Tag: leadership

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.

Giving Him the Finger

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had a breakthrough in accepting myself on Sunday. Forgiving myself for everything I didn’t know before my mother died (my mother didn’t want me to know I was disabled because she thought that I was too smart for what was then called “the special classes.” I don’t know. Maybe I would have been happier. My teachers would have seen how smart I was and I probably could have taught myself better than they could. Special Education is actually more about room to stretch out than it is the curriculum being different. Special Ed understands meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, lack of executive function, going selectively mute when you’re overwhelmed, and everything my other teachers wouldn’t have understood because they didn’t study being neurodivergent for a living.

I have trouble with transitions. I absolutely hated school after first grade, and it’s not that there weren’t genuinely good moments. It’s that in every school I attended, there were only five minutes between each bell. That’s not enough time for an AuDHD person to adjust to the next thing. It is EXACTLY like being at a party and needing to go to the bathroom just to recharge.

Also, five minutes is not enough time for a person with floppy muscles and depth perception issues to be able to run fast enough to be on time. I have been punished for my disability many times, which is how I found myself in the nurse’s office because a teacher was pissed at me for being a couple of minutes late every day and I knew it……. so I was hauling ass and I fell down two flights of steps.

Because I am low needs, I am trying to speak for the ones who can’t. You can’t imagine how brilliant most autistic people are if you take the time to get to know their brains rather than focusing on what they cannot do. It bothers me that people treat those with autism in which they can’t social mask like children. It’s one thing to have a childlike brain. It is starting how many people think all high needs people have problems with intelligence and not communication. It’s what bothered me so much about the “Autism Speaks” ad where a mother talks about one night in which she thought about putting her daughter in the back seat and killing them both. If her problem is limited to communication and not intelligence, what do you think it does to a person to sit with that knowledge for years on end? People think they’re talking behind our backs because in their minds “autistic” is shorthand for “stupid” and not different.

I would bet there are many more AuDHD people than me out there, but would never want to get tested because of how autistic people are treated.

  • Because Autism Spectrum Disorder means that your brain processes information differently, people at the lower needs end are told things like “you don’t look autistic.” “Everyone’s a little bit autistic.”
  • I am going to bet that those people have never experienced demand avoidance down to not being able to make demands of *themselves,* much less being able to communicate when other people make demands of them. If someone makes a demand of me, I have to white knuckle my way through it if I’m on a deadline, because I have problems with, again, transitions. I like to know what people need from me plenty in advance, because I know at first my body will say, “no. Not doing it.” Autism makes it where when someone makes a demand of you, you go into fight or flight (meltdown). It’s not because we don’t want to do things for other people AT ALL. It’s transitioning from one thing to another. We all wish that part of it would go away, because it’s the biggest reason even low needs people have trouble taking care of themselves. It’s not laziness, it’s not an unwillingness to do anything. It’s that our brains are shutting down because we cannot handle overload.
  • I realize that I have anxiety and I go through cycles. Sometimes, I want to stay home and chill because I’d rather spend time with myself, either writing or reading/watching something to spark my own creativity. This is problematic in two ways, and neither one of them have anything to do with me.
    • Sometimes, I’m on a down and I’d rather isolate than interact because I’m more likely to go into a meltdown from feeling overwhelmed. Recharging also means getting away from my own writing, navel gazing. I have learned that many, many autistic people are like this (the isolating part, not the blogging part) because too much activity in a room is overwhelming to an enormous degree. If you are low needs, that seems incredibly odd and they’re weirded out by it. People can clearly see that in high needs autism, but they cannot see that low needs does not mean less distress. We are just capable of social masking because we can recognize when we’re making you uncomfortable and adjust constantly, knowing you won’t adjust toward us. I am sure that you cannot say this about an autistic kid’s parents or siblings most of the time, but I’ll say it again….. NO ONE KNOWS what to do with autistic kids after they graduate from high school.
  • There has never been an apology to me by a boss when they have miscommunicated with me. It’s “how can you be so stupid/airheaded/flaky?” Why are you “not living up to your full potential?” Because you don’t have the skills to communicate with a neurodivergent person nor any empathy for those disabilities. It is always on the neurodivergent person to pick up what a neurotypical person is putting down when they literally can’t. Especially in an office, where everyone and their dog has a PhD in bullshit. If you don’t, you’re a problem child quickly….. mostly because since most bosses don’t know how to work with neurodivergent people, they don’t know how to get their message across in the way that they meant it because the chasm is *wide.* Bosses do not like to hear the truth most of the time. Very few will let you speak truth to power. Therefore, if I acknowledge a problem in their logic during a meeting, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t pick up on the social cue. I wasn’t focusing on them at all, but the matter at hand. I also want to contribute to the discussion in a major way because I’ve had bosses talk to me privately and steal my ideas.
    • It really, really matters whether your boss can hear criticism or not when you’re autistic, because you are literally trying to help with your different pattern recognition and it is seen as threatening, particularly to men. The first boss I ever thought really had my back was at Marylhurst, when in a meeting with Google I laid a truthbomb on the table and he saw what dog I was walking immediately. I was so touched when he said, “I think we should get back to what Leslie was saying, because I’m going to need an answer on that.”
      • I’d spent so many years thinking my words and opinions didn’t matter, so it made my year.
      • He actually did that twice. Dana thanked him for hiring me and he said, “Leslie is worth every penny.”
  • These are the things I remember when it all goes to shit later because literally no one understands me after a while.
  • I am one of those people who needs iron structure every single day like clockwork, and also angry when I feel micromanaged. There has to be a middle ground, and there is. But it’s more work than it would be for a neurotypical employee because what you say is not what we hear and vice versa. It’s why when I need to relax, I watch cartoons.
  • If you react to us realizing the pendulum has swung too far with negative attention….. “oh, look who FINALLY decided to show up FOR ONCE,” we’ll never show up to anything ever again. It’s easier to watch family friendly and kids’ shows so that you can study shows that present big ideas to little kids. Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind………… It’s almost as if it’s a hidden layer that’s gold when you find it.
  • Here’s what I mean about good writing where you least expect to find it…… Rigby says “tonight, let’s do something REALLY scary.” Pops says, “we could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts.” It was at that moment I realized Pops had given me nightmares. 😉 It was a truth I, and most people with mental heath issues/processing disorders need to be able to voice. That’s part of the problem. Not being able to completely take care of ourselves makes us bad at communicating our needs as well. That makes society doubly difficult.

There is nothing scarier than being alone with your thoughts when you’re disabled. The system is not built for you, especially when you’re low needs and “seem normal,” You walk around all day, every day, feeling worthless and useless because we cannot accept that we have disabilities. It’s easier to believe everyone else….. you’re either slow on the uptake or a judgmental dickhead.

When you think of us as “stupid,” it comes across in a sugary sweet voice that no one needs. That voice is the shortest and quickest path to driving me up the wall. If I have to ask for information again because I didn’t catch it the first time, it’s downhill from there. That’s why I prefer working through e-mail. I do not like conversations at all regarding work because I do not want there to be anything missing in the conversation that I can’t go back and read. It’s what keeps me from having to ask “stupid questions.”

We don’t need your pity, but we do need your advocacy. Thank God the neurodivergent community found programming, because starting when I was a senior in high school, being a programmer meant getting rich. Not necessarily working at a company, but joining a small company that has venture capitalist money on a project in which you really know to the core of your being that it will succeed.

But that has backfired in a lot of ways because when programmers are sitting around together, they’re all tracking the same way and they get shit done faster than you can imagine. Therefore, the perception is that you’re either a savant at something, or you belong in special ed. There is no middle ground, because we’ve made it that way. Social masking has made it where we’re choosing not to take up room not to rock the boat.

Has it worked yet?

And now I realize I haven’t explained the title. In accepting my disability, I could laugh about it. In accepting his disability, Zac could laugh about it. He said “if you think I’m adorable, it probably has something to do with your depth perception issues.” I said, “I’m wondering if I should give you the finger you don’t have.” He said that was VERY well played. Because I realized something. That I can joke about it with Zac in a way I won’t let anyone else in the world get away with. EVER.

That’s because he’s not punching down, and neither am I.

Sitting in the Cheap Seats

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What makes a good leader?

I have never respected a boss that wasn’t exactly like me in terms of leadership. If you make everything top-down, then what the higher-ups are saying is that other jobs are beneath them. I will never give anyone something else that I wouldn’t do, and I learned this from all the important leaders in my life….. first, my dad. Then my emotional abuser, who despite being a dick to me is one of the most successful people I know, then my sister, who rose above being a basic campaign staffer to successful lobbyist for a federally funded queer health clinic in Texas. They’re under fire, as you can imagine. Then, there was Supergrover, who actually changed me the most because I take in information through writing best. So, when she said something about leadership, I could take it in much easier.

I only remember my dad being an associate pastor twice in my entire childhood. Therefore, he was the visionary for anywhere from 300-1600 people my whole entire childhood. I don’t remember how long he was an associate pastor the first time, but the second time it was only a year because the pastor who was at Naples before us died and they needed a senior pastor in an emergency. My dad knew that his senior pastor was a legend and he could have learned so much more, but at the same time he thought he was ready to take on his own thing- so we moved.

I was going into the second grade when we got to Naples, one of the most formative years of my childhood because for whatever reason, one of my teachers TRULY didn’t like me. I don’t know what it was before my parents took me to London (the school decided I couldn’t graduate to third grade if I missed eight days, so my dad just unenrolled me and re–enrolled me when we got back). That made me an entitled little shit, because people in Naples don’t do that.

So, I suppose she gave me fair grades, but she made my life a living hell and I can assure you I was not alone in this. Talk to anyone who was in second grade with me now and they’ll still remember how terrified they were of her.

In opposition to her, my dad was trying to make our church the center of the community, ecumenical because some people would come to a church if they were holding a special thing when they wouldn’t normally, or we were the only game in town. For instance, MYF was more popular than any of the other youth groups in town because we were a fun bunch. Kids came from other churches, as well as kids who hated church and wouldn’t go to Sunday worship, but they would come to MYF because it’s where everyone else was hanging out.

I continue to be glad that of all the pastors I could have been born to in Northeast Texas, I got the one I got. I could have ended up in a much worse situation, especially when I came out. I could have lost everything I knew, and lots of friends my age did. My dad is open-minded, and brought people together. He didn’t promote anything politically, he just talked around both sides of an issue so that Republicans and Democrats would both get something out of it.

When we moved to Houston, it was a big jump in congregation size, but they were actively in crisis. The minister before us had been caught having affairs with several women in the congregation. One of the women’s husbands shot a bullet hole through one of our front windows (before we got there) and we never changed the glass….. alternately creepy and cool as we began to mark progress away from it. By the time we left that church, it had grown from 150 active members to over 300, and closer to 400 on things like Christmas Eve and Easter morning.

That’s because there’s a religion section on the news in Houston- it doesn’t push any particular thing, just will put your event in a crawl. Not only were we on the crawl, one of the news stations came and filmed a spot. It was beautiful.

We also started a Christmas Pageant that is so known it’s still going on in the same way it did from the beginning….. except I’m not Gabriel, in the choir, and playing handbells. I needed roller skates.

“Can I ROLLER SKATE?”

Also, don’t let anyone at Bridgeport think that the idea for the flowered cross came from her. She stole it from my dad. It’s fine, but credit where credit is due. She also stole my mango salsa recipe and then wouldn’t even let me help prepare it. It was just control. After a while, “I didn’t fit her vision,” and she’s always working on the next transactional relationship…… which is the thing I learned about how *not* to do leadership. She would show up when the garden needed tending, so that showed me she wasn’t all transactional. She’d work just as hard as the gardeners. But at the same time, no one close to her got anything for free.

I’ve learned that the best people in power are the ones who don’t want it. That’s because they only use it when they have to, not because it pleases them. I believe it’s the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Joe Biden wants to be the president. Trump wants to be a king. His money has made him think that’s how the world works, and so far no court case has managed to sway him that he’s ever made any bad choices in life.

I’ve learned that good leadership admits mistakes. That sometimes things are an emergency because we’ve fucked up and we don’t have time to react the way we normally would because that takes time. I do not like the attitude that “you guys fucked up, so I’m going to go home while you code all night.” The best example I can think of is at Apple. Steve Jobs absolutely drove the coders like a team of mules when they didn’t get their usual deal on chips from Motorola, and the entire codebase of OS X had to be changed to support Intel in six weeks.

But as the visionary, he didn’t drill into the details of how long it would realistically take not to release an unstable operating system. Although most companies do it. I never worry about upgrading Windows until there’s at least a service pack. So, I don’t know how they did it by Jobs saying “get it done” all the time instead of moving deadlines is crazy. No one slept.

And this, dear children, is what I know about leadership. A top-down executive would tell you to buy the best Mac available. A true leader would tell you that now since the processors are identical to PCs, you’re paying five times as much for a Mac as a PC, thinking it’s hugely different. The operating system is different, and I wish that was sold separately. I could build a Hackintosh, but I like Ubuntu just as well.

I am a leader because I have learned that it takes more strength to be vulnerable than it does to yell at them and make them feel bad……. but I always get better results.

What makes a good leader is being able to tell the truth, all the time. Keep your employees apprised of the situation with your company, and you’ll get more people emotionally involved. Once they’re emotionally invested, productivity goes up. If you treat people like kindergartners, they’ll act like it. If you value their opinion, they’ll act like it.

The hardest part is getting leaders to believe that’s really true.

English & Language Arts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What was your favorite subject in school?

In elementary school, I had two classes. One was called “English” and one was called “Language Arts.” It has been at least 40 years since I started school, and I still can’t tell you the difference. I am 100% certain that it would only take a quick Google Search to make the distinction, but I enjoy being a writer and not knowing. It’s just funny. However, if I had to guess, it would be that “English” = Grammar and “Language Arts” = content. I’m guessing because I always got grades like 97/95 in English and I think those were the two criteria. I then, like now, wrote in stream-of-consciousness mode so my grammar wasn’t infallible, but even before I learned to type it was typo-adjacent. I only spelled things wrong when I wasn’t thinking about it. Also, in high school I wasn’t a very good typist. I caught more mistakes that way because I was going slower.

Learning how to chat online made me a better writer, because now I can touch type. In fact, I can keep up with my thoughts to the tune of only being a couple of words behind what I’m thinking. Most businesspeople can do this, but it’s a specialized group that didn’t know anything about typing and learned it because conversation moved too fast for them to keep up. My first real foray into language arts was with meeting girls (of course it was). Then, just like now, big emotional connections, but not outright flirting because I was 15 and they lived far, far away.

I will tell you about them (mostly because if they Google themselves, they’ll re-find me), but I have to tell you that I might not be in any way correct because catfishing was a thing even in the 90s. But whether these women were real or not, they were my friends and there was no sexual content to anything, leading me to believe that they were legit. Yes, I was young, but I found other young people, or at the very least, adults who did not hurt me.

The first was Rainey McMillan from Swansea, Wales. It was 31 years ago and she’s still fresh in my memory. I didn’t have a personality with her because we’d never met. In her, I found my real self- the autistic person who went non-verbal for very, very, very long periods of time because writing took away my barriers to conversation. I believe wholeheartedly that Dana didn’t see it because she couldn’t. I used to be a lot more okay with forced extroversion than I am now, which was bad. Very, very bad. I was overwhelmed a hundred percent of the time and lived in burnout often. If I can narrow down my demand avoidance to the most essential of needs, I can feel my body’s rhythm and flow. It gets lost in an overloaded schedule. I notice when my demand avoidance gets so debilitated I cannot move. My biggest job right now is to learn how to deal with these disabilities, because I cannot even ask for ADA accommodations if I don’t know what will actually help.

I could do lots of jobs in a quiet room. Very few offices have them anymore because it’s all about cubicle farms and conference rooms. People have asked me how I worked in a busy kitchen. It was a process. First, my relationship with Dana was strong and a lot of it was just us alone in the kitchen. She was a sensory experience in and of herself and my eyebrows are going over my forehead and that was meant to make her laugh because she knows her. They’ve met.

Dana becomes very excited about things. Very excited. I was irritated by a lot of it, but she also became very excited about me. It wasn’t all bad. The negative aspects of my sensory experiences paled in comparison to the positive. 😉

However, this shouldn’t be taken as a slam on Sam, either. A positive of waiting is forgetting enough about the experience to make it new, which is what 90s gays in Houston called “Baptist virginity” (because they get re-baptized all the time and we have no idea why. The first one didn’t take?).

I’ve always thought sex was hilarious, since I was a kid. One of my favorite comedy routines is the one about Jeff Foxworthy trying to make the room all romantic for his wife. He puts candles on their headboard and halfway through they realize wax is dripping on their faces. I would like to believe that I am also hilarious with stuff like that. There’s no point in getting too worked up over it. One day it’ll make a cute story between us, what doesn’t kill you makes good writing, etc.

I also think being queer had to cure me of Protestant beliefs about sex because I had to talk about it so often. The glossary of my community alone, JFC. Learning it takes years and I’m behind the eight ball. If I’m talking to someone under 30, they’re going to have to use flash cards. :::pause for laughter::: On the other hand, new terms come to me easily because I want to learn the language even if I never use it. I picked up “new relationship energy” or NRE from polyamory because it describes how I feel at the beginning of every relationship. I’m what’s called “demisexual” or “sapiosexual.” That means I am not attracted to people by the way they look, but how much they excite my brain. That’s why it doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, I’m going to get lost in a fog. I feel the same energy with Supergrover that I do with Lindsay- because since Lindsay only works here and hasn’t actually relocated, every time I see her it’s the brain fog of it feeling new and heightened. Strong, comfortable, and exhilarating because she’s such a big shot. What I have learned from both of them is that I am worthy of being married to someone like them. That they weren’t more powerful because they were smarter. They were more powerful because their brains were built for the system and you couldn’t find more beautiful women in a catalogue selling fuckin’ anything.

Thus the first, Rainey, eventually became Supergrover…. and not because I tried to replace her. It’s that by the time I met Supergrover, I’d had 30 years of relationships entirely in text. My relationship on the ground with my sister helps me to understand Supergrover’s life by being able to see what a powerful woman is like and how they became so without it actually being her.

When they walk into a room, it’s not only their employees that snap to attention. It’s all the men above them, too. It comes in handy because their beauty makes people trust them before they talk to them, and they’re wonderful people so being magnetically attracted to them is easy. They’re also the type of people that are infinitely kind…. the type people who other women don’t see as a threat because they go a little stupid when they see them, too. If Supergrover has had one real crush, she’s had a million “girl crushes” on her since birth. She’s the kind of person that’s gorgeous enough to have power like a mean girl, but she gets it through attraction and not malice. I know all of this because I grew up with her personality type. Every man wants to be her boyfriend, every woman wants to be her bestie.

That’s because they both have the power to make you feel like you’re the most important person in the room when you’re with them, and it not coming off as manipulation because it isn’t. They genuinely like their small moments with people that are quality, true connections. A connection is worth something even if it only lasts a few minutes, because networking is more important than mental/physical labor. Networking makes any job easier while being at work is more specific.

For instance, Lindsay has worked in both private sector and non-profit lobbying, plus campaigning and body man for the mayor of Houston and did constituent services for a while. Knowing Annise Parker was her connection to the White House because she ran Mayor Pete’s campaign. Pete losing was hard on me because even though I never realistically thought he would win, I thought “now she’ll have to move to Washington and I won’t have to make it my idea.” It’s not a priority to me because it would be so nice to have her here all the time, but I wouldn’t see her any more than I do now. She just doesn’t have time. I don’t even see her every time she comes here. I text her 99% of the time for the same reason I e-mail Supergrover, and why I say that if we had a relationship on the ground, it would look a lot like the one I have with my sister. That being close meant “I can give you 15 minutes in March.” And that’s only if I ask in December and am willing to be picked up and driven somewhere, find your own way home because I got shit going on here, man. But you know what? Those would be the most valuable 15 minutes in my entire life. I would walk differently after that. I get the impression that time with her is valuable because she makes time, never actually has it. We’d play by the rules and improvise on them as necessary. I’m ADHD and don’t give a fuck. That means spur of the moment get together or cancel and I’m great either way.

That’s what I mean about being in Washington at a time she wasn’t supposed to be and joking about having an affair with Michael’s wife. That it wouldn’t do to hide anything because it’s more trouble than it’s worth…. what I feel is happening when she doesn’t claim me outright, and feel secure when she does. It had gotten to the point where I thought that Michael didn’t even know about me because she seemed so secretive with me, I assumed she was secretive with him as well. It was a surprise to me that she wasn’t, and I had to be furious, overwhelmed, and forgiving all at the same time because her whole shtick is that adults don’t discuss their conversations with other adults and that she didn’t want any of what she said to go to Dana, or have to worry about it so she wasn’t going to say anything more when what she told me was the source of my anxiety. She destroyed me in a second, and because my environment was threatened, I completely rearranged my life in order to get peace I so desperately needed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it would do the least good.

So, in short, I felt like I kept my word and she screwed me to the wall.

That’s because now it’s 10 years later and I’m still a nervous wreck. She won’t listen when I say that because she’s programmed herself to only think of me as a threat. It helps her ignore my reality, because I know she feels guilty. She tells me that all the time without ever resolving the problem. I keep hoping, and keep being disappointed.

I decided that was all her own shit, that I didn’t think of her as a threat until she acted like one. That I didn’t paint her as a villain in every story, just the one where she was. I also painted me as the villain first. It’s not only that I hurt her. It’s that she had the high ground first, and relationships tumble and roll. She cannot win every fight, all the time, and she won’t give on anything. It’s like working with a Republican congress, but not one where we can’t get anything done. When they used to collaborate to the bare minimum.

It’s so sad because we could have been Obama and Biden.

I bet she’d look good in aviators. I don’t know for sure, but she has the personality of a flyboy…. the equivalent of Finn Hudson, the quarterback popular kid and the choir nerd (she doesn’t sing, I just mean she has a soft side). It’s more fun looking back than it has been the last eight years, because I felt so constrained by what I could say to her. Since she took everything as a negative, I was constantly searching for the right thing to say and landing on the wrong one.

One of the songs on the playlist I made to move my mind forward was a Ludacris duet that I hear in my head all the time… “can’t live with you, can’t live without you.” I only wanted to solve the swings, not kill the relationship altogether. But like I said, we both get defensive immediately, which lead to not listening on both sides. That’s because she’d only answer when she was angry. She wouldn’t feed the positive, so my reactions to her were angry as well.

I own a lot. I just don’t own everything. I am not the only person that needs to learn and grow in a relationship, and this is what happens when only one person makes the commitment. And I don’t care if it’s because of apathy or not. Whether I made the mistake of wanting her to work on something when she didn’t and not walking away, or whether she really does love me with Mama Wolverine intensity and I’ve underestimated her feelings, I couldn’t get her to say how she felt either way.

I told her I thought that and no response. I have no idea whether she’s licking her wounds or happy I finally got the message. If she’s happy I finally got the message, then I deserve more than her, no matter what I think of her. I will eventually find someone else and hopefully she’ll see she made a mistake. But by then I’ll be gone and I’ve told her that if she comes back, she has work to do with me. Nice is not going to cut it. It’s not that she can’t come back in and of itself. It’s that I will no longer tolerate this crack-smoking foolishness. I watch Doctor Who. I have standards.

She doesn’t see her hypocrisy. I’m the only one who ever ruins anything. But I didn’t ruin us. I ruined me trying to find her.

For Susan Hoefer and Sue Protheroe, my English and Language Arts teachers. If they hadn’t taught me how to express my feelings clearly then (7th grade), I wouldn’t be able to express myself to the degree that I do now. They are precious to me because of it.