One of the most surprising joys of blogging is discovering where my words land. I sit here in Baltimore, writing about the rhythms of my daily life- the perfect cup of coffee, the quirks of local streets, the small victories that make a day feel whole- and then I look at my stats and see readers in places I’ve never been.
I wonder how so many people know me in New Delhi, or even closer to home. I know people in the DC area, that’s not a surprise…. but Buffalo?
Go Bills.
My words are being read across the San Joaquin valley, and yesterday for the first time I had a sizable population from Alaska.
My words stretch out into landscapes I’ve never walked, but allow me to plan trips. It would be a kick to see where my readers live, perhaps hosting a meetup. I am much more fun and funny in person. We should really go for coffee instead of hanging out here.
I wonder what it is about my writing that transcends barriers. Maybe it’s the universality of relationships. I write a lot about them. Or perhaps my search for the perfect cup of coffee resonates with their daily search for chai.
Maybe it’s just that we all need to know we’re not alone in our search for meaning.
It also strikes me that personal narrative becomes cultural exchange. I don’t write with the intent of being a bridge, but somehow my reflections on my life become windows into the daily American experience. Sometimes I wonder if I am reaching Americans abroad because my references are so specific.
It’s the beauty of storytelling: stories travel further than we expect, carrying fragments of our lives into places we may never see, but where someone else is listening.
Describe a random encounter with a stranger that stuck out positively to you.
Apparently, if I had just waited until today, the perfect story and the perfect prompt would have lined up. I wrote about a very meaningful encounter with an American Uber driver who was from Afghanistan originally. It always hurts when you can’t make them line up if you’ve published a story that would have been good for the prompt, like, less than 24 hours ago. That being said, I cannot answer all of the prompts because I’ve already answered them. This is either one in which I still have the post in my draft folder, or I took off that day. A large percentage of my readers come from the daily prompt, because people’s answers are highlighted and moved up. That’s how my audience grows every single day.
I am growing most rapidly in India, and honestly I think that’s because WordPress is more popular in India. There’s also not really a language barrier because my Indian housemate and her daughter were both taught English in school. Plus, Indians and I are the same tribe. We’ve been supporting Windows users since we were kids. 😉 I do not know what it is about my personality that attracts Indians, or people from any other country, really. I do consciously think about the fact that I’m writing for an international audience, though.
That’s why so many of my illustrations come from the Bible and Doctor Who. Jesus and The Doctor are two of the most recognizable figures in the world and not just to Americans. I am definitely a Christian and a Whovian, but it’s more than that. Both the Bible and Doctor Who give me an endless library of images with which to explain things to people who have also read/seen these things. There are not many things I can talk about to an audience that read global.
It is also why I talk about intelligence so much. Intelligence feeds my writing because it shows that I am an American, but I am not American-centric. I believe that we are allowed to work in our best interests, but none of this over the top “America is right about everything and other countries are stupid” bullshit. We could learn so much. We just haven’t, and won’t. We’re not smart enough to be humble and admit when things aren’t working and say, “hey. France has a good idea on this. Maybe we should take a look at it.” Substitute any country in the world for France, because there can be good things found in any government right along with the bad.
In short, I want to show more people than just Americans that I hear them, that their stories do matter to me, that I am not an American imperialist but a seeker of knowledge. For instance, Argo is my favorite movie. But when I really get down to brass tacks, can I really say to myself that the US was right to do what they did? I do not want to exclude Iranians and their story by invalidating their feelings and their history. I love that the movie starts out by saying that the Iranians were angry, and the way the voiceover plays out, you hear the anguish in the struggle. I rooted for Tony and the houseguests. I did not judge whether the United States was wrong or right for putting themselves in that situation in the first place. It is too complicated for me to comprehend, because I was not an adult at the time. I was two.
I am a student of the chessboard without assuming that the United States will or should win every game.
For instance, people have thought I was crazy for saying I’d like to retire in Mexico (not likely, but an interesting thought) because of all the drug cartels. I said, “well, if I get hurt by one of the cartels, at least I won’t be in debt up to my eyeballs.” We would be happier with socialized medicine, but most people (even those on Medicare) don’t support it because they don’t understand it. Think about all the school shootings, all the public events that have been ruined by gunfire, and the tremendous amount of money those people had to pay to recover from the privilege of being shot.
People say “if you don’t like it, just leave.” If I leave, there will be no one to vote for these things. Telling me to get out is so much easier than working with me to find a solution, my problem with that mentality in its entirety, and most of what I hate about Republicans and have since the 90s.
Republicans don’t do solutions. They didn’t like The New Deal any better than they liked Obamacare. This has become a pattern. They’re fine with just sitting back and saying no to everything while problems persist- while also not coming up with anything and being angry that Democrats get credit for cool things and they don’t.
For instance, Mitt Romney could have taken on nationalized health care as easily as any Democrat, but he didn’t win the presidency, first of all, and if he’d told the Republican party he planned to overhaul national health care the way he did in Massachusetts, he never would have been the candidate in the first place. This is why they can’t have nice things.
Hillary Clinton started fighting the Republicans on health care in the 90s, when Bill took office…. and it took until Obama to get even the barest minimum. It’s not a complete overhaul, but it’s a start. I have no doubt that’s one of the reasons why Michelle Obama’s focus was on preventative care and not trying to take on legislation like the “Patient’s Bill of Rights.” She focused on diet and exercise, which is the best you can do without medical or legal intervention.
The Republicans aren’t the idea machine, but it’s not because they can’t be. It’s because they won’t. It’s their personality now. All they do is try to stop the Democrats, they don’t try to come up with ideas that will work better. They don’t collaborate with Democrats, so there’s no Republican buy-in to basically anything that represents moving forward.
We are not the same country that we were under Eisenhower, and Eisenhower would not understand the current Republican party any more than I do, because our thinking is very much the same. The GOP has gotten more and more conservative, which has made the Democrats more conservative in order to be electable. What people think of in America as “liberal” is very conservative in the rest of the world.
Very. Conservative.
That’s why it’s hard to see that Donald Trump is a fascist for some people. They do not realize that we were already so tilted to the right in the first place. That fascism wasn’t a huge leap because we’d been sliding toward it so long. It is astounding to me the number of Americans who think Trump is perfectly capable of being president from prison. I am not kidding. There have been polls.
Joe Biden isn’t as liberal as you think he is. He’s not even the most liberal person in our party. In terms of world leaders, he’s very conservative, because the other leaders in the world do have socialized medicine in their countries (the major players). It is impossible to say that conservatives in other countries are equal to our own….. A good for-instance would be comparing Republicans to Tories. When Tories get angry, they don’t try to defund the NHS and take away gay marriage.
I will say that the United States has a history of crazy in the political arena. It is only relatively recently that we stopped rolling our eyeballs at that level of insanity and electing it instead.
Now it’s time for me to go put together my desk chair, because now that I have a really comfortable one, I’m going to be in it all day long. That’s because I put my desk at the foot of my bed so that when I’m writing, I can turn my head to look out onto the greenery and the trees. So much of writing is turning your head to look at the trees.
It’s nice, because I’m normally looking at the whole forest.
This is another entry that will just jump around, because a lot bothers me. I just talk about all that here so my friends don’t have to hear it. You’re the place I go when I’ve overfocused and they’re exhausted. 😉
My being bothered encompasses a range. It bothers me that I can’t work on my computer unless I built it from scratch, and it bothers me that Russia is trying to make Ukraine fold.
What bothers me about mental health issues is that I have to be vigilant about taking care of myself, because my brain chemicals will take an issue like the former and make it as big as the latter due to my own echo chamber. So, really it’s me that bothers me, most days. Here is an itemized list:
It bothers me as a writer that if I write about someone’s behavior, they will constantly overfocus on what I said and not how they behaved. If they’re mad I wrote something, they don’t think “Leslie’s hurt” and come running. Ever. They think I’m out to get them, when in reality I am explaining them to me. How do I know how to change gears if I don’t know how I acted? The not focusing on the part where I wrote down my behavior is where it gets tricky, because I stab the knife further into my own chest than I do others.’ They just don’t talk about it because it’s easier to believe that I am a monster. That’s why I’ve gotten rid of a team of people in my life. I realized that if they were going to treat my blog as a threat, they couldn’t have me as a friend anymore. Mostly to protect them, because obviously my writing is too much for them and I don’t have time to cater to everyone. I have tried, and it has failed.
It bothers me as a writer that people think we are lazy freeloading assholes until we’re Brandon Sanderson. You’re not a real writer until money is on the table. You don’t write movie scripts until a studio has paid you for one. You’re not a novelist until you’re on the Bestsellers List. It becomes clear very, very quickly that we are a no-value add if you don’t understand the creative process and devalue us in every conversation. You think you’re being helpful and you’re actually destroying our self esteem.
It bothers me that I don’t always know when my favorite foods are going to be discontinued and like anyone on the ADHD/Autism spectrum I’d like to be able to buy six cases of whatever before it happens. Sensory issues are real, and I try to avoid them in order not to be distracted. When I am not “in the zone,” I’ll eat anything you put in front of me because the food is my focus. In writer mode, I will tell you that it’s been six months and I’ve eaten a vegan ham and cheese sandwich, chips, and a banana for lunch every day. Before that, it was veggie hot dogs with vegan cream cheese and hot sauce designed to wake the dead. If you think this is weird, it’s not. Mark Zuckerberg and I are just the same archetype. He wears the same thing, so I bet he eats the same thing. Source? I also have three hoodies and good luck getting me out.
It bothers me that people should look at me like Mark, but they should also acknowledge that I am hugely emotionally intelligent because I am self aware. If you treat me like a problem child, you’ve missed out on the best part of what I can do. The way I think rubs off. You’ll learn to love yourself, mostly because in my writing I’ll remind you of it all the time. I don’t write about people’s shitty behavior because I’m out to get them. I’m writing it because that is what happened the way I perceived it.
It bothers me in any conflict when people expect me to behave the way a normal person would and hold me to those standards because I have never met a normal person……. and my personality type is only found in 9-15% of the population before the trauma and mental health issues start making me complicated. I have had it confirmed by people in all tones of voice that they have never met anyone like me. I am deep and frightening and intense in every way imaginable. Mostly because other people have so much armor that they’ve forgotten how it feels to emote deeply.
It bothers me that I may never find a partner because of it. I couldn’t even make a close and loving friendship work on that level. So now I think I belong more to the world, as writers often do. If I make my focus all of you, I am not focusing on my lack. I am focusing on an upward direction that will hopefully cast a wider net on making friends.
It bothers me that people don’t understand my Internet relationships. Most of it is that my personality is so rare that I don’t find many people like me to connect with locally and I process better when I’m typing. I get together in person a good majority of the time because other people aren’t writers and I’m good with it. It’s not that I don’t need conversation, I am just unlikely to remember that I need it.
It bothers me that being a writer and getting your work read are two different skills and I really only have the first. I don’t want to have to tell you to engage, and I want to earn enough money to eat. The struggle is real.
It bothers me that the world isn’t built for me. People say, “you weren’t born to fit in, you were born to stand out.” They think it’s a compliment when I feel disconnected and lonely most of the time.
It bothers me that I don’t have emotional fortitude in person because I am frustrated at my lack of being able to craft sentences on the fly, because people say they don’t like my writing and get frustrated with talking to me as well, because then I’m stammering and can’t get words out……. but I seem so self assured…… the medium is the message.
It bothers me that there’s so much noise and so little signal, and fighting through it is immense. What I have found is that the way I fight through it is not seen as valid to many people, because it’s not the way they would do it.
It bothers me that Supergrover and I have a concrete need to be in each other’s lives, that we should have collaborated the whole time because we can’t not….. and then we proceeded to destroy each other. It is devastating that it’s easy to love her from afar, and terrifying to be close because I cannot feel lost and confused that much of the time…. and when I express that, to have it ignored. I get it. She’s a big shot, and I’m not. Alternatively, there hasn’t been a problem smaller than me for eight years, and there never will be. I’m not a priority because I’m not on the list. We created a trauma bond, jacked it up to eleven, and then when I had a genuine need, she treated me as if I was just trying to cause trouble for her. That’s unacceptable. From the outside, it looks like I decided she was the one and moved here to be with her. That is frighteningly incorrect, but I cannot lay out my feelings about that except “other factors at play.” To let go of those reasons would cause hurt, and not even to her. When I said that I did move here because she was here, you don’t know what idea that was based on, either, and that didn’t have anything to do with me at all. I misspoke when I said that I did move here for her and I was tired of covering it up, that’s what I meant. I didn’t show up because I thought she’d change her mind, or I’d sit and wait. No, it was much, much more than that. I’m sure where her ire lies is that for her, my valid reasons felt like a game I was playing, because she invalidated my feelings. It will always bother me that we never took a time out and just called each other.
It bothers me that people are fine with internet communication right up until they aren’t and don’t change mediums. What sounds creepy in an e-mail sounds fine in a phone call because more of what goes into communication comes out. If you start with 7%, you’re going to spiral downward into much less than that.
I was a product of my illness, and she forgot my personality, even after the fight was over. It made me think that she thought my illness was bigger than my personality by saying the opposite and never opening back up.
It bothers me that I understand why people pull back, but if I write about it hurting, that’s an attempt to provoke someone and not a genuine need to communicate with other people because I can’t rely on them. This is an all call issue. I don’t write about you because you’re you. I write about you to understand how I interacted with you. Sometimes, that encompasses our behavior. Only when you haven’t stepped all over my boundaries will I allow for reconciliation. Provoking people is the last thing on my mind, because my ruminations about them aren’t directed. I have a bigger fanbase in India than I do in the United States.
It bothers me that I cannot thank India enough. I did not expect to be more popular overseas, and if I was going to pick one, I don’t think it would have been Asia due to cultural slang. It’s mind blowing. Thank you.
I can’t remember the exact moment Prianka came into my life. Somehow, she has just always been here. We connected because we were both bloggers at the time (Prianka says she’s gotten bored with her life) and became fans of each other. That led to chatting online a bit and talking on the phone for hours at a time. As I have said before, we have never done the whole crush thing, because we each needed that space to talk about our lives to the other. I wasn’t the girlfriend, and neither was she- we were both the people for each other that got to HEAR about the girlfriend. At the time, I desperately needed a friend in that area. I had met Dana by that point, but she wasn’t my friend. Just some chick I saw at church and thought was a little bit (lotta bit) craycray. As Dana and I gelled, though, so did Prianka and I. In 2004, Prianka called me up and said, “my friend Nina has a conference in Portland and I’m coming with her. Can we stay with you?” I was thrilled. Nina and Prianka spent the weekend with Dana and me because Dana’s wife, Carol, was out of town and there was no where Dana wanted to be more than with the three of us. We made an EXCELLENT foursome.
We ended up watching Clueless, playing Trivial Pursuit, and eating junk food….. a lot of it. That weekend in 2004 cemented us for life, because it’s 10 years later and we’re still going strong. Stronger, even, because this is the first time in our lives that we’ve been able to have the kind of relationship where either of us can say, “let’s meet for lunch.” If you’ve been following me on Facebook, you know that we meet for lunch most Mondays at Native Foods Cafe, which has become an exercise in just how much food I can stuff in my face at a time. I am fascinated by vegan food Fascinated. To me, it is where food becomes art- like taking cashews and turning them into Alfredo sauce. These Mondays have become very, very important to me because Prianka has the mindset of an elite athlete, and she pushes me without pushing. She sets ideas down and I just have to Keep. Up. It’s working. She is inspiring me to be a better version of myself one tofu peanut butter parfait at a time.
Because her wedding had been planned for so long before I considered moving back to DC, I did not expect an invitation to their wedding, but as it happened, last Sunday she and Elena had a cancellation, so when we met for lunch on Monday, she literally stopped me on the street and put down her stuff and said, “I HAVE TO DO THIS RIGHT NOW.” She texted someone and a few hours later, she texted me. “Do you have time to talk?” I said, “sure- call or write away.”
A few seconds later a very apologetic Prianka said, “are you ok with being invited last minute?”
Ummmmmmm. YES.
The emotion didn’t hit me until she and Elena walked into the restaurant as a married couple. They’d had a private ceremony with their families, and they were wearing traditional Indian wedding dresses- Prianka in deep red and Elena in gold and green. I cried like a baby. She was gorgeous. Everything I’d ever wanted for my friend and she got it, wholeheartedly. The room was FULL of people just celebrating her and her marriage to another beautiful woman. I’d never met Elena before, and she welcomed me with open arms into their family. That was the best part. Getting to feel like the family I felt with Prianka extended to both Elena and the brothers Nandy (Avik and Amit) that I’d heard about for the last ten years but was just now putting faces with names….
Amit’s toast was hilarious- he talked about when the Nandy family used to go back to India in the summer where her parents had a four-level house that looked out onto the neighbor’s roof, and one day he and Avik were being pests and threw all Prianka’s clothes out the window onto the neighbor’s house. He said it was only funny because she got most of the clothes back, and I found myself wondering what happened to the rest of them…….
Speaking of India, that’s an interesting fact about Prianka you ought to know. Avik and Amit were both born in the US, but Prianka was born in Calcutta at the same hospital where Mother Theresa worked. Honestly, it shows. Prianka is just power, grace, and style in a tiny body. You can’t even believe the huge ideas that come out of someone so small. For instance, Pri is on a mission. She does IT and spreadsheets and analysis for the World Bank. She takes her gifts and funnels them into a larger mission, which is everything you want in life, really…. to take tangible gifts and turn them into spiritual ones. I got to meet Prianka’s parents and I told them that I thought their daughter was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I am looking forward to getting to know Elena well enough that I can say that to her parents, too. From what I have seen so far, that’s going to be no problem.
It was also a joy that Nina was at the wedding, too, and brought her husband with her- a thrill because I’d heard about Jeremy for the last ten years and this was the first time we’d ever shaken hands. I liked him immediately. IMMEDIATELY. In a “you’re my new best friend call me every day” kind of way. He’s a lawyer. He’s a pit bull of a lawyer. He told me how to go after Silver Spring regarding their inane homeless shelter policy in about 30 seconds, in a way that I know I’ll win. Hands down. If he runs for something, I’ve got a job in a speechwriter’s stable. That was when I melted inside. I told him that we needed to spend time on the phone together and visiting each other because in order to speech write for him, I needed to learn his “voice.” He and Nina live in “Luevul,” so I imagine that there will be much Skyping as we get campaigns off the ground. I am already formulating the Dog Catcher campaign in my head. We have similar backgrounds- his mother was a Baptist minister and my father was a Methodist minister and even though the doctrine is different, the experience is the same. I told him that I’d like to meet his mother, and he said that she died in 2013, but that he would find a way for me to meet her in another way by giving me access to her writing. Do you see how that just reached into my heart and squeezed? I looked at him and said, “that’s why I write. THAT. I want to live forever.” I want to live forever, as will all of the “characters” that come into my life, for the short-term or for the whole run.
In terms of blogging, Prianka HAS been there for my entire life. She’s seen my writing career blossom from three followers to 30,000, and will hopefully be there for three million as well. She said something that I have to write down here, because it is so beautiful that I need to record it. She said, “all day, you have been my lodestone.” And it’s true. I was that person she could reach out to for a hug when she needed to get back into her body and back down to earth. To make sure that she was, as I say, “God to head, head to feet, feet to floor.” It was magnificent to be there for someone I’ve loved for so long in a way that defies odds. I was joking that the reason we’re so close is that we met online and then discovered that neither of us wanted to murder each other in our sleep so we’re golden. We talked about how when Prianka came to visit me, that was WAYYYYYYY before that shit was normal. We each just took a leap of faith and trusted that the care we felt over the e-mail and the AOL Instant Messenger and the phone would translate.
It did.
Yesterday, I went to her wedding. And now she is officially invited to mine, if and when it happens. And on that day, she’ll be the one I reach out to for a hug, just to remember that I am “God to head, head to feet, feet to floor” as well.
I love you, Prianka. Truly. And I can’t wait to get to know Elena so I can be there for her, too. You brought Elena into my life at a time when I really needed friends, and she is as gorgeous as you are. I am so blessed to share in your family, and I hope you know that you have long been a part of mine.
Stories That Are All True 