or something like that. It was in context to the conversation, I just don’t remember what it was. The leader of the group was like, “aww, that’s so nice. Do you have lots of cool spy gadgets in your room?” I didn’t react to it, but the tone made me think she thought I was nine.

As for “do I have spy gadgets,” the answer is no. I have autographed hardbacks from spies that became writers after they left CIA. They don’t make “cool spy gadgets” for people like me unless I had Keith Melton money.

Keith Melton is the largest private collector of CIA and other intelligence agencies’ UNCLASS gadgets that sell at places like Sotheby’s. You’re not going to be paying six figures until trying to buy an Enigma machine or something similar. I also like really small houses, so if I did start collecting stuff like that, it would be on loan to the spy museum just like him. But if this is what his public collection looks like, I’d give an arm and a leg to see his private collection. I don’t think he’s going to part with everything precious long-term.

I would sacrifice holding all my “cool spy gadgets” at home.

I have sacrificed friends to the natural consequences of my blog. I have freedom of speech, not power over whether people are attracted towards me because of it. I did not sacrifice friends with whom I had problems, but friends with whom I had problems about this. If you care that I blog about my life, then you cannot be my friend. It is as simple as that. I have enough on my plate without worrying about how I’m going to be criticized in advance when I was never supposed to be responsible for your reaction in the first place. And if I write something you don’t like, you’re going to be a lot better off coming and talking to me about it, rather than talking behind my back. You’ll actually get results because we have resolved our conflict. Art imitates life. I am not going to make up the past to fit your narrative of my experience, but I am going to change as we do.

There is a difference between loving a writer and supporting them. Loving a writer means praising them when they do something you like. Supporting a writer means being willing to work things through by accepting my reactions as valid. That I don’t just sit here and make things up. If I said someone had a tangle with me, they did. But I am not looking at it like retribution, because I’m getting my feelings out whether they come back or not. They are not responsible for, nor do they have to like what I am writing. But if they’re offended, it’s up to them to change the channel, because I cannot change the authenticity I show here.

There are two reasons “your side” is not represented. The first is if someone is avoidant. I can craft beautiful sentences even when someone is angry because I’m so grateful that anger is a transitive state. It was easy for Supergrover and Daniel (and all the other friends I’ve lost) to be angry about what I wrote and over the moon about it in one breath. That’s because our stories didn’t match the ones we were telling ourselves. If you give me no information, I am writing about what I think to become settled over it. I never want to come across as catering to people who will not show me their feelings as well. I have had too many lopsided relationships that way, because they hold in their feelings and get annoyed while my love grows deeper because I’m being assured nothing is wrong. They want less contact, and I want more because they save up too much anger and bust my fairy tale without a thought.

Meanwhile, everything that they’re angry about is 100% their fault, because if they don’t tell me anything, I’m just going to write about me. One of the things that Supergrover said to me that kicked me in the stomach was, “as if everything I do has to do with you…..” It’s not that at all. It’s that this is a personal diary, and I’m not going to root through your head. I’m going to say what I think is going on- the story I’m telling myself. Supergrover would have liked it even less if I tried to guess what she meant.

It’s a group project I’ve carried on my back, because I didn’t know the real story. I take everything literally, so I didn’t start getting mad at Supergrover’s avoidance until it was too clear to me what she was doing and I couldn’t ignore it anymore, because my self esteem just kept getting lower and lower as she pegged me as the only person who ever had problems with her and I was the only person who ever criticized her. I think what she means is that she has a lot of people around her who will do what she says without asking any questions. I am not one of them. I speak truth to power and she doesn’t think I have that right, or at least she doesn’t anymore. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get her to see the things that are in her blind spot in hopes of helping her, anyway. It’s not because I’m obsessed with the idea that she’ll come back, but that her story is inextricably interrelated with mine. I have no doubt that I will have to think about her until I die because of my blog, not because I have this need to own her time.

She didn’t get anything she wanted because she didn’t ask for it, except when she said “please do not contact me again.” Then, a couple of months later, I accidentally texted her due to a glitch on my phone. I knew she’d go nuclear, and she did, because she didn’t believe for a moment that I hadn’t done it on purpose. She attributed suspicion and malice to everything, then read on my blog that my dad was having surgery. After the complete nightmare that was her going nuclear over a mistaken text, it was a surprise that she sent me a note that said “hope all goes well with your dad.” We started talking and two days later, my mother died. It was a whole new ball game.

It didn’t change anything for her. In one of her letters, she said she knew she was sounding like.a dickhead and she didn’t care. You’re not special. I lost someone who was LIKE a mother to me. Why do you get a special day in which I need to cater to you?

It was the year anniversary of my Mom’s death.

I want her to read that e-mail again and choke on it when she actually has to go through the process of losing her own actual mother, when she said that her mother’s death would bring her to her knees.

WELL, IT’S A GOOD THING I’M GOING THROUGH IT INSTEAD OF YOU.

But she is NOT going to be the villain in my story.

If she wants me to be the villain in hers, have at it. I’m not going to be around to hear it, because you’re not special, either. You just won’t know it until you have to deal with what I did. Have fun picking out her coffin.

So I sacrificed her.

My Necklace

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today?

I mentioned in another piece that I wear an ichthus necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint as the pattern inside the fish. I got it in 2016, which edges out my pants by, I think, a year or two. I’m wearing the sweat pants that Zac got me at the Pentagon, a soft dark green t-shirt, my Apple Watch, and two bracelets that match ones I bought for Zac. One is a rainbow friendship bracelet, and I am an idiot because I didn’t buy them for Bryn and Dave as well. If they’re reading this, I will rectify the situation when I can. 😉 I bought them on our double date to the Spy Museum and Irish pub. The other is a gift from Zac. I got him a set of bracelets made of nautical rope, and when he opened them, he put one on me. It’s maroon with black plastic hardware and looks great up against the rainbow. Meaningful, yet not old.

I would like to say that I’m wearing these pants because I’m pining for Zac and they make me feel closer to him. I would like to say that. However, they are the most comfortable pants in the universe, Zac or no Zac. They came from the Pentagon, ergo, the government cares that I am comfortable. 😉 One of my favorite things in life is when Zac says, “I’m a middle aged white man who works for the government. I’m here to help.” He is aware of how it sounds and plays it up for comedic effect.

The fact that my man knows how to use comedic effect is one of the reasons he’s my man. Zac is on the brain because we finally made plans for tonight, “plans” being relative because the “plan” is to sit on the couch and watch TV. There may be some excitement, though, because Zac is having his car serviced. He said we could Uber or he would pick me up on his motorcycle. I said it was okay to pick me up on the motorcycle if it was a sunny day. I decided that Lindsay wasn’t going to be the only one on a motorcycle before she died.

Please know that I know riding motorcycles is dangerous, and if something happens today, know that I went out doing exactly what I wanted to do…. live a little. It’s a calculated risk because I am not going to be operating the motorcycle, I will be riding with someone who is very experienced. Also, military men are too confident to be daredevils on the road most of the time. Anything they needed to prove, they’ve already done it.

Plus, my friend Donna Schuurman has gone on these long, involved rides all over the US and Australia and I thought, “if Donna can do that, you can trust Zac from the Metro to his house.” Pretty sure he’s driven that route a time or two.

I feel like I have a different view of death than I did before my mother died, and the way she died in particular. The reason she got sick and died in 30 minutes is that the problem was originally a broken foot. She developed an embolism in the foot. It came loose and traveled, which made her faint. It blew, and she was dead. Because of the speed, I know that the best surgeon in the world could have been right next to her when she started feeling faint and there still would have been a 95% chance she’d be dead, anyway. It’s a scalpel, not a magic wand.

It is very comforting to know about medicine in a time like this. To know the limits of what medicine can do and actually be able to say “it’s no one’s fault.” Maybe if she’d moved her leg more when her foot was broken, but that has to undo the last six or seven weeks of her life, not the day she got sick.

As a result, I have a very practical, pragmatic view of death. It could happen at any time and without fanfare, so just be as honest with people as you possibly can because you really don’t know that it’s going to be the last time you talk to someone. I’ll give you a for instance. My mom’s choir had a perfectly healthy director and organist one Sunday, and a dead one the next with absolutely no warning or fanfare. That is not an easy transition. Everyone was lost and confused, not just me.

It’s one of the reasons I have become so adamant about telling my stories and getting my voice out there. I want my friends and family to know about me, and I know they’ll treasure my blog when I die. It is not about leaving a legacy once I’m famous, but leaving a legacy at all. My grandfather wrote a five volume series on the Lanagan family, and they all eat it up. Therefore, I know that the joy of a book doesn’t come from how many people have read it. The joy of a book comes from writing it.

So whether I die today or 50 years from now, I’m just going to be blunt and lay it all out there. I don’t have blinders on anymore. Death is random, and I do not have to be afraid of it because it is so random. The universe is not out to get me. It is a numbers game. What it has given me is the strength to keep asking the big questions of myself, because the smaller ones don’t matter.

Blog is My Copilot

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I decided to do a short question and answer regarding the death of my mother. I couldn’t think of anything to do with one of the prompts, but I can combine all of them. This will probably make you laugh, cry, and get angry. My mother is dead. She will not know I said these things. Keep this in mind, that I am just a child reflecting on her parent’s entire life, and that little moments do not define a lifetime. There are times when she was wonderful to me and times that she was just plain terrible. What kind of child doesn’t say that about their parents, especially after they die? I am not out to get her. I am out to illustrate her. By the end, she will be a 3D character to you, and hopefully you’ll learn more about me as you read.

I’m sorry to hear about your loss. Here are 10 thoughtful questions a friend might ask to learn more about your mother and her passing, which you can use for your personal blog prompt:

  1. Can you share some of your favorite memories with your mother?
    • I think I turned nine the year she threw me a Peter Pan birthday party with tons of activities in our backyard. There must have been a hundred people at my house for that one, because it was a tiny town. If there was something to do, people came. I was not popular in school, and I struggled against my mother being more popular than me (she was the music teacher, the fun one. I have been a 90 year old autistic man for like, 46 years. That tracks. I am 46 years old. I knew the smash hit “Get Off My Lawn” by the time I was seven.). Therefore, I was a lot more relaxed with her when we were just out in the backyard having fun. My grandparents, both sets, also lived close at that time and she was more relaxed in her comfort zone than she was when she was trying to make me into the perfect child. I didn’t get it. She could talk to me about being good because of my dad’s job all she wanted, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t just going to sit there and be weird, anyway. I found Daniel and I was fine. Neurodivergent people travel in packs. If you’re an introvert, they’re just smaller.
    • She thought I was a great singer and often gave me solos in things. She would laugh until she cried when she told the story about how I was too shy to sing with the choir, but as they were leaving the stage, I decided what the people really needed was a solo.
    • We were a team. She was my accompanist no matter whether I was singing or playing my horn. She learned monster orchestra reductions (piano accompaniments) just to take me to contests. Then, because she was already accompanying me, she accompanied all my friends as well. The only person she never played for, I don’t think, was Ryan Darlington (he’s a tuba player). It’s not that she wouldn’t have done it, we just went to different middle schools. We both ended up at PVA, but he went to Johnston and I went to Clements. Johnston was the performing arts middle school and I didn’t get it. I got into Clements and we marinaded and grilled their asses at contest. It was memorable because I was the trumpet soloist that helped get them there. I played the opening trumpet call in the “Dances With Wolves” score. I auditioned for PVA when I was at the absolute top of my game. My mother played for me at that audition, too.
    • At HSPVA, I was a trumpet player. At Clements, I was in Varsity Band and Varsity Choir at the same time, which I loved.
      • Let me take a quick break to tell you how I did it. I sang for the choir director and she put me in junior varsity. I said, “are you sure? I’ve been doing things like the Messiah for five years now.” She said, “Ok. Prove it.” She played the first four measures in front of a monster exposed lick, I believe trying to prove to me that I couldn’t handle it when I’d had in memorized since I was 12. Please. My opera voice flipped on. Case closed (link is to a humorous clip from one of my voice lessons).
    • In short, I would not be the person that I am today without the grand piano she bought to put in our apartment after my parents’ divorce. That’s because as long as it was there, she always had a way to draw me in. Draw me closer. Test out anthems she wanted to use with her choir and wanting to play for me because she could hear how it would sound at choir practice. I was part of the vetting process for the programming when she was a choir director/organist. I asked her to leave me her piano in her will, and she did. Now, it’s at my sister’s house and David’s house just isn’t big enough. But when I’m at Lindsay’s, I get really quiet and let my mom speak through the chords. It what she did when she was alive and it worked. Why stop now?
  2. How has your mother’s life influenced the person you are today?
    • A tape runs in my head that I should be the perfect person all the time because people are always watching. This was true when I was a preacher’s kid, but now I can’t turn it off and I have massive self esteem issues at making any mistakes. I have chided myself for not achieving perfection instead of taking the W at excellence. I’m the person that absolutely is driven to get an A+ on everything and a body/brain that just won’t have it. I can either accept my fate or die thinking I’m the worst person that ever lived. I choose acceptance.
    • I work with children much easier because I am social masking her, an elementary and middle school choir director for all of her career, except for the time she took off from work until Lindsay and I were old enough to fend for ourselves. I’ve picked up more, noticed more than she ever imagined. She was a saint and also tough as nails. Strict disciplinarian who hid all her feelings because she thought she wasn’t enough, either. It is the plight of women most of the time. Because I needed to break free from that pattern, I see it for what it is. However, I do not think of her as a bad parent, but an overly fearful and depressed one. Her whole life depended on what other people thought. I was basically Chelsea Clinton on a very small scale.
    • She is the person that convinced me it was better to hide my every need than to display it. It’s part of the reason Lindsay is so outgoing and free, while I hide in the shadows. She doesn’t worry about what people think of her to the extent that I do, and it’s a problem. It’s only now by convincing myself I am a good writer who has something to say that I really value myself as an asset and ally. Again, I mean to come off as confident, not arrogant. Someone has to tell me I’m pretty every day. It might as well be me. I got well when I realized that not saying anything left me angry and resentful all the time. When I began to express needs, no one liked it because I was so angry. So, so angry. I apologize for that, but I cannot apologize for the ways I’ve felt ignored by people who’ve said they loved me. It is on them to apologize to me if they feel bad about it. But if they don’t, I’m not waiting around for an apology. Sometimes you have to create your own closure, and I’m at peace with it.
    • She is the one that taught me how to treat a wife/husband, basically doing everyone’s emotional work for them and taking all their bad behavior because if I don’t, those people will leave. It took me a very long time to come to the realization that if they leave because you have emotional needs, you’re better off without that person in your life. Be careful in deciding the line where someone else is “needy” and you’re refusing to talk. A mind will only accept that of course you’re too tired to talk for so many days/weeks/years. However long it takes for someone to realize they’re unhappy. But because they’ve been unhappy for a very long time, you’re not going to like it very much. Have clear boundaries on what’s too much so that fights like these don’t come up. Work smarter, not harder.
    • She taught me that jokes were funnier when you didn’t see them coming, like her making a really sharp comment when she was normally so happy go lucky. I have a feeling that she was probably also autistic because the tapes that ran in her head were that she had to act completely normal all the time, too. It’s called social masking. Because of my family, I have both male and female sets….. as in, what a man would generally say and what a woman would. The female set is unsure and cautious. The male one walks in the world knowing that no one is better than me and no one is worse, either. It’s very important to make that distinction, because basically seeing the way I write convinced me that I had a man’s confidence online, so go with it. Be confident all the time, because it’s not all about you. It’s a survival manual for someone else.
  3. What were some of the values and lessons she instilled in you?
    • If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t say anything for 35 years.
    • Be kind to everyone, no matter what they do to you. This has had enormous positive and negative affects, because I tend to overestimate the good in people and stop standing up for myself when I feel bullied. On the flip side, everyone is more open and caring with me because I am open and caring with them. It’s a mixed bag, as parental lessons often are.
    • Be subservient to your partner. Whatever they want to do, you want to do. What you want to do/eat is not up to you, because you have to watch your weight and not seem like a pig (I wasn’t on Adderall til college and had the normal appetite of a teenager), and also his choice of restaurant is always better than yours. I wasn’t raised to be queer. Neither are other women. We’ll talk for an hour about what to do for dinner because neither of us wants to assert an opinion that might offend the other. Same for dating. Lesbians take FOREVER to admit that they like someone because God forbid someone rejects them. it’s systemic, but my personal experience is unique and universal. One of the things I like about men is that they’re direct. It’s easy to ask them out because it’s a yes or no question to them. It’s especially fun when you don’t care about the answer and neither do they, because it’s no harm, no foul. With a woman, you’ll waste years pining over her until someone finally admits feelings and then spend the first four months of dating EXCLAIMING over how much we didn’t see it. Yes we did. We were just ostriches about it. If I don’t tell you I like you, then I don’t risk abandonment. It’s intrinsic to who women are as people. If we are not perfect, our husbands will leave. Flat out. This is changing as gender roles decrease. That information was useless to me then.
    • My mother’s narrative was never how hard it was for me that I was queer. It was always how embarrassing it was to tell people I was queer. She couldn’t empathize, which is the root of why we had a sometimes terrible relationship. Later in her life, she wouldn’t let anyone get away with a homophobic comments, but she never told me that. I heard it at her funeral, because all of the sudden she was now the cool mom and not the rejected one. She could play up that card instead of being embarrassed, all the while being completely disinterested in hearing how Meagan, Kathleen, or Dana & I were doing. I am glad that she came to peace about it. I am not glad she never told me.
  4. How do you cope with the grief and keep her memory alive?
    • I have fallen in love with everything Dia de los Muertos and I actually visit cemeteries a lot for the peace and quiet, yet feeling surrounded. The most profound place I’ve ever felt peace is at a neighborhood for the dead in Paris. It’s called Pere LaChaisse (sp?), and it’s got more famous artists of every discipline that you could possibly imagine. If you cannot travel to Paris, there are the same type cemeteries in New Orleans. See them before you die, because it’s an experience in and of itself. In DC, I have now been to sit with Gore Vidal. Good talk.
    • I wear an ichthus necklace every day now, because the necklace she actually gave me came apart in a million pieces. I got it at the funeral home, and the inside of the fish is filled with her fingerprint. I don’t like how I got it, but I do like that it was possible to create and a powerful remembrance to have my mother’s fingerprint on my heart every day.
    • Lindsay and I FaceTime at my mother’s grave when I’m not in town, or visit together when I am. It makes us feel closer to her even though we know she’s not really there. The idea is fun. We sit and talk to her, sometimes eat, sometimes drink coffee. It’s a safe space to get away from it all, and we do.
    • Stories come up at random times, and I never know whether they’re going to be good or bad. Some of them are still so painful that I blank out, like seeing her in her coffin. What is really bad is that because it’s the last image I have of her, it’s the one that’s stuck. My mother got sick and died in about 30 minutes flat. I wore this look of abject shock, like I was high on Oxycodone and completely sober. It was more than a year of magical thinking, because it was so unbelievable.
    • I know for sure that she got the death she wanted, because she did not want to be in pain and she did not want Lindsay and I to end up taking care of her for years on end. She didn’t know it was coming, but she would have been pleased with the result. It gives me complete peace. I don’t have to worry that there are things she would have wanted that she didn’t get, because I know for sure that given the choice between dying quickly or it being a long, drawn out process she would have chosen to go out exactly the same way.
    • Other people keep her alive for me. She was such a public figure that people tell me all the time how much I remind them of her. It’s irritating until you realize that it’s the only way to keep your mother alive long after she’s dead.
  5. Were there any traditions or hobbies she passed down to you?
    • Make a big deal out of people’s birthdays.
    • Love people until they just can’t stand it. Make it weird. So many people are hurt in the world. See it.
    • If you are a teacher and you don’t have money, you are responsible for finding it. She taught me that people will support a valuable cause. For instance, she dated a judge after the divorce that was pretty wealthy. She worked at one of the poorest schools in Fort Bend. She never asked him for money. She talked about her life, and he responded. One year he bought the entire class winter coats. You can get things if you ask for them, but only without asking directly. This is not bad advice, because it’s not one’s responsibility to respond to your needs, you’re just asking if they will. The difference is that I don’t take rejection personally and she viewed it as a flaw in her character. However, this is a new development because I finally got tired of not being heard correctly. I don’t do well when I’m talking around something and just hoping.
  6. What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
    • I have learned many things from my mother, from the tender to the terrible. Every bit of it had to do with focusing on external validation. She was not attention-seeking in the slightest. She was just trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could, because someone, somewhere could be offended.
    • She gave really good hugs. I miss those the most.
    • Towards the end of her life, she enjoyed traveling and came to both Portland and DC. In fact, I also met her in Seattle and we went to the Experience Music Project before she and her husband left on an Alaskan cruise.
    • Giving birth is not for the faint of heart. It’s especially hard if you don’t tell your doctors that you are in pain. She said that she bit her pillow while everyone screamed and no one noticed that she needed medication. There’s no award for that, but if there had been, she’d have won it.
    • Own yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. You cannot be perfect enough to please everyone all the time, and you will die mad about it. I learned that because she never did and I watched what it did to her. She was still mad at my dad at all family functions 25 years after the divorce. I realize that relationships are complicated. Being a decent coparent is not. At some point, you have to say to yourself “this doesn’t even matter anymore,” like my friends who found out they were pregnant the morning of their wedding. All of the sudden, the wedding was literally a piece of cake because there were bigger fish to fry. Like, we’re having a good time, okay, but we’re not even going to pretend that any of this is now important.
    • I am a more compassionate person than I would be otherwise, because my mother’s insistence on being polite and friendly has led me to keep going in relationships that weren’t interesting at first, but kept growing. It was a lesson to sit back and keep listening.
    • It feels excruciating that she would have treated Zac like he walks on water, because he might be a little too much for her, but he’s still a man interested in her daughter, which was infinitely more important than a woman being interested in me. It is not surprising or lost on me that I did not find complete happiness with a man until after I realized she wasn’t there to give “advice.” Even though Zac is also queer and likes me for everything I am, she would not have believed I could tell Zac I was nonbinary and have the relationship survive. Yes, I’m sure that men who like men definitely have a problem with me………. But I only know this from watching how she treated Ryan and how she treated Meagan. Oh, and also I didn’t have any agency. It was all my emotional abuser’s idea and I had been turned somehow. Meanwhile, I’d been crying alone in my room for two years. I’m just not queer enough to exclude dating men altogether. It speaks highly of Zac’s brain that it even happened in the first place, because I do have a preference for women. It gives me a little bit of clinical separation, honestly, because not every conversation digs deep. By the time I talk to Zac, I have worn myself out on my blog.
  7. How did she inspire you in your life’s pursuits and passions?
    • She loved everything I ever did in the arts, whether it was singing, playing my horn, playing the handbells, or creative writing. She also loved asking me to help her with her room when she was decorating because she knew I was creative at that, too.
    • She wouldn’t be surprised that I turned out to be a great writer, because I was already on my way in 2016. Therefore, she was invested in my talent. She still managed to bust my balls about my behavior, though. She hated my writing at times, because she thought I was harping on a point over and over. She did not realize that autistic people are governed by monotropic thought processes. It is literally not possible for us to change gears quickly, or process emotions easily. It takes time, because nine times out of ten, it’s trouble with not being able to translate neurotypical into neurodivergent or vice versa. She thought Supergrover was bad for me, that I descended into a world of pain. She wasn’t wrong. That being said, I couldn’t find a friend of mine she did like. Neurodivergent people tend to be queer and run in packs. Therefore, if she didn’t understand me, she didn’t understand them, either. So, her interest in my blog was a mixed bag.
  8. In what ways do you see your mother’s traits or characteristics in yourself?
    • I am only strong when my back is against the wall. I only use power when I need it, not because it pleases me. Just like my mother in a classroom, I walk softly and carry a big stick. I just don’t have to be as aggressive about it now, because I have friends that respect my boundaries and I don’t feel like I’m being ignored. Your voice doesn’t have to be loud if people aren’t covering it up.
    • It is easier to be honest on the internet because when I’m in front of people, I cater to the urge to be small in front of them to gain acceptance.
    • If I’m going to be a musician, be the best musician I can be. Don’t think that you’re incapable of something. Suck until you don’t. And in fact, my voice didn’t get really exceptional until I started taking private lessons every week. It was so good to learn that I was so much more capable and confident than I thought, because I had a great voice, I’d just picked up some bad habits. She helped me work through all of them by accompanying me between lessons.
    • Take the time to get in a proper warm-up, because you’ll sound better if you’re relaxed. Start a rehearsal with your vocal cords already warm. Breathe deeply. Four measures is a long time.
  9. What do you miss the most about her?
    • I miss having someone to talk to all the time. We had long, involved conversations about her life, her career, her everything because I was happy to listen to the chatter rather than tell her I wanted to talk about my life, too. I knew she wasn’t comfortable, so I just listened. The same goes for being touched. We could say a lot without saying anything, a safe person to just walk up and hug because they’re used to it. People rarely hug me anymore, and I’m so used to it I forget I need it.
  10. How would you like people to remember her?
    • As a saint, perfectly perfect in every way, because no one gets through life without making mistakes. With your parents, it’s only a different situation because your first family installs all your triggers. I hope that by not staying silent about them, you won’t, either.

We are all a little bit broken, and that’s where the light gets in.

These questions are designed to be open-ended and reflective, allowing you to share personal stories and feelings about your mother. They can help readers understand her impact on your life and the legacy she leaves behind.

Jesus as CEO

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you a leader or a follower?

It’s the title of a book I read long ago, and I think I left it at my dad’s house and it just kind of stayed there. I am positive that I could lay my hands on it if I was there. It was a book that applied the lessons of Christ to managing large organizations. I had to vet it before I actually spent money on it, though. I read quite a bit in Barnes & Noble, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have to sit through an entire book full of wackadoodle bass ackwards theology. I wanted to make sure they were scholarly about it.

Unsurprisingly, it was a fascinating exploration of the INFJ personality when it comes to being in charge. That is, in order for Jesus to be a good leader, he had to be vulnerable. That he drew people in by making them listen harder to him, not by making his voice louder. It’s basically the law of attraction. Don’t spend any time trying to impress other people. Learn to be impressive to yourself, and your honesty will flatten people because it’s so rare.

I hear it all the time. “Your candor and honesty…..” I have a lot of candor and honesty these days, because I have given myself the confidence to believe that I communicate my ideas well and I am old enough to have an opinion. Old(er) women are powerful, fierce dragons because they’ve had all the fun they can take.

It’s just one of the reasons I think Hillary Clinton would have made a fantastic president. All her fucks slid off about 30 years ago. It’s not her fault that America watched her get up on a televised debate and call him a Russian asset to his face…….. and still thought the guy wearing ten tons of makeup and a suit that still managed to look cheap while expensive carried the day.

I will never forgive the American people for the 2016 election, or at the very least, I cannot see forgiveness yet. That’s because the facts were all there. The former Secretary of State who has known Vladimir Putin for years is telling everyone in the entire country that there is going to be massive trouble if Trump is elected.

She has not been wrong about that.

What we did, paraphrasing David Sedaris, is hear the flight attendant say the meals available are Salisbury steak and chicken covered in broken glass, and stopping to ask how the chicken is prepared.

The choice was clear, and we fumbled. it wasn’t a personality contest. We let Russia walk in the front door and extort the Ukrainians, then after Trump left office the Republicans were so concerned about the Ukrainians. It was sickening.

If it wasn’t high crimes and misdemeanors, we are going to have a hell of a time defining it in the future.

We’re facing a time in which we’ need to eat Salisbury steak out of necessity, not because it’s our first choice. For people that object to that statement, do you really want to take the risk that January 6th will happen again? Do you want to embolden white supremacists? FBI is already getting chatter that Pride parades are going to be attacked this year. That is not unusual, and what I am trying to prevent is the country being once again, buried in regret. A good episode of Saturday Night Live does not kiss an election and make it all better.

Biden is problematic. I will hear it. I will allow it. I will sympathize with it. I still won’t get mad enough to vote third party. When one party splits, the other wins. I knew it was happening, I just didn’t know how close it was. Conservative and liberal democrats clashed too much for the DNC not to splinter. Now, the same is happening because I can hate Joe Biden for sending weapons to Israel all I want and that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up on democracy itself.

People think it’s a long shot, and most of them haven’t seen polls that say a sizable part of the population is willing to vote for Trump even if he’s in prison by the election. The fact that they think a president working from jail is acceptable is alarming. Common sense has completely flown out the window.

Politics was never meant to be about morals. Politics is about how to manage money. We get taxes in, we decide how to spend it in Congress. It wasn’t really until the Religious Right started taking over the Republican Party that issues of morality like homosexuality became a legislative item….. keeping in mind that homosexuality has nothing to do with morality, but you can’t convince anyone in the Religious Right of that.

They’re not playing the long game. It will get restrictive enough that the people will riot, and I am shocked that it is taking so long. What’s next? Republicans coming to your house to make sure you don’t get pregnant? Abortion is banned at seven days? What is it going to take? And abortion and homosexuality are only two of the issues wrapped up in this crap. We’ve let conservative, rich, white little boys run the show for a long time. I can’t take them on all by myself, and I get nervous when I don’t feel enough buy-in.

What if Donald Trump gets elected and Putin decides that’s the time to band with China and attack us because we’re weak?

They could start by bombing the oil fields in Alaska, but Sarah Palin will see them coming, so it’s okay.

I am usually teasing Zac about this time (what do you believe, as a private citizen, mind you………). I have gotten a series of sly smiles, dumb looks, and occasionally, articles in the New York Times. If he just looks at me, I change the subject, because I know he would tell me if he could, but he can’t. No biggie. I have other friends I can talk to about that stuff where their jobs aren’t at risk. People who have been chatting on the Internet like I have are always hearing unverified intelligence chatter. I had a friend catch a hole in DoDs security and his name went on a list.

Pro tip: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Where I become a leader and how Jesus influences that is to just be the person that takes everyone’s stories in…. that when I make leadership decisions, I don’t just have my employees productivity in mind, but their happiness with the job as well. I have a great reader retention rate, and I would hope that my employees felt the same way- that they wanted to stay with me. I would be the kind of boss that lives to serve. I mean, I probably draw the line at washing their feet, but it’s the thought that counts.

What I mean is that I have more success as a leader by taking in the world around me and reflecting it than I do in real life, because I am not getting up in front of a congregation to say these things. I am writing on the internet, which ups my congregation size tremendously.

I am firm because I have a vision, not because I feel the need to hurt anyone. There is a difference in me setting boundaries and me being obnoxious. The people closest to me got angry when I set boundaries, and I set them because they weren’t listening. They didn’t deserve to hear my story anymore.

I feel lighter and happier than I have in years, and it’s because I’m different. I was happy with being breadcrumbed for a number of years, my needs ignored and dismissed, handling a barrage of emotional live ammo only to find out that the pattern would never change. It felt like a lie, a friendship borne out of pity and a pattern I never wanted to reinstate ever again. Thus, telling her to grow up. I dived deep into self-reflection and I became more secure. She stayed in the same place. The patterns that worked on me before weren’t going to cut it.

You are 100% allowed to miss someone you’ve cut out of your life. I realized that she could not see the magnitude of what she was doing by reestablishing our connection, and nor could we ignore it. We had too much shit to do, and she ignored it. Then, I started writing about what happened, and she threw a shit fit because her side wasn’t represented. I cannot review a book I haven’t read.

So, what I know is that it’s not emotionally mature enough for me. I have grown past her. I cannot stand someone holding everything in and just exploding. It’s too much punishment at once and I am completely overloaded.

And yet on the flip side, she has a practical and precise way of moving in the world. She can achieve more in five minutes than I would in three days. Her brain is built for that.

It’s a yin and yang I always look for in relationships and it doesn’t work out. Practical people hate touchy feely crap. It’s the black cat vs. golden retriever debate.

And in talking about Supergrover, it brings me to another aspect of leadership. Have the right people around you. When Supergrover and I are writing to each other, it’s clear we have different processes to get to a conclusion. I can see where I fall short all the time, because when she talks to me and puts her own thoughts through her own filters, I see “oh THAT’s how a neurotypical person would do that….. I always wondered.”

The other thing is that talking about relationships and talking about organizations is very much alike when you are actually close enough to your employees where emotions get involved. You know how many employees I have to have before there are possible kinks in the organization?

One.

Being avoidant with your emotions is just as problematic at work as it is at home, you’re just talking about much different things. You will absolutely be dealing with hard emotions even though you’re not close to people….. most notably, annoyance unless you’re the type of person that needs a break every five minutes. I can be like that, but not usually. I’m the one with my headphones on and I wouldn’t hear a bear even if it was right behind my Aeron.

However, if I’m thinking of myself as the future CEO of Lanagan Media Group, I’m not the one with my headphones in. I’m the one that’s open and available to jump in and help you, or hire OTHER people to jump in and help you. If not, I will develop a reputation for hiding something. People clam up around other people who are hiding something. People don’t clam up around me because I can instantly put them at ease. There’s no trick to it except vibes. Being personable, approachable, friendly, etc. If I like being with the person and their presence gives me energy, the sky is the limit on how long we’ll spend talking.

I hate small talk, so it’s easier when I get up in front of a group. I can just apprise them of the situation, which solves two problems. The first is not having to schmooze with people. The second is not having to tell each person individually. However, if the other person’s vibe is also warm and approachable, and we connect, you’ll always be able to to count on me telling you what I think, but never in a million years telling you that I think you’re a bad person. Trust is broken in a million different ways.

In kitchens, this is always expressed by someone saying “I’m going to be five minutes late.” It’s always an hour. Always. No one cares if you’re slammed, get used to it. Even if someone tells you they’re willing to work on their day off, the chances of them picking up on said day off are slim to none. It’s why I got so many brownie points at my last job. I was there every time someone called out and every time someone got sick and every time we didn’t know what the hell happened, but someone had to have their ass on dish by five. It might as well be me. I’m the one that doesn’t like days off because it interrupts my rhythm. The brownie points were always the biggest at “let me change my clothes. I’ll be right there.” That’s because I actually meant it….. a rarity in our industry.

Giving up driving helped me to be on time every day because I am bad at transitions. I would get demand avoidance over driving, and have to force myself out to the car. Because I was determined not to be late, I would wake up ridiculously early and get to the office by 0800, when it was just the CEO and me for the first hour. He was the kind of leader I am, the Jesus as CEO type. That’s because he genuinely cared about our work/life balance and team cohesion, like buying us all Orioles tickets and carpooling us all up to Baltimore. He was also a CEO that drove a Honda.

I was very impressed.

Somebody went to Sunday School.

Anyway, I had so much less demand avoidance over traveling because I had a set schedule every single day. I could time it to the minute…. and the entire way, I could play on my phone, read, write, watch movies, etc. It was completely guilt free time to myself because I didn’t have to be in charge of anything as serious as a car while I was exhausted. The train ride gave me time to really wake up.

Which was good, because the CEO’s one failing was that he liked his coffee so weak. I use one level tablespoon of coffee per cup. He used a plastic teaspoon, and there could only be 11 teaspoons of coffee for the whole pot, which was 12 cups. Believe me when I say I am not trying to prove anything. The coffee was weak, I’m not trying to make motor oil.

When I drove, I would get to 7-11 or Walgreens by 7:45 to get coffee or an energy drink out of the cold case.

Telling you all of this…. that I love my friend and I needed to let her go at the same time. That I have just so many diagnoses and “letters behind my name.” It’s important. It’s all important. It’s what makes me authentically myself. That I can extend love to more people because I am experienced in dealing with conflict. I don’t pretend it doesn’t exist and I don’t pretend it’s not capable of developing. I’m also not going to skirt around you. I will bring up a problem, and how you react teaches me what to do. If you come up with a solution to the problem, it’s a green flag. If you can’t do anything, but you empathize with what I’m saying, that’s a green flag. The only red flag is saying “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Neither the relationship nor the company will survive.

Posting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I update my blog so frequently because of how blogs work. When you update an entry, it sends a ping to search engines, the WordPress community, everyone. The more often you ping them, the more exposure you get. The reason I don’t *always* post several times a day is that Sometimes I think 10,000 words at a time. Sometimes I think 50. I am not known for being terse. Every thought comes with bonus content. When you see something flip to a completely different subject, it’s what I was writing about, then went to something else, then forgot that text was at the bottom. I am not nearly as scrambled as I seem, because most of the incoherence can be chalked up to “I forgot.”

I am detail oriented, but the details don’t come all at once. They come in as information does. I will have thoughts about every new piece of information because I’ll be collating it with what I already know to be true. Things change fast, therefore so does my web site. This is because it’s my space, the one place where I’m allowed to own it because no one asked you to be here. And I mean it. If you can’t recognize that I have agency over my own story, then your beliefs carry no inherent respect, either. That’s because if you don’t think I’m allowed to have an opinion, why should I even bother listening to yours?

I got tired of Supergrover using me as an emotional support animal, only being pleased to hear from me when it was convenient to her. She can call me the asshole for it all she wants, but that doesn’t make it untrue. She breadcrumbed me for like, eight years. Every time I tried to walk away, she got back in touch. Every single time. She was right to be angry and walk off the first time. I got tired about the 30th.

She can say I’m demanding of her time, but she opened up about how she felt and said she was enjoying writing. She also said that she was going to “offer her own psychobabble,” and she sounded JUST LIKE ME. Like, she has my patois dead to rights. Or I have hers. Chicken and egg, but I tend to say that she’s the original and I’m the copy.

It’s a lot to be told you’re a lot, and expect respect without giving it while also ignoring the fact that you’re a lot. She’s never done anything wrong, I’m a dickhead.

Yeah, that tracks. That’s what a healthy relationship looks like, that one person is always wrong no matter what they do. To add insult to injury, me telling her for years that it felt like a cat and mouse game while she continually said that she wasn’t manipulative while she manipulated me. That’s because some of her last words were “I do not want to get back into the cat and mouse game with you.” Which one of us is the cat here? Sometimes, she was full of love. Sometimes, she was full of piss and vinegar. The same could be said of me, but I was willing to talk it through so that we didn’t have these issues anymore. We could start actually enjoying each other instead of both turning into bitches on wheels every time we disagree.

It’s not her fault. It’s just as much mine. But she runs from her emotions, and I don’t. It is problematic, and the only answer was to let her go back to what she’s used to in life. if I’m the only person that ever gives her problems, which I don’t doubt because she’d never open up enough to offend any of her friends, then I am out permanently. You don’t get to walk around in my inner landscape and call me a judgmental dickhead for nearly every opinion I have.

I spent two paragraphs telling her about a situation with someone else and how I’d mishandled it. She responded that I was so judgmental and needed to back off and all this bullshit that I’d explained to her in my letter already. I did not need additional reproach. She reads so quickly that she misses a lot, and gets very angry if I say she’s missed something because she’s perfect. I called her on it, that she was reading too fast and I got these messages in quick succession:

“I read too fast. I meant that I am not angry. If you are, have at it.”

“Don’t insinuate/insult me/something like that I don’t read your stuff.”

I told her that I wasn’t basing my response on anything but timestamps, that I was not guilting her. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. She made a mistake. Obviously all my fault.

Fuck me running.

Now that I can move away from all of it and call bullshit, pings mean more than she does. That’s because I can’t count on a future with anyone but me.

Luckily, I’m turning out to be a fun person to hang out with.

Pricks on My Skin

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just thought of something and it occurred to me that I wanted to remember this feeling. I don’t write about anyone in a negative way to write about them. I write about them so I remember why reaching out is a bad idea. I have to remind myself every day that Supergrover and I aren’t talking this week…… Sigh. We’re both tired. Tired of so many things.

I don’t come absolutely unglued in these entries because I feel a need to shame people. I write to explain why I can’t go back in time. The fact that I broke my beautiful girl’s heart is a fixed point in time is so painful that I’ve been to some really dark places over the years. It doesn’t matter as much to me what she’s done as what I have, because it takes so much longer to forgive yourself than to forgive someone else.

I regret that I never got to know her in person, because she said she’s more fun and funny in person and I’ve never doubted it for a minute. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in deep grief that wouldn’t go away simply because we wouldn’t stop picking on each other and get it together. We were never fighting about the thing we were supposed to be fighting about.

She couldn’t get vulnerable enough to fight about the real issue, and I don’t think she ever will. In her last letter, she talked around it. She got very close. I realized it when she said “you’re not the only one who has triggers.” I’m the problem. It’s me.

She can’t admit that she’s scared of me. I’ve told her I’m scared of her. We both took each other to the mat. We both fucking lost, because we each had a little red button regarding my writing and her career. Something we could hold over each other’s heads for 10 years and fight about something else.

So, that’s why we fluctuate on how close we want to be. It’s not a one-sided problem. It is, as she says, “a wheel with many spokes…” Which I had to retype because at first I typed “a spoke with many wheels.” I think we are on the same page, I just call it a tapestry. I think we say the same things in different words without realizing it a lot of the time. The most interesting thing to me about her last letter was how close I was in terms of seeing what was going on. I was right. She said that my words felt like pricks on her skin, and any strength I had left went out the window. I thought, “I am not communicating effectively, because this is not what I want in the slightest.”

So, of course I would just keep explaining.

Just like according to Jim Gaffigan, “if there was a Catholic service started somewhere, it’s still going on,” I felt similarly about starting a letter to Supergrover. Because again, I call her that because she’s cute, cuddly, and works blue. She also said once that she didn’t mind being monstrous, and that was the picture that popped into my head. That’s because she’s Alduin when she wants to be, and has always been my Pet Monster on a Fraying Leash, Inc. I sent her a meme of a little girl braiding a dragon’s hair.

Why a dragon had hair that long is another matter.

But the thing is, I’ve grown into my own type of dragon over the years, but I’m always afraid I can only sneeze sparks. I believe that in English, it would be called “imposter syndrome.” I’m not sure anyone really gets over it. I know lots of people older than me that still get intimidated by things. We’re always learning that the world is bigger than we think it is, which is why the greatest acknowledgement as you age is how relatively little you know. I’ve studied political science and international affairs since college. I can assure you there’s a lot I don’t know. But I do research the news thoroughly because I don’t normally write about stories immediately, but it’s the easiest way to get illustrations for my blog. Although I’m noticing that my posts on history have gotten attention, too, like “The Personal Computer.”

I study the news to stay relevant, because I want it to be a mix of me being able to exercise my demons when I need it, but also be able to weave current events and history throughout my writing no matter what. I have gone into sensory deprivation lately, though. I have never known less about the world because right now I’m in burnout over it. It’s too much, too fast. I’ll get back to it. I just need a breather to reset.

I feel like the blogging prompts were all meant for memoirs, except on rare occasions. This is because most of the prompts were talking about recreating a scene in your mind. Depending on who you ask, I am either brilliant or terrible at it. By the time the camp was large enough to be firmly divided, the less I cared because both sides had a hot take that wasn’t necessarily true. I am neither as brilliant nor absolutely fucking evil as everyone says. I talk a lot of shit for someone who can’t reach the top shelf.

But it’s because I’m talking it out and you’re seeing my emotions go up and down that eventually “shit works out, my dear.” You see my struggle as I come to peace within myself, because in order to let people go, this is how I grieve them. Fortunately, since this is the Internet, they’ll be able to come back later and re-read my words without so many emotions attached. I have often found it surprising how much I’ve learned in five years. 😉

That’s because they’re not seeing the 3D character. They’re reading every day, when entries are actually just micro chapters of a book. In order for you to see yourself as a 3D character, you’d have to read it bound. My dragon would look so much different to herself if she went back to 2013 and read forwards. The plot moves forward, and shit works out.

I have written about emotions that cover the entire spectrum. There are some feelings I can’t describe even now. But it’s not about making her feel bad. It’s to remind me that I shouldn’t reach out, when it’s not what I want. I’m not whining about it, just trying to retrain my brain. For 10 years, my absolute first impulse has been to tell her everything. I’m autistic and this is a monotropic thought process (the hitting “compose” part). Therefore, I experience a lot of anger- also not to anger her, but to remind myself that my emotions are valid, and her opinion of me doesn’t determine my worth.

I didn’t say “right” or “wrong.” I said “valid.”

We both invalidated the other’s feelings all the time because we were so eager to run out the door. It’s been a disaster every time I’ve tried to retrain my brain before, because I’ll just crash and burn and it makes her furious whether she says anything or not. When she does, she doesn’t say it without spikes, which gets my hackles up because I’m not itching for a fight. And yet if someone tries to make it hurt first rattle out of the box, it induces red mist rage and I go blind. Unfortunately, I can type with my eyes closed and hilarity does not ensue.

Unfortunately, this is also startlingly common among autistic people because we cannot regulate our emotions.

“Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.” -Sylvia Plath

With neurodivergence, there’s a switch that flips between “obsessed” and “completely disinterested.” There is no middle ground absolutely ever. ADHD people are great at multitasking in some cases because even though they’re monotropic thinkers, they can switch channels so fast that no one notices. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve noticed in the kitchen. You’re multitasking and in hyperfocus at the same time. It’s where you’re “in the zone,” and finding the right ratio is hard as FUCK.

God forbid I have an unexpressed thought, but I gave myself a space to do that without bothering anyone else, but they came here expecting that if I portrayed them as a deity once, it would always be that way… Even those who have been reading my writing for years. They’re never allowed to change and grow over the years because they fired themselves. I describe times where my emotional needs are being met and everything is wonderful, and I describe when my emotional needs are being ignored and how it’s my problem to deal with, but that doesn’t make it easy. When someone is committed to not hearing you, then you don’t try to change them. You walk away.

But I wouldn’t let Supergrover go and not because I didn’t want to; I felt like we were trapped in a vicious cycle because of our trauma bond. Believe me when I tell you that she is one of the most beautiful, most capable, most successful people I know. Believe me when I tell you that the medium is the message. Emotions hit harder in writing. Both of us have huge emotions and a terrific amount of empathy, and we both throw it away to pick on each other. Over time, it became less and less worth it because she was Breadcrumbing me and wouldn’t admit it until she did.

I don’t write to punish her. I write so that I remember I have a reason to move on, because otherwise I never would have had the strength to let go. In the beginning, I thought she was single and I never wanted to let her go ever. But then I decided her boyfriend would take issue with that once I really took in the enormity of the situation and had a better handle on it.

But it’s not just her husband that would object to not being able to spend time with her, and I’m ok with that. There’s her parents. And her kids. And her siblings. And her friends. And her dogs. I’m just the late night crowd, literally the piano man. She’s even put bread in my jar.

But that’s because my writing didn’t make her mad because she was reading as a fan. She read it with totally different eyes once she was in it, and I couldn’t leave her out. I just can’t say everything I’d ever want to about the situation, and she doesn’t want to help me manage it. So I wing it……………………………… Poorly.

There are some life events that are too important not to record, because I don’t really have any day to day memories of Kathleen EXCEPT for what I’ve written on my blog. We were together when I was a junior in college the first time around. Therefore, the reason I write so obsessively is so that my memories don’t fade. My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. I want this fucking blog.

So, you can call it silly or stupid or whatever you want, but I bet The Bloggess is crying into her bank account over it. Maybe I’ll get there one day. Maybe I’m just a hack. However, that’s not up to me. Apparently since Jenny got a big metal chicken before I thought of it, she’s more successful than me (kidding, she’s one of my favorite writers of all time). If only I’d bought Beyonce first. Emphatic fist shake!

It doesn’t bother me when people come and go, because if it’s not worth reading, I don’t encourage people to stay. I want to be worth your time, but not because I have to bend over backwards trying to explain my life in a way you’re not angry because I botched the characterization…. And come back later and apologize, because after you’ve thought about it, I had a valid point. You were angry. Or, alternatively, I explain my thought process more fully and you understand it, when you thought I thought one thing and it was exactly the opposite, because you don’t actually know what I’m alluding to- you think you do. How well we communicate is what allows me to capture people in real life.

So, first of all, I don’t want friends who don’t believe in me as a writer, because there’s never going to be a time in which I write the way you like it consistently. It’s an impossible task. It’s setting me up to fail.

I’m not going to let anyone set me up to fail. I owe it to my beautiful girl, because it was her love and adoration that made me feel this way. That I had a right to take up space in the world.

She gave me back to myself, and I sleep deeper most nights because of it. She appears in my dreams frequently, all the conversations I would have liked to have had playing out as scripts in my head. God, I’m such an INFJ. How dare I use my dreams to go to therapy? It seems like a lot of work. That’s because it is.

It’s essentially praying, dividing my brain in half so that I’m thinking about what I’m saying and creating the responses as well. It helps me get clarity and calm down. My clarity is not someone else’s truth, and if I wasn’t a writer, you wouldn’t know any of this. I am not out to psychoanalyze anyone but me, and the way I do it is by looking at the situation with an omnipotent third eye. I am very judgmental when it comes to situations, not people. I look at problems through the lens of medicine, psychiatry, and ministry.

“Grace never leaves you where you were found.”

-Anne Lamott

I Just Didn’t Have It In Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I got demand avoidance over writing. I take a lot of heat for my opinions, but I am of the same mind as Ben Franklin…. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” So, first of all, my blog is why I stand up- to have a voice at all. Sometimes it shakes, and I speak my truth, anyway. That doesn’t mean that my truth means someone else is lying. They are not having the same experience as me. So, if we have mutual friends and they have a different story than me, please believe both. It’s not a matter of truth vs. lying, but what both people picked up in the room- and by necessity, those won’t match because we didn’t know what the other was thinking. There is room for more than one truth, and mine isn’t the only one. That’s because there’s truth, the subjective, and Truth, the objective. I do not traffic in Truth so much as truth. I cannot be omnipotent, I can only be a diarist. The problem comes in when my readers want me to be omnipotent, representing their mindsets.

I am not here to take away validity from anyone else’s story. I am here to name it and claim it, whatever it is. It really hurt me when Supergrover said that I’d painted some things as fact that I didn’t have the right. I had no idea what the hell that meant, because it’s not like she talked to me about what I was writing, or offered suggestions as to how I could make it better and more accurate. I was floundering because I had no information and my responses were feeding themselves without any input at all. So, if you leave me to my own devices and never address anything, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because you don’t have a problem with it. If you tell me there’s a problem, I can regroup.

I cannot be held to the standard of apologizing for everything I don’t know. Everything I don’t know is fucking enormous, in this situation and in others. What I can do is apologize for what I do know. I’m shattered that I hurt my beautiful girl at all, ever, but I am so incredibly human and fallible. I made mistakes. Full stop.

I just got tired of paying for them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over……… You get my drift. As I told her, “I don’t get to decide how long you hurt, but I do get to decide where the line is between justifiably angry and holding a grudge.” I didn’t get tired of her being hurt and angry. I got tired of her not wanting to resolve any of it so we didn’t have to live in hurt and anger.

As I have said before, I would have cut off any one of my limbs to read her blog entries about me (she’s not a blogger, I’m just sayin’). I would have liked to have been angered and moved by her words, too…. And I was, but only when she was mad enough to say “I’ll answer this one, but after that, fuck right off.”

I know she doesn’t want drama. I know I don’t, either. But we’re both cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It’s an unbreakable connection on both sides, because after a few months goes by, the urge to tell each other things returns in full force. Then, we get close and after a few months, we’ll blow a gasket and tell each other to fuck off again. It’s seriously like an addiction I can’t kick, because neither one of us are very good at no contact. This is because it makes me cry every single time she says “I’ve been good. I’ve followed the rules. You said you wouldn’t reach out again, and yet, you did.” The fact that she thinks she’s being good by not talking to me wrecks me every single time. We are not cut out for this.

We are both tenderheart bears, yet not without our claws.

It’s just time to put them away, and for her, that answer is distance. For me, that answer is connection and resolution. I will never be happy with a relationship in which someone intentionally keeps things from me, because it makes me afraid and untrusting. I don’t need that anxiety, and I’ve confronted her about it many times before writing about it here. It’s frustrating, because she’s mad I let the world into ours, I’m mad that she doesn’t listen to me and you do.

In the end, I basically had to choose between being a writer and being her friend, and I chose me. It was time if she was going to keep stonewalling me, and I have no doubt that she would have done it until she died or I did.

But that’s my baby girl…. And I don’t mean that in a romantic way at all. I mean literally, in my mind, she’s a child. One I was supposed to love, protect, honor, all that. I did and I didn’t. Very mixed results. I do not blame her for any of that. I was a straight up mental mess. However, once I got it together, there were no more conversations in which we could make headway because we were still so cautious and resentful in the first place.

It is seriously one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever been a part of, and yet also something I never want to live without. I can’t, because even when she’s not here, she’s here. When I write, I can feel her presence, and she’s usually teasing me.

Something to the effect of “come on, Lanagan. I know you have more in you than that.” I basically just replace the person I know now with the person I knew 10 years ago because those memories are happier. I do not like all of the unpleasantness, and I am finished with it. I am receiving the closure I need the longer I go on having sent her very healthy messages in return, because it says to me that she was only in it for a dog to kick.

Being called a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years will do that to you.

Meanwhile, I have so many terms of endearment for her that I couldn’t even write you a list at this point. She can also act like a huge jackass, but I don’t think of that as her personality.

When I think of her personality, I go a little starry-eyed. Still. After 10 years.

It’s not a game, and I resent that statement more than anything else. I promised her I’d be there for her for her whole life. I didn’t know what it would entail, I just said yes. At that point, we didn’t even really know each other, and yet I knew I was forging an unbreakable connection.

It started to feel like only her pain mattered, only her thoughts mattered, only her everything mattered. That’s because I made time for it. She did not make time for my feelings in terms of responding to them unless they were about other people. I have never managed to convince her that we need to work on our own communication. No one’s relationship with anyone is off the table except for apparently the one between us.

I haven’t been saying that this is all her fault, or using my blog to be shitty to her. That’s because I was not having the same experience as her, so I doubt she’s been tracking with me this whole time. I am positive that has led her to believe things about me that are not true, because she doesn’t respond. She takes things in and “reads between many lines.” But no actual communication regarding any of it except for “I’m furious beyond belief at some of your entries, and moved by others.” Well, what the fuck are you mad about and what moved you?

I feel like both of those things are important for me to know.

Because if I knew what moved her, I’d always write like that. I always want everything to be happy and sunny in my world, but the world doesn’t work that way. It’s complicated and sometimes it’s dark. Sometimes, it’s really dark.

But, for every storm, there’s a rainbow.

One More Sleep

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s my last night in this room, as Zac is coming over tomorrow after drill to help me move my stuff, and if we don’t have time to do it all, we’ll finish it up Sunday after 5:00. I don’t think it will take very long, but that depends on our energy levels and the stairs at both places. I’m lucky in that Zac is very handy, so he has tools already that would be helpful and yet, I wouldn’t have thought of them on my own, like a drill and a hand truck, etc.

So, as I close out this chapter in my life, I have a million thoughts in my head, pictures going by too fast to get one to stick. The people who’ve lived here with me, the things that have happened, etc. It’s a lot. But my entire DC story minus the 18 months I lived here in my early 20s has been created in this one house, mostly this one room.

I hope I’m as comfortable at the new house as I have been here, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to cohabit so long without incident. It is one of the longest stretches at an address I’ve ever had.

Everything is, big picture, going to be the same. When you get into the details, my route around town changes. I “have a dog now,” because the house I live in now has five dogs, but none of them live on my side of the house. I don’t see them for months at a time, but I’ll hear them.

Jack will have free run of the house, and may sleep with me some nights. I can walk him whenever I wish. I think it will be good for me, because I always notice I’m calmer when I’m writing and Oliver, who is a dog, is in the room. His presence is everything, so I hope Jack and I will have the same vibe.

I need to get to work, but I thought it was too important a date to go without writing just because I was busy with other things. I am very, very busy with other things and absolutely could not afford to tell you all this, but I thought, “will it matter in five years if you didn’t blog today?” That’s the moment I stopped. This is a milestone.

Nine years is a long time.

When I landed at DCA, it was midday. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go right home or to Kramerbooks, but ultimately tiredness won out; I took the Metro to Silver Spring, where Hayat picked me up.

Hayat drove me to BWI when Lindsay called and said that my mother had died and I needed to come home.

Hayat gave me a Lebanese jewelry box that is one of my favorite things, because I designed my room around the color scheme of the tiling. The curtains are teal, and are thick enough to use as blackout. I never have to worry about working a graveyard shift ever again, because she said I could take them as well. 😉 And on that note, I have to go- for some reason my Android has decided it does not like the “Enter” key today, so I cannot make new paragraphs. I’m not sure my brain is capable of new paragraphs, either.

It’s Too Easy to Do the Wrong Thing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have a lot of people tell me this when they’re in relationships with me, and I have found that it is a fighting tactic of which I’m not very fond. They say “you’re demanding,” but what they mean is “I’m overwhelmed.” That’s because it is not on one person to divine the other’s needs, and there is no way that the problem is always me. However, it is a very effective cheap political shot, as if nothing in their behavior ever elicits my response. I’m just “mean.” When that happens, I disengage. I don’t want to play games. And, I’m hearing Supergrover’s voice in my head as I type this, “I do not have room for that temperature in my life.”

Last night Daniel invalidated my feelings, so I disengaged and went to bed. I didn’t want either of us to say anything they regretted, because he sighed in exasperation, which came across as passive-aggressive in the first place, and I knew it was time to go. It was enough for one day, because I was tired enough that I knew I’d go nuclear on him and I was heading a fight off at the pass. I said, “I don’t want to play your games,” took my sleeping pills, and went to bed.

I wake up, and he’s mad about all these slights, real and perceived, that he has not expressed before, so one of two things is happening. Either he’s actually concerned/angry about these things and has been covering them up, or he’s just making up things to throw in my face so that I’m “forced” to feel bad about the fact that I withdrew.

What I have learned over time is to go to bed angry. Let that shit work itself out in my dreams, rather than taking it out on the person I love because we’re fighting while we’re exhausted. So, I got some sleep, and while I was asleep, he went from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what, this isn’t worth it” in two hours.

He absolutely spun out on his own because he was anxious, so it wasn’t a real breakup. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is right now, because he thinks I’m demanding due to old tapes. If everyone tells you that your feelings don’t matter, then you’re going to believe they don’t. If you don’t believe your words have power, then you’ll say anything because no one is listening, anyway. I understand this innately- it’s a trait of all neurodivergent people. But it is not my responsibility to fill that hole inside him and make him secure enough within himself that he doesn’t think I’m abandoning him every time I go to bed.

He asked me to stop bombarding him with messages because it was too much- he, like Supergrover, assumed that I needed answers to everything rightthefucknow, when I was making a list and checking it twice over things that were important to talk about as we plan the next few years. However, because it had been a problem with Supergrover, I was prepared for it. I could never convince her that I wanted an answer eventually, that I wasn’t on a time constraint because I was looking so far into the future that the moment didn’t matter. She could be as busy as she needed to be, as long as she was willing to lay her guts on the table and tell me what was wrong. I cannot divine it over text.

But I would if I could, and often tried.

So, I stopped writing so much to Daniel at a time and started recording my thoughts either here or in a notebook (because I doubt you care about the dull details that create dreams, you care about the dreams themselves). I want to get married to Daniel because the piece of paper has a function beyond just saying to the world that we’re in love and want to be together. We could do that in front of our friends and family without ever filing government paperwork and it would be every bit as meaningful.

But there’s a huge difference in marrying a civilian vs. marrying a veteran. Dependents are entitled to so much more if they’re married to or a child of a service member, even in Daniel’s retirement. There are perks that are thank you for your service all over the place, like not having to pay tax on things when you buy at the PX, getting to fly standby on military planes when Daniel, Cora, and I are all traveling together, and a health care system in which I’d never fall through the cracks. It’s a lot, and it’s a big decision, but Daniel has already offered. I don’t think we’re there yet, obviously, if our communication needs this much work.

But here’s why it does………. God help me. I am marrying myself, and it’s not so easy to be married to you. I do not mean that I’m a selfish bastard, I’m saying that we are so much alike that it’s akin to having a child and thinking, “I wanted you to look like me, not act like me.”

This time, it’s on Daniel to figure out why he spiraled out so fast, and learn how not to do that. Not my circus, not my monkeys. If he’s as serious about this relationship as he says he is, he’ll have to learn to own his half, because I am not here to suss it out for him.

I am in no way a psychologist. I just “speak” psychologist and this is the best way I know how to explain what’s going on without putting blame on either one of us. Medicine and how the brain works over huge population samples gives me perspective that I am not trying to analyze them, but to explain to an audience what I think is going on and how I feel, because that kind of empathy helps me move forward in a positive way. The empathy part is going out of my way to try and prove that I’m wrong. To give people the benefit of the doubt because I can analyze behavior with an omnipotent third eye, calling myself out on my own bullshit in the process.

There is just no room in my life for people who don’t want to know what part they played, because relationships don’t last that way. If one person expresses needs and one person hides, it’s a hard pattern to break……… but I have to, or Daniel, et al, will make me afraid to emote at all.

That is not what I want in a partner. We’re going to be giants together, with room for all our feelings…… no one ever has to hide in fear and spiral out alone.

Daniel seems to waffle on conversations about the future, but it’s for good reason. I’m not saying that he’s avoidant because he wants to be, only that he has to be right now…. but not forever. He’s in the middle of his disability case that could make his pension even more attractive, so he can’t predict things like cash flow and his ability to “move about the country.” At the same time, without any kind of vision, I flounder. And if me wanting some sort of working boundaries is taken as a problem because I am telling you what I want/need and feel like you need to keep everything close to the vest.

I have a huge capacity to love, but also a huge capacity to feel needed. The lovebomb/discard cycle will not happen with me, because I won’t allow it. It’s harder with an addict or a patient with mental health issues like PTSD, but not impossible. It’s not because the person is a narcissist, it’s that their first reaction is trained to be fear and protection of themselves. If you bring up a problem, their first reaction is to try and make their environment safe, and that includes the steel shutdown with the automatic locks, sometimes with the cocking of weapons to show you shouldn’t get any closer. That’s the point at which I know our conversation has come to an end, because I am not going to fight through all that. You’re going to explore why you felt you had to “suit up” and come tell me what you were really feeling that made you react that way. You are not responsible for my reactions, but I am allowed to have them.

I’m allowed to feel pissed off that Daniel once again broke up with me, but he fired himself out of anxiety and abandonment, just like I did with Supergrover. I felt abandoned even though she didn’t feel that way. I didn’t need any more safety and security than that. That way, I’m not counting on a response, but it’s welcome if I get one. I would have treated her like I treat Bryn for her whole life if she had been as honest with me in all of her e-mails as she was in her last one.

Here’s the line that got me. “I could write all night, but I won’t.” In that moment, I knew I hadn’t been lovebombed just to be discarded. That’s because the letter was already pages long, and then after she said she didn’t want to type anymore, she typed for several more paragraphs. It made it feel so much more personal and intimate, because it was like she was saying, “I could write to you all night.” The only thing I worry about with both Daniel and Supergrover is that I have done this thing: