Tag: lesbian

Leslian Culture

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It was at HSPVA that my friend Scott started calling me “his personal Leslian,” and I realized that I hadn’t talked much about being queer because I’ve been dating a man for over a year. These questions will put my life in context.

  1. Reflect on your earliest memories of realizing your sexual orientation and how it shaped your understanding of yourself.
    • My life from the time I was 10 has been complicated. That’s because the years between 10-12 are when I figured out I was queer. I didn’t know or care much about bisexuality until I married a bisexual woman and we went to some lectures about it. I thought, “they didn’t have to call me out like this,” and that was before that phrase was even popular. But early in my childhood, I was alone in my room, sleeping off depression and anxiety because I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I wasn’t like other kids. This all came to a head when I held my best friend’s hand in the middle of the night at a slumber party. I don’t even remember doing it. But people sure hated me afterwards. One girl put suntan lotion in my drink and forced me to drink it in front of everyone. I didn’t have enough life experience to tell her to shove it. Turn the other cheek, right? I just let myself be bullied until I came out in ninth grade. I can tell you that I would have come out much sooner without the shit show that went on in my head when I thought about telling my parents in the 80s/90s. It didn’t appear, but my life wasn’t easier because it didn’t happen. My fears were extraordinarily valid. My understanding of myself was that my life would be hard, and it has. But, in recent years, because queer people are more and more accepted, it feels like I have everyday problems instead of problems because I am queer.
  2. Describe a significant moment or experience that made you feel connected to lesbian culture.
    • I had just gotten divorced a few months before Pride of 2015 (I think). But, my ex’s parents live in the area and she was going to be in town, so I invited her to come with us. She said yes, and then she stood us up. I have no idea why, I didn’t feel like I had the right to ask anymore. But what I do know is that it made me sad. My friends Prianka and Elena put their arms around me and said, “look around you. This is for you. This is ALL for you.” That year, we were marching in the parade with DC Public Schools. So, they literally said that while we were in the middle of the street, taking a break from all the chants. That’s the first time I cried. The second was a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “I’m sorry for the way the church has treated you.”
  3. Share a story about navigating relationships, friendships, or family dynamics as a lesbian individual.
    • I am not the person you want to ask about relationships. I mean, I can make it sound good because I can social mask neurotypical people, but the reality is that most neurodivergent relationships fall apart. It’s not unusual to have no friends because of your communication disorder. But what I will say about romantic relationships between women is that they get very emotionally intense, very fast. The U-Haul stereotype is real. It’s not unusual for the first date to last about three months.
    • Lesbian dating is relentless because women generally don’t want to talk to each other for fear of being rejected. You go to a lesbian bar and the only ones who are really getting down and dirty on the dance floor are good friends who came together. A lesbian will talk to one, maybe two women at a bar. Even if she likes both of them, there’s only a small percentage that she’ll ask either for their phone number. What if they weren’t getting the right signals? What if they hit on a straight woman by mistake? Ok, first of all, this is a trauma response. Second of all, a trauma response cannot be turned off, even in a gay bar. That’s why you are still so reserved about showing people you like them, even though the odds are probably 90% that she’s there for the same reason you are. There are best friends who pine in secret for literal years before they tell each other. It’s Victorian. This is not surprising to me because women are more shy about their sexuality compared to men overall.
    • With friendships, you often find that the people who have dated you in the past know you better than anyone else. So, I think lesbians have a better tolerance level for exes than most, as long as it’s not the one you just broke up with. I joke that it has to be at least three girlfriends ago, and now my eyebrows are going over my forehead at just exactly how true that is.
    • Family dynamics are very difficult. Your daughter’s wife inherently gets less respect than your other daughter’s husband, and it’s not out of malice. It’s that those meetings have been scripted for thousands of years. You switch up gender, and people are completely lost. That’s why to so many people, “who’s the wife” is actually a valid question. They do not understand relationships that don’t have gender roles at all. For years and years, partners spent Christmases pretending to be friends, college roommates, study partners, whatever. ANYTHING but girlfriend….. Unless you’re a straight woman. Then you can call anyone your girlfriend. I always get weirded out, because with some women (particularly in the South) you can tell by inflection what kind of girlfriend they mean. In other areas of the country, it’s not as pronounced. It’s also rude to ask, because why is it my business? Meanwhile, I’m only trying to find community and don’t want to be nosy to get it.
  4. Write about a time when you felt marginalized or discriminated against because of your sexual orientation and how you overcame it.
    • I can’t tell you how I’ve overcome any of it, because you forgive people, but you don’t forget:
      • Kids at HSPVA surrounding me carrying their Bibles and reading all the “clobber passages” against homosexuality while my friends did nothing to stop them.
      • My boss telling a story about her kids and then looked at me and said, “I guess you can talk to us about your cat like that.”
      • The one I will never overcome, forgive, forget, anything is the number of men who think it’s okay to ask you if they can watch a propos of nothing. Literally nothing.
      • I was on a team of all men and we were in charge of rolling out a new operating system at the VA. They found a urologist’s office full of dildos and chased me down the hall with them.
      • My domestic partnership was only valid in Oregon. It felt like being exiled from Texas (it’s good that’s not true now, however).
      • Every Evangelical I’ve ever met wants to debate me just so they can stand there and call me a sinner to my face in the name of helping me. There is only power through education. I didn’t sink to their level. I learned to outsmart them. Quickly. The first thing that throws Evangelicals off about me is that when they bring the clobber passages, I bring the history and tell them to their faces that they are messing with the wrong person. If you really want to have this fight with me, we’ll have it……….. But you’re not going to like how you look at the end. When chat rooms began, this got exponentially worse. EXPONENTIALLY. And then came social media, which took that exponentially large number and added an exclamation point at the end. Homophobia is still cancer in many parts of the world, because homosexuality is cancer to homophobes.
      • Others’ stories affect me. Dana’s mother saying to me that she couldn’t be the mother Dana needed, so she should find someone else. Katharin’s parents racking up thousands of dollars’ worth of credit card debt in her name when she turned 18. They didn’t even tell her until she came out to them, and they told her about the debt and that they didn’t have to pay it back because it was “the gay tax.” Knowing now what I know then, if someone had done that to me I would have had them arrested. I don’t have the luxury of forgiving and forgetting that amount of money. It would be a different situation entirely if I did. Kathleen’s mom telling us that it would only be her grandchild if Kathleen carried it. Meagan’s mom thinking I made her gay and forbidding us to see each other….. (I did. It worked. You’re next.).
      • My church not being able to ordain or marry me. I’d never preach in the UMC as an ordained minister, and I’d never marry my partner officially in a Methodist church. That left out every church we’d ever served………….. The people who actually knew me and would want to come to my wedding in the first place.
      • In the entirety of my school education, I had one teacher that was willing to admit they were gay off the clock. That one teacher made a difference, but you know you’re going to be lonely when you only meet gay people once in a blue moon. You only find gay adults, truly, when you’re a gay adult because no gay person in their right minds wants to take a chance on being pegged as a predator. So, even if they were married with a family at home, the most stable people in their community, getting fired was not uncommon nor sane.
  5. Explore the role of community and support networks within the lesbian culture that have impacted your life.
    • The first one I can think of is “Christian Lesbians Out,” or CLOUT. It opened my eyes to the fact that mainline theology wasn’t the only theology out there.
    • I would never have been able to move in the past without my large posse of lesbians, because that’s what we do. Mostly because none of us have any money. Most lesbians are handy for the same reason. We don’t do traditionally male work because it’s fun, although it is once you get into it. It’s that two women make less than any other kind of couple, because all women make less. We don’t pay for labor until we can, and that takes a long ass time. We also have something to prove because women have been told forever that you need a man for these jobs. We’re also very efficient because we don’t take time to say, “hey Bubba! Watch this!”
    • I don’t currently have any lesbians I’m close to, but Bryn and I both love women. Every time I think about this, I remember sitting next to my friend Nancy while a choir was using our church as rehearsal space. This woman was wearing a shirt that said “100%” Lesbian. We sat there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what percentage we were. We also had a good laugh at how prejudiced lesbians tend to be, thus why we would not be sharing this information with the class.
  6. Discuss the representation of lesbians in media and literature, and how it has influenced your perception of your own identity.
    • I didn’t find myself in queer characters until I was a teenager, in Nancy Garden’s “Annie on My Mind.” Before that, I relied on characters coded as queer, which there are plenty of when straight writers don’t know anything about gay culture and therefore don’t feel one way or the other about giving characters a certain attribute that might sound funny in my crowd. Anne Shirley calling Diana Barry her “bosom friend” had me in hysterics. But the best example I can think of is Kristy Thomas, president of The Babysitters Club. She is clearly coded as a lesbian, and I was well into my forties before I knew that Kristy was based on Ann M. Martin, who is indeed a lesbian. It was on purpose. I was right. VICTORY IS MINE! (On left.)
  7. Describe a personal journey of self-discovery and acceptance within the context of lesbian culture.
    • When I was a kid, I was convinced by others that you had to be one of or the other. I didn’t have a comeback for “bisexual just means confused.” Now, I know that the answer is “no, you’re confused. I’m bisexual.” There’s been a peaceful letting go of the lesbian community because I find that more lesbians are prejudiced against bisexual women than bi or straight. It really is a purity test, and a blessing when you decide you don’t want to take it anymore. The first time my lesbian crew saw me holding hands with a man, the look on their faces was as if a spaceship had landed and little burritos walked out. And then they tried to act like they knew I was dating him all along. There is absolutely no way. I am not an idiot. I know what a Pikachu face is.
    • I tend to stick with other writers, and find other queer writers very approachable on the Internet because we’re both writers. WE’re built to communicate that way. Although I will say that I’ve met more straight writers than queer, it is nice to be able to meet new authors at all…. And a plus if they’re “family.” The acceptance in that is knowing that most writers are loners who prefer talking in text form. It’s not isolation, and yet it is. I talk about connection a lot for someone wearing a t-shirt that says “INTROVERTS UNITE….. SEPARATELY….. IN YOUR OWN HOMES. Live it, love it, sing it a hundred times. Praise hand.
  8. Reflect on any challenges or triumphs you’ve experienced while exploring different aspects of your sexuality.
    • There are two great big ones that come to mind. Life altering.
      • The first is that when I was convinced by others that you had to choose, that bisexuality wasn’t real, I had a boyfriend at the time. Had I been more educated, the relationship might have lasted longer, or it might not. But what I do know is that their influence did not leave our staying together up to chance.
      • I didn’t have enough proof of identity for my driver’s license, and the state of TEXAS (capitalized because it is so damn important) took my Oregon domestic partner license as proof of ID. The fact that this happened gave me hope for the future. It was a very small enormous victory. My expectations for kindnesses like that are rare, because I was the first person who ever asked them if they could do it. Small moment, large impact.
  9. Share an anecdote or memory that captures the diversity and richness of lesbian culture.
    • Joanie left for South Africa a few years ago. Beth took a job all that way over on the West Coast. Me, and I’m still tryin’ to live half my life on the road… It gets heavier by the year, and heavier by the load………………..
  10. Write about a moment of pride or empowerment you experienced as a lesbian individual and how it has shaped your outlook on life.
    • When Matthew Shepard was brutally tortured and murdered, very much a gay Christ figure because of the way he died….. To paraphrase theologian James Cone, the cross and the split rail. Because of my background, I was chosen by my college gay group, Global, to lead what was essentially a prayer service. No Christian content, just contemplative. I held space for grief. I held space for rage. I let all those emotions pass, but didn’t let them go unanswered by thanking my straight boss for the time off from work to let me come and do this (I was shaking when I asked him, FYI). It wasn’t to disparage anyone’s feelings, but to know that when feelings get violent, things get out of hand. I thanked all the straight people in the crowd who came out to support us, because at that time it was very unusual. I let everyone rage, and let everyone heal, then did a benediction wishing everyone peace.
    • When I was a teenager, I won an award for going around to local churches that had asked for speakers from HATCH (Houston Area Teen Coalition of Homosexuals). Their questions were hard…. Not from straight people. From not out people. The woman with the searching eyes asking if gaydar was real.

The life I’ve led has been interesting in terms of lesbian culture, but now I just call myself queer. Zac is a pretty good boyfriend. I’m not ready to give him up quite yet. He’s still at work so I can talk about him behind his back. But thank God tonight I’ll be able to talk to his face. He’s been through a lot since the last time I saw him, most notably a bicycle accident that has left him with road rash everywhere. He’ll have to show me where to hug, but it’s been too long.

It’s been too long since I’ve been out with women who like women, and ironically, the last time I was, it was Bryn, me, Zac, and Dave. We looked like the stereotypical couple with two gay friends, because Zac and I both look queer independently. The fact that we’re together blows most people’s minds and I love that about us. Of all the people in the world that you would think would be interested in each other, we’re probably at the bottom of the list. But it’s better to be different. I’m not the same person that I was when I was with Dana, but that is in other people’s perceptions, not the truth. That’s because since Zac is queer, we maintain the same cultural references Dana and I did, as well as all my other girlfriends. It’s not like having a girlfriend. It’s dating a man. But a man who understands both the pain and the triumph of what it is to be gay in America.

He served in the Navy under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” His stories on gay culture would be on a whole other level. If he reads this, he might write some down. However, I am totally a better writer than him. It’s a shame he has to live next to such talent. I’m sure he’ll manage.

Wow, I almost said that with a straight face.

We’re both great writers. We just write different things. You can like more than one. Jonna Mendez is not better than Alma Katsu. Alma Katsu used to work for CIA and now writes fictional spy thrillers. Jonna Mendez used to work for CIA and now writes non-fictional spy thrillers. But one art is not superior to the other.

Zac would write amazing spy thrillers because I asked him for a writing prompt and by the time he gave it to me he was already 1300 words in. 😛

If you’ve stayed with me to the end, congratulations. I saved the best for last. I hit a thousand Fanagans inside the WordPress community. Zac says that daily writing habit has paid off. I say it’s the people who’ve showed up.

Humbly, thank you.

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.

This Needs Attention

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There needs to be an overhaul of #dailyprompt on WordPress, because not being able to use it cuts you off from the WordPress community. I got more exposure from #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x than I have from tagging anything else. That’s because you’re more likely to appear in people’s feeds because they have it- people have to go looking for things like “friendships,” “relationships,” and “CIA.” And now I’m really laughing hard because to a new reader, this must look horribly confusing and I think it’s better to just leave it.

If you only have dailyprompt-x for so many days, and then you just start reusing them, eventually, you can’t answer them anymore. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s an old prompt. I am never starting from the same place on a different day, especially with 365 days in between. It also reinforces using the Jetpack app, which I have noticed they like reminding you to use it a lot…… So make it easier, Matt (Mullenweg, owner of Automattic). It creates a habit, and literally the only habit I have. Now, I’m feeling a bit weird at committing to write every day and I somehow have to think of it myself? Like I’m a creative writer? This is bullshit.

I hope I’m kidding…………..

I have gotten so used to rolling over, picking up my tablet, and seeing what the prompt is- then taking a few minutes to think about it while I get myself together- and writing everything in one shot.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever gotten is that the prompt came out at midnight and by 12:30 AM I had a fully functioning essay ripping Evangelicals a new one; a reader said, “whoa. You are good at this.” How did he know I was good at it? Daily prompt tag.

I write a lot faster when I feel passionately about something, and a writing prompt doesn’t have to be followed strictly. You receive the idea, and whatever comes up, comes up. If the prompt is about a time in my life when I felt embarrassed and it was on a fishing trip so my ADHD brain jumps to everything I know about fish, it’s still valid because I was still prompted.

Today’s is “topics I’d like to discuss.”

And I’m all like, “this web site is always about me. What about them?”

I will talk to anyone about anything, but I like listening to subject matter experts. That’s why living in Washington is so important to me. One of the best nights I’ve ever had socializing in Silver Spring was stopping into a restaurant on a whim (All Set for some Sriracha Cheddar biscuits. If Red Lobster closes, Silver Spring is going to be okay). I started talking to the man next to me and he was president of the National Black Journalism Association. So, I got to hear about what he does and how he does it. Those are the conversations I treasure because I am all about self-improvement and learning from people who are better than me at what they do. I think that people think I’m obsessed with fame, but they don’t see Tim Ferris that way.

There’s a difference between wanting fame and wanting success.

Not only that, I’m not impressed by anyone, ever. I find that if I get impressed, I won’t speak at all. The inverse is also true. The more that you treat people like you’re impressed, the less they want to get to know you because you’re somehow weirdly obsessed with them. I got my own taste of that when I realized that I did not want to date a fan. Since I have mentioned that Supergrover started as a fan, I feel like I have to specifically say I’m not referring to her.

I went on a date with a woman who’d read me and she grilled me over the coals. It felt like one would feel when they show up to a party and get served because of the bait and switch. I will give you a for-instance. If I said on my blog that I was married three years ago, then why am I not married now? Fair. But it just kept getting deeper and deeper, like she was trying to catch me in a lie and there was some kind of “gotcha” somewhere. She didn’t do anything specifically wrong, per se. I’ll just never forget the feeling of being on the witness stand and not being able to give any right answers. If they didn’t match up exactly to what I’d written months ago, then I was a liar……. When time had gone by and I was in a different mindset and god knows what I was thinking while I was writing that day…….. You get my drift.

Blog entries are just a snapshot of my day, and you can see it in my feelings between entries, because some entries are diametrically opposed. To me it is a way of saying to the world “yes, she can be taught.” I don’t feel like I am now lying, I feel like someone is holding me to the past. My blog is helpful to me because I can see where I need to grow and adjust. It is not useful to have people around me that do not see it as a living document. Everything is being amended to reflect progress.

It’s also about accountability. I can’t go back and cover up my past, but I can read it to change my future. It’s scary to go back and look at what you’ve said in light of what it did and didn’t do for you, and that’s what happens when I go back and read an entry from even last year or the year before. It doesn’t take five years for things to change. It doesn’t even take one. The blog changes every single day not because I’m making things up, but because I make it my business to think about how I can improve my relationships and get clarity on my life.

However, I made a decision to paint myself as an unreliable narrator because I am. I have given you everything you need to know about why I am an unreliable narrator, and that mostly has to do with the fact that narration is unreliable in and of itself. It’s harder to take seriously when that person is documented as having mental health issues.

I am not trying to be anything I’m not. Interesting, yes. But an expert? No. I’m also still laughing about “who peer reviews you?” Because if there was a peer review for bloggers back in the day, it was all of us commenting on each other’s posts. People don’t comment now. They acknowledge. It’s the difference between Facebook and Reddit. Both have ways of one-tap recognition, but redittors are not known for being terse. Reading people’s writing on Reddit is sometimes better than reading a novel…… As long as you don’t mind looking through a lot of spam and porn to find actual intelligence. Reddit is the best of us because it’s the worst of us….. Just like we loved “The Real World” when it stopped being polite, and started getting real.

For instance, I posted on r/washingtondc about the beauty of Washington and how you should stop and take a look because it’s worth it, etc. Basically using lines I’ve used with you guys about DC before. All of the sudden, I had almost 300 upvotes along with a cacophony of where’s hiking? Where’s biking? What are you talking about?” People came out of the woodwork saying “here’s where to rent a boat,” here’s where to hike/bike, here’s the good lakes, etc.

And when you’re in r/washingtondc, you do not dare mention Virginia or Maryland. There are places to do all of these things inside the city if you are not expecting the Columbia River Gorge dumped into a major metropolitan area, which is what most of the people from Seattle seemed to be so fucking mad about. Like “Rock Creek Park is not hiking…. When I was a hiker…. :::dramatic flare:::

Sit your jack ass down.

I realize that this is not The Gorge, but Rock Creek Park does have good hiking, and I think that Great Falls is just as beautiful as anything I’ve seen on the West Coast. Just because it’s a little different doesn’t make it less divine. Sailing on the Chesapeake is just as spiritually satisfying as driving out The Gorge.

I’m blessed that I’ve gotten to live on all three coasts in the US, because I’ve lived in Houston/Galveston as well. I also know that I am an Oregonian, not a Californian. I am not that kind of “West Coast.” Portland is full of old white lesbians that nine times out of ten look something like Paul McCartney. I fit right in.

Oregonians and Californians have a tense relationship, because basically when California started becoming expensive, Portland became the new hot place to live. Oregonians are gatekeepers, most of whom think should have closed when they came in. I am guilty of a little bit of that because it made rent skyrocket dramatically. I lived in Portland when it was the right time for someone my age to do that, but I’m glad I left. It’s not just that I’m a different person, it’s that Portland is a different city. If I moved back, Portland would remind me of DC and not the other way around in terms of the way the city is more focused on business and industry, less on being the place where “young people go to retire.”

Maryland’s suburbs do not remind me of Oregon, but Virginia’s do. There are lots of pockets that look like Lake Oswego, Beaverton, etc. On the Maryland side, the population is too dense to spread out like that. Zac’s neighborhood is a perfect example of what we don’t do here in MD, because it’s a townhome community backed up to a nature preserve. It looks very much like many of the houses I visited in Oregon. It’s not a beauty contest to me. Both cities have a lot to offer, I just think Washington has more because of the transit infrastructure (I would be broke trying to get around Portland or Houston). I don’t wake up every day and think, “God, The District is gorgeous, but it’s not Oregon.”

I’m not always on Reddit.

Here’s my favorite quote so far:

That morning was when I began to invent my own personal version of shorthand, which I would continue to use throughout my career. It was so secure and so covert that even I couldn’t make out its meaning sometimes.

I gravitated toward her style in some ways because it’s reminiscent of mine. Or mine is reminiscent of hers, but I started writing before I started reading her books. So, chicken and egg debate on who sounds like whom. I know I sound like her when I write about intelligence because she’s my touchstone on how to do that. But as a general rule, both she and Tony write like me because their books and my blog are both memoirs. Mine is just written paragraphs at a time.

Memoirs are one-sided, always. People get very angry about them. Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Harry Wales are the three recent memoirs that have caused the most scandal, but all memoirs are written with one person’s story in mind- the writer’s. I keep memoirists in my head all day long because I only have a few people giving me blowback at any given time, not a nation or a kingdom.

I don’t think I could cause an international incident with my blog, but give it time……. Eyeroll.

If I could pick a writer that I would like to spend a day with, learning their secrets, it would be Vladimir Zelenskyy. I’ve thought he was brilliant since I saw “Servant of the People” on Netflix, so I know that we are kindred spirits. This is because he’s also interested in writing, comedy, political affairs, satire, etc. I believe I would need a translator, but if I were to meet Zelenskyy at all, I would FIND a translator. There’s got to be a Yellow Pages in this house somewhere, damn.

The other thing I learned this week that I’m going to have to tease Jonna about the next time I see her is that I’ve already found a typo. She called it “Silver Springs.” I kidded her that one day I’d write something as good as hers and she said, “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that.” Every time I hear her say it in my head, I fall over laughing. It was the right way to tease a writer…. Because I like talking to subject matter experts. It means a lot to me that we can joke about craft, and more importantly, I know that Jonna has lived in my little town.

The funniest gag in the first episode of “SOTP” for me was the newly elected president saying he needed to stop by the mall for a CD for his niece on the way to work because it’s her birthday. His staff offers to do it for him so he can get to work. He agrees and the scene ends.

Later, the secret service show up with the band, because as they explained, they could not find the CD.

And on that note, it’s time to go and make coffee…….. Because I just heard the pipes.

The Straight Truth About Queer Dating: The Leslie Edition -or- Too Weird to Be True

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Straight and queer people both suck when you’re bi. That’s because it’s all homophobic and for queers it’s internal because we’ve been taught to hate ourselves so much. It is offensive to cheat whether you’re male or female. The person you had an affair with shouldn’t matter, but it does. As if the fact that we’re bisexual means we’re purposefully going to screw you over later by dating men…….. because they are the enemy. No lesbian thinks you actually enjoy being with men. It’s all an elaborate intelligence operation where we’re trying to hit your most vulnerable spot when in reality we are just moving on with our lives.

No lesbian believes that a bi person can be monogamous, because they think that we can’t live without dick in both directions because no straight woman would believe that of a man, either. Cheating comes in all sizes and shapes, and is not personal. That’s your internalized homophobia, and you don’t get to control us if we break up. Not going to happen. To make it a requirement of your partner is ridiculous and you look really hateful…… and kinda stupid.

For instance, to me, Supergrover being wigged out that I was female and not male said homophobia to me, so I retreated and then couldn’t get her off my mind, so I lashed out to get her to go away. But she took it as that’s all I would ever do to her, all I would ever be, and we both missed out on something incredible……..

And then realized we were stuck in an impasse and I didn’t have a choice but to fold and prepare for a lifelong connection. I cannot ever cheat on her or leave her because she’s already found her life partner, so my gender shouldn’t have mattered. I should have known she was dating a man, but I didn’t. I should have assumed it from the beginning, but I didn’t. I’d never had a deep internet relationship that didn’t take away sexual orientation and gender out of the equation because after a while you don’t see it. I wanted to wait it out and hope because I knew I could appeal to her in writing better than I could in person. That we’d get over our issues faster and easier if I wrote them down- the neurodivergent urge to explain more and better, more and better.

So, bisexuals might cheat, but it’s not going to be about gender. We don’t cheat any more or less than you do. You know how I know this? I’m bisexual and I’ve dated both bi and lesbian women. Except for Dana, I’ve been cheated on by every single woman I’ve ever loved- because they wouldn’t want to, anyway, regardless of the gender of their partners. I do not want anything less than enthusiastic consent, and it would have been incredible to eventually be wanted in that way, but because it didn’t happen didn’t change me. It didn’t change how wonderful I thought she was, and sometimes it seemed like she thought that of me.

On my end, it would not have been any less offensive to Dana if Supergrover had been male (not sure I would have noticed, tbh, because she’s got the patois)….. but to some women it would have been more. That’s where the self hate comes in, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the bisexual partner. It’s your bag, not ours. I bring up Supergrover because it just shows that especially an emotional affair sees past gender, especially for bisexual women because women are naturally programmed to open up to people that open up to them. We’re raised to be fixer/pleasers, so when we don’t have to be, we connect on that level regardless of the other’s private parts.

It’s more important to be heard after the new wears off. Good sex can be found anywhere. Good communication is rare, beautiful, and precious. Choose that. It’s why I love Supergrover- because she’s absolutely who she is alt all times and I love all of her. But if you hurt her, she’ll never open up ever again. I’m wondering how that’s working out for her all around, because I get the feeling that I’m the only one she’s really honest with, either, so it crushed her when I couldn’t stop myself from being a dick to get rid of her by wigging her out a little more. It wasn’t a good plan, but first of all, it worked and second of all, it was 10 years ago and we eventually made our peace when my body and mind relaxed about our situation. What I knew for sure is that she had changed me emotionally in a way I couldn’t open up to someone else, so it felt natural to want that from her even if she didn’t want that from me. That’s fair. What hasn’t been fair is needing to talk it out and get closer while it’s also the most unpleasant option. I think she thought I was bullshitting her about this connection and just trying to get into her pants, but it was a symptom, not a diagnosis. I needed time to get over it, and I did, but I don’t think she believes it.

Because in the immediate moment, she deserved to be furious. I took my lumps. I didn’t deserve them for eight years until she finally said that I needed to look for friends that didn’t cause issues in me and she had no worries about what I was going to say…….

And then when I started telling the truth about my perceptions, she would change her mind and it would send me into a spiral. So, I have never been as obsessive as she might think. I have been trying to protect her while also processing our experiences and she picks and chooses when to be mad about it, scaring the hell out of me. I found what I was looking for about the baseball game. She’ll know. It’s unlikely all right. That’s her way of being an absolute dick to me now, and it would make so much more sense to you if I could explain the whole thing, but again, the most important pieces are the ones I can’t talk about, and she’s being paranoid and oblivious at the same time…… and when I say things like “I didn’t get laid, but I am certainly and surely fucked,” even those words don’t describe the pile of shit I walked into, but they’re the best I’ve got. I don’t give myself to someone else because I don’t want to do it.

We took each other to the mat and that’s why I think we’d have been all over each other for about two weeks and then emotionally destroyed each other. But that would have had to be predicated on her being single and queer, of which she was neither. So, being close enough for the relationship to flame out was a bad thing, and I couldn’t think of a faster way to get us there than sex. It messes up more than it solves…… and it did mess up everything because I opened my big mouth. And she had a right to know that I was going to write about it, so hiding it wasn’t going to happen.

So, I have a drive to be near her and available that I won’t ever give up, because I can take care of her emotionally in ways that other people can’t. Objectively, not subjectively. She just doesn’t believe it, and that’s okay. It’s a love that will last because it has to, and not in a way that I feel put upon. I’m just in touch with reality and what her news from home does to me. There’s no hard feelings, but I concede that the love is there if she wants it, she just really has to want it and I don’t think she ever will. I think that she thinks I’m out to get her, which is why my next partner doesn’t have to worry about her anymore. She thinks she’s doing the right thing by disappearing, and I hope she’s right. So far, I don’t think she is. I will never forget what I know, and she’ll always be threatened.

Would it make a difference to you whether you were having sex with the person or not once the relationship got to this point? That’s why I don’t think my gender matters. That’s why I don’t think hers does, either (though not getting to be the person that touches her ass is tragic). That’s why I don’t like lesbians who inherently think me being with men is offensive to them, on purpose like a “fuck you” because we have more power than you do. It’s never that we feel guilty and empathetic about that, but we can’t do anything about the system, either. All we can do is wear our queer flags with the rest of you, supporting you while you’re “so offended.”

I like Zac’s personality. I like Oliver, who is a dog. I like how I feel when we’re together, and it doesn’t bother me that he has other partners because I feel polysaturated at one person. I’m a writer. I don’t have the time or need to have someone around me 100% of the time like a caretaker in addition to a boyfriend, or needing to make sure he’s happy every minute of every day…. which is what a lot of lesbians see our relationship as being. That I’m willing to sell out. I am definitely not. I have had fulfilling relationships with both sexes. I think about what Ryan and and I could have been had I not been so influenced by the women around me. That it was a transition and I’d never feel the same way about men again. I don’t feel the same way about women that I did before I slept with them, either…….. #protip

So, will it hurt my next partner that they can’t have all of me? Of course it will. But they can’t have the rest of me if they can’t handle it. Poly means more jealousy, not less. You just have to breathe through it, and I’m good at that because writing is my lover. I’ve made promises to S-dog o’ Bling Bling due to what I do, and it’s important. But would it hurt more if I was a package deal with a man? To most of my dating pool, this is true.

The reason I’m so furious about this is because women advertise that they’re not interested in bi women, rejecting us all because of course we’re a monolith. I have an interesting case of poly love because I can’t let anyone else into my little bubble, my softest spot- which is why it hurts that I can’t talk to her about it anymore because she doesn’t have time or wants to avoid me. I do not know which, but I’m hurt either way so it doesn’t really matter. However, if sexual fidelity is the fucking only thing that matters to the self-righteous bigot brigade, all I have to say is that my next partner is none of your business. So, the fact that you’re walking around butt hurt because it’s a him (even if we’ve broken up, there’s still an expectation I date the same sex partner?). You don’t have the right to judge me on my next partner, because when our contract ends, you don’t get a say in my next relationship.

It’s all about making us feel like shit as much of the time as possible because they think we’re exploiting heterosexual privilege when we do it. But my boyfriend is bisexual as well, so does that mean heterosexual privilege, too? Perception is not reality. All it would take for Zac to get queer bashed is to be with one of his male partners in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we’re bad people because we’re privileged. I promise you that by the end I’m not standing in any. Straight women are freaked out by my being gay because they don’t really understand being queer. Lesbians are freaked out by my being bi because they don’t understand that men can be human as well. To be fair, they haven’t done a bang up job of proving it, but my boyfriend is bi so I don’t have the standard model, either.

That being said, just because Zac is perfectly perfect in every way, that doesn’t mean I’m going to get struck on the head by lightning the way I was with Supergrover. It’s a whole different thing, because I’ll never meet anyone like her ever again. But, behind every beautiful and powerful woman, there’s someone who has to deal with their shit. I just think it’s worth it provided she’s on her game as well. She cannot be supportive and frightened, because that doesn’t give me room in the relationship to be me. Right now I am waiting for all the stories I know to have been told so that she can rest easy in my memory, because she’s told me that’s what she wants so many times and reneged when she’s felt threatened…. basically, reaming me out until I adore her enough in print that we’re good again. I feel I’m only good for the adoring entries in which I extol her virtues. I could do that a Shakespeare amount, okkkkkkk…. but it wouldn’t be interesting because it wouldn’t be real. All people have problems with their family and friends, but we don’t talk about it. I do, because my honest voice is a good one. I am not putting myself out there and pretending to be anything I’m not. I am bisexual, but that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of being faithful. It just may not look like the kind of faithful your parents told you that you should want.

I’ve said it over and over so that you get when you see Zac and I out and about, you will most likely be confused rather than enlightened. We look like a heterosexual couple that really doesn’t fit in because we look like we don’t know we’re queer. Lesbians and gay men all think that they’re enlightening us by telling us that bi us just a phase, and we’re confused. No, you’re confused. We’re bisexual. It seems too weird to be true that gay people have a hierarchy just like black people. I don’t know what the word for it would be , but it feels very much like colorism, where I am judged on my sexual purity by how many men I’ve slept with. Even one in college is a black mark, on both sides of the equation because we’re all homophobic to varying degrees. Heteronormative bullshit is the default script, but we’re finding out the default script doesn’t work.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Special K -and- O Canada

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

From October of 2003.

I got an e-mail from someone who works at ExxonMobil the other day, interested because I mentioned being an out lesbian and working there in the same weblog.

So I talked a little about my experiences in Fairfax, both the good and the bad. I started with Kathleen and I walking in Dupont Circle and picking up a copy of The Washington Blade, then nearly dropping our ice cream on the pavement as we read a quote from senior media advisor, Tom Cirigliano. I’ll paraphrase it here: “ExxonMobil does not support domestic partner benefits, but in countries that allow LEGALLY BINDING gay marriage…” We started planning our trip to Vermont that afternoon.

But the real fun began after we came home.When Kathleen presented our certificate to Human Resources, they acted like they had never heard of civil unions, and to be fair, they probably hadn’t. We were assigned a caseworker and given a possible date at which we might be given more information. That date came and went. We finally called back. We were given another date at which we might possibly be given information. We went to church. We prayed. We crossed fingers.

Another month went by, and the date at which they said they’d call us back came and went, and we were assigned another date at which they might possibly give us more information. It was a nightmare of bureacratic red tape. What we didn’t know is that the senior media advior had spoken without any clear definition of what he was talking about. They were literally having to write a proposal for how they were going to include us from the moment we presented them with our certificate. No advance planning had gone into it, presumably because they thought no one would take them up on it.

Another few months went by, and I was hired by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering, which alleviated our concerns about joint health coverage. Now that I had my own, we weren’t concerned about my getting ill- but it was still a justice issue in that each of us wanted to be listed as the other’s spouse in case of a true emergency.

Another two or three months went by, and we finally sent a letter that was very kind but firm- something to the effect of “if the next time we meet we are only given another date at which we might possibly be given more information, we would like to seek legal counsel.” It was worded more diplomatically than that, but our intentions were clear nonetheless. I sent copies of every e-mail and every transcription of every voice mail to the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and sincerely thought about the Washington Post. In retrospect, I would have had a lot of compassion for the people in HR if they had just e-mailed us and said, “we didn’t really think anybody was going to use this, so be patient with us while we write this thing from the ground up.” Wading through months and months with no inkling that any information would ever be forthcoming was the hardest part.

This morning as I sat down to write I didn’t particularly feel like writing about anything. But people who work on the assumption that you only write when you feel like writing don’t get book deals. So with that in mind, I went to Yahoo! and searched for “writing prompts.” The first site that came up was a writing resources page for people who teach junior high. Most of them were pretty inane, but this one just cracked me up: “What does Canada mean to you?”

I’m assuming that this prompt was meant for Canadian teachers wanting to bring out a small bit of patriotism in their students. But in the interest of having a good laugh, I’m going to attempt it anyway. So here it is, for your viewing pleasure:

What Canada Means to Me
by Leslie Lanagan

I am pretty sure that if Canada weren’t around, it would have taken the world a lot longer to realize just how ignorant and egocentric Americans can be. For instance, when I was in high school, I dated a girl from Fort St. John. Her accent was so thick you could cut it with a knife, so when we would go out together, people would instantly start in on this conversation in various forms:

Random person: Hey, that’s a great accent. Where are you from?

Girl I Dated: I’m from Canada.

RP: Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone from there. Do you guys have Christmas on the same day?

GID: (flustered) Of course.

RP: Say out and about. Come on, please!

GID: Ok, let’s just get this out of the way: Out, about, house, mouse, boot, shoe, sorry. Is there any other word in the English language that you’d like to hear me pronounce before we move on?

RP: End a sentence with “eh.” Come on, you know you want to.

GID: (turning to me) That guy is a total fucking hoser, eh?

As an American citizen, Canada also means easy access to good Cuban cigars and cheap European imports. Hey, let’s not forget that even though I am sympathetic to the fact that Canadians have little to no identity outside their own country, I am also one of the egocentric bastards they do their best to avoid.

The end.

Laughing So Hard You Must Send Help

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I made pasta with pesto. It was an entire box of spaghetti, so I just ate as much as I wanted and put the rest away. Pasta acts as a sponge and gets dry overnight in the fridge, so rather than eating too-dry pasta, I just made a second sauce. You can do that with pasta, and it tastes better than reheating the same thing. Tomorrow, I might add diced tomatoes.

Today, it was Alfredo. I browned some pumpkin seeds in salted butter, adding garlic powder and black pepper. Then, I added flour. The flour sauteed for a few seconds as I got out my whisk and milk (it’s important to have the heat very low for roux. Gives you more time to catch a mistake). I do not know how much flour. I whisk in milk slowly. I don’t know how much of that, either. If I add too much, it will take longer because I will have to wait for the sauce to reduce before I can add the Parmesan-Romano.

I am a professional cook and do everything by feel and palate. It’s not “being a snob,” it’s 10 years of experience at work, my entire adult life at home. A roux just a 1:1 Tbsp. ratio flour/butter and a half cup of milk being exact, but you can break the rules if you know how to follow them. If I know what the sauce is supposed to look like, I can change gears on the fly, where butter is clutch and flour is accelerator. Some people measure. I guesstimate accurately, and there are very few mistakes in flavor I cannot fix; I really only throw things away if they’re burnt, or, God forbid there’s blood on it now (accidents happen).

I am telling you what to do because I know what I’m doing, not because this is some kind of food magic only I possess… and that’s actually the point of this entry. When I was cooking, I was thinking about one of my last entries in which I talked about running a kitchen at home, and today I was thinking that relationships are so telling by how you work in one. If you are in a relationship, dinner is always a two-man job. I know that this is impossible every single night, I just think that whoever is home should participate. Both “stations” suck, so trade off.

One person is mostly the cook, one person is mostly on dish. There is a chef and a sous, because it’s easier for one person to manage the recipe and assign parts out. The most essential thing that a sous can do is be available. Chop the onions. Grate the cheese. Most importantly, wash every pot and pan as they’re done using it. There are some things where you can cook and clean at the same time, like if I have a rice cooker going and I want sausage to go on top or whatever. Those things are going to be done at such different times that I can handle it.

But having a pot washer is invaluable with pasta because the pasta goes into the collander, then back into the pot. You pour the sauce from the saute pan into the pasta pot so you can mix/reheat. The other person washes the saute pan and the collander, because the person mixing pasta has gone on to plating. Once the food is plated, one person can carry everything out while the other washes the pasta pot.

When the pasta pot is clean, the only thing left is putting plates and silverware into the dishwasher.

It takes teamwork to run a kitchen that smoothly, but it will change your life on days where you eat all three meals at home. Plus, it’s easier for me to social mask around all that stuff. Being in a partnership reminds me to do things like eat.

I look forward to cooking with Zac one day, because he does like it. He buys all kinds of interesting things for me to discover when I’m housesitting, like blocks of haloumi cheese that I seared with za’atar (that was so good I ate most of it right out of the pan). That being said, when we’ve gotten together we’ve either gone out or to Trader Joe’s, where inevitably there will be something new and different we must buy immediately.

My favorite meal we’ve eaten together is Korean fried chicken. I do like the flavor of southern fried chicken, but not like I love this. I could eat soy garlic or spicy chicken every day for the rest of my life (just not exclusively). Most people eat chicken, veggies, and rice in some combination most days. If you have a close, deep, personal relationship with Popeyes, Korean fried chicken will be up there on your list, too. It’s also almost as good to take off the skin if you have to avoid high-fat, because the marinade is just as good as the sauce. Plus, cooking it on the bone will yield better results than taking out the skin and bones beforehand (morbid, yet true). There’s a reason drums and flats are more popular than boneless. Not the same playing field.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I do like chicken nuggets. I just don’t like McNuggets. I think they taste fake. I do like grocery store chicken, like Dino Nuggets. They’re great with a little salt, pepper, and garlic before you put them in the oven. Season them just like you would patties for a chicken sandwich- ditto for vegetarian or vegan Quorn. Quorn nuggets and patties are my go-to at home.

This is because I also like to buy my own wing sauce rather than buying nuggets that are just “Buffalo flavored.” :::stares in Morningstar Farms::: Right now my favorite wing sauce is ghost pepper and tastes more on the Sriracha end of the spectrum than Buffalo. I pair it with Daiya bleu cheese most of the time. If I have time, I’ll make it. Cream dressings are one of the few things that it’s easier for me to make than buy because the ingredients are so cheap. Even if I was a millionaire, it would not make sense to me to pay for mayo I was going to use in a dressing. I would only use the dressing for one night. I would need the preservatives in pre-made mayo.

Thinking about the jobs you have in the kitchen requires both understanding what they want to eat. The thing that my ex-wife and I learned in a restaurant was how to divide up a recipe without thinking, at home or at work (she was my first chef… which is cute to the point of nausea). If she was grilling, I was making sides. If people were coming over and it was a bigger operation, we were both making sides and rotating who went out to flip the bird in front of the neighbors. 😉

The thing that made our relationship work in the kitchen is that I liked making sides and Dana liked grilling, but if she didn’t feel like it, I could grill and she could make sides. Both jobs were important, and we were both outstanding cooks. It was nice to both be competent so we didn’t have to do anything, we chose which jobs we wanted.

In our professional kitchen, I liked making things like eggs, pancakes, and oatmeal. She also liked eggs, but liked being on the meat side of the griddle- I can only assume because she was a butcher (butcher than what?).

When my father got the job in the Heights, my mother met another piano player and they used to do four handed duets together. I loved how all four parts fit together, and there’s not a better description in my mind now that Dana and I were always a two-handed duet and oh, dear God I just heard it.

I can’t top that. I’m dead.

IFLS

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. -Newton’s Third Law of Physics

I knew I was attracted to Supergrover’s personality from the moment I met her. Again, cute, cuddly, and (works) blue. She was attracted to me because I was vulnerable with her in a way no one else could be- she read my thoughts here and thought she found a safe space. She did, it just took initiation into a really shitty club, the one in which I’m not social masking so there are maybe three people in it. Her husband spoils her in a way I would have wanted, because she put up with too much bullshit for discount yogurt coupon.

She talks me down off the ceiling, and the reason I’m over the moon is that she does it whether I need it or not. In those moments, I may not be able to look into her eyes, but I see the forehead kiss coming. The problem comes in when Supergrover doesn’t take the time to correct the story I’m telling myself and we get off track. But I don’t want to be off track. I am open and communicating, which comes across as rude and demanding. It’s how she came across after she didn’t want to solve anything anymore. Therefore, I used her tone thinking that’s how she’d respond to me. That when we came back together and regrouped after I’d had time and space to think about it, there would be a continuation of her giving me no bullshit answers and me doing the same.

What actually happened is that my no bullshit answers were taken as “you’re trying to hurt me.” Meanwhile, my heart’s all tied up and I’m lovesick because she thinks that. It leads to more anxiety on my part and avoidance on hers. It finally became untenable, because I was tired of having made a commitment to her like I did and not getting a say in anything…… while she said I dictated everything. Easy to be a dictator when I’m the only one who initiates and first response is anger. I wanted her to keep standing up to me by confiding in me. Being stronger by being vulnerable. Raging inside that she couldn’t and it was all my fault. After eight years of it, I finally decided something true. I matched her tone for tone and it wasn’t all me.

Turns out if I can’t date her, she can’t date her, either. That’s because we’re annoying as shit from different ends of the spectrum. I’m laid back. She’s persnickety. “Do not miss a detail or I will incinerate you if my ire is in full force” is on brand. Mine would be “your nachos look better than mine.” That’s because she’d never ask something of someone else that she wouldn’t do herself, and she wouldn’t miss a trick with nachos, either.

There are certain songs that remind me of her.

If you said “goodbye” to me tonight, there would still be music left to write. What else would I do? I’m so inspired by you. That hasn’t happened for the longest time.

She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.

Those are Billy Joel lines that have come through my head recently, but I’ve attributed others.

She’s like a one-way ticket and you can’t come back….. singin’ yeaaaahhhh, you want her, but she’s so mean.

I’ll never let her go, but only in terms of the character she presents here. There will still be music left to write because all creatives use their pain as art, no matter what kind it may be. For me, it’s having a love so deep and so ethereal that it has become a mind worm, but stopping our interaction has made it healthier. I do not ruminate on the questions when I know there aren’t going to be any answers…. as in, I’m not expecting them, waiting on them.

I never should have been waiting on them in the first place, but you’d have to understand details I can’t share as to why that didn’t happen. Why she got twisted further into me rather than further away.

We leapt before we looked, and were only now starting to see real promise- or were we? I don’t think so, because our relationship hung on thinking about perhaps one day maybe never doing something and what I could do for her. She is not selfish at all. I had time to be sweet to her and I wanted to do so. When she had time, she wanted to as well. We’ve sent each other all kinds of digital shit, particularly books and coffee because Amazon and Starbucks are the easiest to transfer back and forth.

We just don’t have the same time; people are right when they say everyone’s got the same 24 hours, but wrong at both ends of the spectrum. A poor person doesn’t get as much accomplished because they can’t travel very far, very fast. You have to have money for gas or public transportation. A powerful person doesn’t accomplish very much because they can’t focus on anything with everyone pulling them in all directions. The difference is small ball. Conversations and research add up. You might have had five minutes a day, but that’s 25 minutes at the end of a work week.

An ADHD or Autistic person does not do that consistently because their thought process is not going to pick up at the same place the next day. They have to come up with a new great idea, because they had it at 3:15, then Carol had an issue, then they got back to their desks and remembered the seed. But then there was only about an hour or an hour and a half left in the day, which isn’t time to fully flesh out the idea. By 5:30, it might as well be, “what idea?”

This is why conversations with Supergrover are so important to me. She’s big picture, and I’m details in terms of spitballing creative ideas or solving a problem. But that’s because she keeps track of everything and all my brainstorming will be off the cuff. My disability comes in where she shouldn’t be expected to keep track of everything, and I’m ADHD. We both have to learn to cope if we have a shot at friendship down the road, and it will be a long time before I’m ready to say we won’t. This is because traditionally when we try to separate, no we can’t.

There are just two reasons it feels final. The first is that I have a legitimate issue with her, I’m not just trying to be an annoying little shit. I’m sorry she’s busy, but I’ve been in the waiting room for eight years. The second is that she sabotaged one of my relationships and I let her because it was good for both of us. And yet also wouldn’t compromise with me on anything later when I felt I’d proven myself trustworthy.

I never railed at her for being straight, I never railed at her for telling me what she told me so that we couldn’t separate, I never tried to make her feel bad because she married a man. I never did a lot of things, she just assumed. She’d read a shit ton of my writing and decided what it meant and how to feel about it all on her own, which she should have. But she didn’t share with me any of her interpretations so that if her assumptions were wrong, I could correct them. She also wouldn’t correct any of my assumptions, then rail that I’d made them. It was not healthy, and her last words to me were “obviously, you’re the only person who can change…” as if I’d lorded my changes over her. I’m not better than her, I’m just different. I felt like I’d done a very good job of listening to her needs and responding, and I was being repaid in anger and guilt.

Reminded me of going to the hospital after Dana hit me and her saying, “must be nice to just be able to check out like that” after she’d hit me. Both Supergrover and Dana caused me to feel things that I’d never felt before in the extreme. I will never forget what it felt like to be hit by a partner. I will never forget what it’s like to be alone in a room with Supergrover, which is how I viewed our relationship- displaced in space and time, a room of our own. 😉 Different experiences, yet not. Different environments, yet not.

In the case of the failed relationship, I felt like I’d anticipated Supergrover’s needs jumping up and down for attention and it didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I don’t know what I was expecting given the previous few years, but it wasn’t what I got.

I got a big gift from her, but there was nothing on the card to indicate that it was transactional. Most of our gifts were “just because,” so if it meant “thank you,” I didn’t pick it up. Therefore, I recognize that she spoke to me in her love language and I am grateful. I just think it’s foolish for only one of us to study the language. It means only I’m in a foreign country.

Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.

And in fact, that’s exactly what I did. I wrote into the night, creating new memories with her and reveling in her old stories when she told them. I told her I wanted to be the Merlin to her Arthur, but I know in my heart of hearts that she did not believe I was telling the truth. This is not real? I ended up wishing that it could be more than each of us curled up reading each other from thousands of miles away, but grateful for even a 30 second interaction because her time is as precious as she is.

My beautiful girl is such a force of nature that I had to be mad at God for a while. First, railing at them because I’d been born queer because the relationship would be so much easier if I hadn’t. Then, railing because since she shut down communicating with me, it felt like she thought she was them.

She thought I was mean and vice vera.

Whatever objects of mine weren’t in motion before she appeared certainly started rolling afterward. The entry before last took place at Marylhurst, the year leading up to meeting Supergrover. Before I knew it was an emotional affair on my end, and I was always preventing her from being uncomfortable because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and I knew she would be.

Not only was I blunt, I couldn’t get a read on what was okay and what wasn’t. Our reactions used to be so similar that when she put me in motion, we moved in the same direction.

Now, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction in which her actions were always pure and she was perfect, and I was trying to take her for a ride. This was in no way true, but I see how she’d get that impression. I thought she would see with eight years of diligence that I wasn’t going anywhere and I was taking my end of the bargain seriously, but an avoidant attachment will run from an anxious one every time because they are not used to communicating with people clearly enough to avoid small anxieties that then spiral. Slights unfold in the memory.

I also don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside sources, and she held that against me, too. She asked why I wrote like she does everything because of me. If you don’t tell me there’s an outside force, I’m not going to look for it. I have enough problems not spiraling out without anticipating even more blowback because the moving goalpost would be “why do you attribute things to my friends and family?” I didn’t want her out of my life because I thought she was a bad person. I thought our relationship was difficult because I couldn’t love her any more than I already did unless she showed me how.

She has no idea how many e-mails I’ve written with tears streaming down my face because of it. Whatever you call it- a chord running between us, wearing her metaphysical ring, two toys in the same sandbox, etc.- I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to undo a trauma bond, and I’ve been left with no other choice. I am not holding onto hope because I think it’s realistic. I am holding onto hope because neither one of us has been able to avoid each other no matter what our feelings have been for 10 years. It’s a tapestry.

I just decided to stop stitching until we went to Target together to buy fabric softener….. and she has to drive for many reasons. She doesn’t get to have an engine that good and not let me watch her play with it :::sly grin::: because she’d know how to raise the hair on the back of my neck safely. That’s why she’s the alpha in our relationship. One of only four or five people I’d trust to catch in one of those exercises where I just have to hope I don’t hit anything as I lean back.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am angry that she does not see me as someone who would catch her and it has become useless to keep saying it and hope she takes it in. Maybe she will in retrospect, but even so it’s unlikely to result in reconnection. That’s because I’ve told her over and over that if she comes back, it has to be big. She has to lay all her feelings on the table so that I feel secure.

I know her first thought when she read that (the first time) was “why didn’t she just ask me to poke myself with a fork instead?” That’s because she’s cute and cuddly, but doesn’t indulge that side of herself. Doesn’t realize that the things she sees as “darts” from me are actually the things I love most about her. I’m not criticizing her, I’m telling her I notice her “-isms.” She has personal and professional quirks that make her unique. She doesn’t see that I think she’s uniquely inspiring and stupid gorgeous because she isn’t looking for it. That doesn’t make it less true.

I say everything wrong, but no I don’t because no one is ever wrong a hundred percent of the time. All of this has become a drumbeat because if I do not concentrate on resolving the issue and keep looking back across the river, I won’t be able to rescue myself.

She has told me to find people that bring good things into my life, that don’t cause me issues. Two huge problems with that. The first is that if I move on, she still causes issues because the bond is unbreakable. We leapt before we looked, and now I’m paying for it dearly. I am sure I am not the only one, I just don’t know her side of the story because she’s so adamant about not telling it.

So now, my task is to find something that will turn my attention, and I’m finding all sorts of temporary interests, but not anything so magical that it would interrupt how I’m feeling currently. Part of it is being a monotropic thinker caught up in a rumination that won’t go away. Part of it is that the situation cannot be duplicated, so if I lose her, I lose a once in a lifetime experience. My broken heart was caused entirely by thinking that I was the only one who got the chance of a lifetime. I forgot that when I saw her trademark and thought it was cool, she had met Leslie Lanagan.™

I don’t think that because of anything but Newton. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Supergrover fell in love with my writing. I started believing in myself. Any belief in myself started with “you like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.”

I was joking. We’d just met like, 30 minutes ago. It was a mistake, and a big one….. but not for the reason you might think. I didn’t pull a trigger in her that meant anything sexual, but I made her feel good and vice versa. We amped up each other’s dopamine so that we felt this heightened bubble around us that excluded the rest of the world for evil and for awesome. It was private and healthy until it was private and not. And I’m not even sure how private it is, sweating bullets over everything about everything.

What I know is that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, my attention will eventually turn. I think that’s best because she’s given no indication that me asking her to step up would do any good at all, and in fact most things I say piss her off because she can only accept my truth when she sees herself the same way I do. If those stories are different, she will become defensive and accusatory. At that point, I’ll just explode because I am so tired of trying to make it work.

The reason I’m tired of seeming “demanding” is that I’m not asking for anything huge. If she actually asked what my terms were, filling them would be the bare minimum in a virtual friendship. It’s not that I blame her for always being busy. I blame her for doing everything she can not to talk about her feelings so that I constantly feel like the failure in our relationship because I’ve asked her to emote. Anything above clear communication in text, like having lunch, is above and beyond. Penciling in lunch is what I’m willing to do, not what I need.

What I need is her to stop moving the goalposts so that I actually get positive feedback. When she holds off reading because she feels angry/guilty, she opens the e-mail and responds to it with anger and guilt…… if the issue is between us. She has time to post-mortem with me if she is not a party. She will help me improve any relationship except for ours.

It felt like I was settling for a connection that would be insecure my whole life because I would walk on eggshells to keep her until I died…….. because bringing up anything about our relationship makes her avoid me. It has to stop for as much as she walks in beauty and I do because of it.

Two reasons for giving up. The first is that I genuinely don’t want to take up her time. The second is that I don’t want the occasions when we do have time to interact to be contentious. I can’t be one of those “Christmas and Easter” friends because we’ve been so close in the past that it physically hurts when we’re distant. Having that distance is the only thing that allows me to keep that thought process at bay. It’s exhausting for the feelings I have about her to rush in and out. Riding the waves is a good thing, but it’s dangerous when the water levels are so different at low and high tides.

I am astounded by the entry where she told me she had read as much as she was going to read, that it’d been okay up to now. There were tears running down my face; my face felt as if it had never really been washed before. The reason I was crying is that the entry was much later than I thought it would be, and she’d read everything that was truly important to me. She didn’t agree with all of it, and that’s okay. Just knowing she read it is enough. Knowing she was still reading while I was at full strength, not social masking. Letting my autism run wild over our experiences so that I could process them through my fingers.

Of course it hurt that she said she wouldn’t read anymore, but it hasn’t been true at any other time in our relationship, so I’m convinced if it’s not true now, it will be. I have no doubt she loves reading about you. For some reason, in her mind I am very perceptive about everyone on this blog as well as completely 100% wrong when she’s in it.

I am not surprised at this attitude, as it’s most people’s attitude about my writing. It’s irritating as shit because people will read me for days/months/years and really get a feel for my writing. They’ll fall in love with it and treat me like a hero. They’ll build me up til I think I’m James Dean on toast. Then, when they’ve convinced me they really want to be a part of my life, they see what I’ve written about them and it quickly begins a downward spiral if I say anything but “the sun shines out of their asses.” I have not changed a thing in terms of the way I operate, but they’ve changed their perspective on me.

I love that Supergrover read the entry about all the things she never knew, about telling the bees she was gone… and might have even heard me read it. If she did, I hope she likes it, because that’s the purest love letter I’ve ever written to anyone.

Falling in love with straight women is never advisable. It’s cliché for a reason, though. Happens all the time. When it comes to being attracted to someone, mistakes are made whether people are the same sexual orientation or not. Plus, even if we had both been queer, that’s no guarantee that we would have been attracted to each other. I’m not even sure I’d be attracted to her physically because I’ve never seen her in person. Yes, her photo is gorgeous; I can’t go on that because you can’t judge how you feel around them by it.

This is why I’m so sure that what she looks like doesn’t even matter. That whether we meet or not, our brains are connected and that’s what’s important to me. Our brains being connected is just not a good thing until we establish healthy patterns and tamp down all the rage.

She and I, like Dana and me would’ve if we’d gotten back together, restarted with a lot of hostility. Over time, we each came around and I kept growing. I felt like we were getting closer, but I think now that I felt the intimacy of opening up to her. That theory holds up because my feelings didn’t degrade if she stopped talking- still haven’t, won’t. What I went through with her was a dream, but a disjointed one…. the kind where you think you’re going to learn the meaning of life….. until you realize it’s all just a bunch of green glass and movie magic.

I am not sorry for wanting her to be my somewhere over the rainbow, but I am sorry that she knows it….. and I couldn’t get around it by hiding her to her because I’m just not that good a writer. Hiding her to people who don’t already know her is hard enough. The reason she knows I love her this much is not just because I told her. I thought it was easier to go the hard route and just be honest with everyone, including you.

Generally, after I talked to her, I talked about her…….. and she read it. The reason we didn’t leave it at a one-note conversation is because I wasn’t writing my feelings about her to her. I was writing my feelings about her to you and she was listening. Sometimes it made her angry. Sometimes I touched her heart. The worst days was when she perceived I was doing the former when I was trying to overdo it on the latter. All I’ve ever wanted is to change her mind and heart, because I wouldn’t be who I am if she hadn’t changed mine.

She knows how I feel about her, how I’ll always feel about her. I will stay in motion especially being acted on by an outside force. In so many ways because our relationship is virtual, losing her is losing me. There are moments when my social mask is her because none of my other friends know her and won’t pick up the imitation. We’re both good people. If something worked on me, it’ll work on someone else.

Supergrover is sort of neurotypical with ironclad boundaries and morals. Therefore, it was imperative to pick up her social masking. She is much more stable than I am in that arena (I’m autistic/ADHD and she’s not, but she has PTSD so I’d be surprised if social masking hasn’t been a part of her life since she picked a favorite Crayon.). We are both incredibly complicated constructs, what makes us attracted to each other on a magnetic level because our conversations just keep digging down.

At first, she was good about thanking me for calling her out and not immediately getting angry, but it didn’t last because I got on her last fuckin’ nerve. I’m not saying her reactions weren’t anything I didn’t deserve, just that I was thoughtless and it had bigger consequences than I could see on the current chessboard. You often don’t when you’re playing black.

I didn’t get anywhere in our relationship until I pushed over my king for the last time….. except it wasn’t, because Supergrover was used to having a fight and would provoke me when I said I needed time. I am responsible for not walking away at that point, but because autism, I’m not very good at that. So, we’d spend our days ripping each other apart when this is someone I wanted to love for all time.

It mystified me that we were fighting over how beautiful she was and I was losing. I’ve loved beautiful women since forever and I’d still never seen anything like her……… and I would say that if I’d never seen a pic.

Her letters were like uncut coke to an autistic brain. I lit up like a Christmas tree every time a notification came in. My senses were heightened because I’d been in burnout/depression when we met and the dopamine of new relationship energy pulled me out. I missed DC (I lived in Oregon then), and for as much as I thought of myself as a lovesick girlfriend obsessed with punctuation, I thought of her letters as “news from home,” too.

I had never had a relationship that was so deep emotionally without being physical, so it took a while to learn how straight women do that. Definitely something I needed to know because I’ve misinterpreted lots of signals the wrong way in both directions. One of the things that’s come from being so tired of walking in gray area is if I’m interested in someone, just tell them. Don’t stop to hem and haw over whether they’re straight or not. If they are, they’ll tell you.

I realized I was pigeonholing women by anticipating whether they were or weren’t based on a non-existent set of facts that are actually just stereotypes. I’m not saying that telling Supergrover I had feelings for her was wrong, I’m saying that I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn’t change things as much as it did, because she was already a monotropic thought process without bringing all that romance shit into it. I felt like a seventh grader. Ugh. Eyeroll.

The one thing I will not do is pretend it didn’t happen. Supergrover has to learn to deal with my feelings if she wants to be in my life because I do not want a relationship where only one of us is getting what we need. What I need is for her to stop the push/pull of adoring me when I adore her here- deeply, intimately… and saying “you’re the only one who ever ruins anything” after we have text.

If this was a movie, our indecision over whether to be good to each other or not would make the audience throw popcorn at the screen. So many times we have duelled, enough that now there’s never a winner because we decided to attack each other instead of the problem.

I want to be kind to her. I want to love her like no one else does, and I can be safe and secure in the fact that I do. It has been such a circuitous route that it is impossible to remember every turn. I do know that at some times, it has felt like Google Maps just told us to swim.

Right now what I am doing is making sure that when I’m older, I still have these memories. It’s not a lot to write down to move on. It’s a lot to write down to record. Hindsight is 20/20, and I cannot look forward before I look back. If I am only looking forward, I am not seeing the mistakes I’ve already made.

Autistic people take in information by reading a lot of the time because processing someone’s voice is more difficult than text. In effect, I’m writing down my memories because it makes social masking stick in my head.

Social masking doesn’t mean that I’m not being real with you when I do it. I am not trying to learn how to emote. I am learning how people receive it so that I can be more effective in my communication. It would be nice if people did the same for me, but neurotypical people don’t generally do that. It’s not how society works. If you are not having a meltdown and stimming by rocking, “you don’t look autistic.” If you hear people say that, they’re certainly not the type who’s prepared to be sensitive to it.

The world doesn’t owe me any favors in terms of excusing my behavior because I’m autistic. It is only a tool for me to learn how my reactions are different by having them classified into a group. I would like to make the whole world more accessible, but that’s not my call. My call is being able to act upon an outside force because it acts upon me, not cower away because I’m afraid to take up room.

For instance, I know that I rejected a lot of love in my equal and opposite reaction to Supergrover because it wasn’t the package I wanted. She thought I was being selfish, like a child who’s had their favorite toy taken away. Our problems weren’t child’s play, so I don’t know why she thought the solutions were easy. She took up an enormous amount of room in the relationship and, I feel, blamed me for wanting a solid 10-20% rather than a rolling approval rating with large spikes.

I’ve said it so many times, and mostly that’s just to convince me I did the right thing. It is torture in the moments I think I didn’t, because if so, I traded a lot for a little. There had to be multiple battles for me to concede the war, because I kept changing tacks and nothing got better. It was hell walking away, and an even bigger hell to stay and be caught in a gray area that felt like it had an electric fence. No matter how much I tried not to get buzzed, I hit a wire somewhere.

The two scenarios are so different because the honeymoon phase is so different from where we are now. It would have to have been that explosive to create this much pain.

Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction, but some elements are more stable than others.

I am not coming from a place of lack, begging her to come home. I am coming from a place of abundance that I ever got to love her at all.

For cesium, there was flourine. For me, there was you…. and the joy and light of being complete.

Be Yourself

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

My comfort level with fighting is nil. I don’t know what to do when I express my opinion and someone gives me theirs in return, because no matter how hard I try to make my voice sound inert, people will add things into it that I don’t mean. This seems to be even more true of the last 10-20 years, where patience was destroyed one Facebook Notification at a time. God forbid you think about what you’ve done rather than ripping a relationship apart.

One of the reasons I allow myself to get so angry on this web site is that people do it to me all day, every day. I’m just processing my problems with them in a way that neither one of us has to listen to it. I don’t hear that anger until I’m reading back to myself. The difference is that I take the time to really make friends with why I’m angry. The root of the issue. A quarter to never will you actually see me pop off at someone here. Generally, by the time I’m mad here, there’s little hope for our relationship because if they don’t care about being my friend, I sure as shit won’t care about being theirs.

I am hard on myself because I ask the questions other people won’t and they get angry. For instance, I am sure that Supergrover hated it when I told her that I hated not knowing what her husband thought of me. Whether he hated me or got turned on by me created two different sets of problems. One I was willing to work on. One I am absolutely not. I will never in my lifetime look in that man’s face if he’s put her through that even once, and thus me by proxy. He doesn’t deserve to know me on that level, and neither does she if she’s not willing to warn me what I’m walking into…… and she couldn’t unless I just directly said it out loud. A man being turned on by one of his wife’s friends is not something he’ll tell his cute, perfect straight wife. No, he’ll wait till his angel is in the bathroom and suggest entrapment…… but this is all done as a joke, of course. Who wouldn’t think that suggesting I could get what I wanted by working with him wasn’t absolutely on the up and up? I didn’t think all men thought this way until they did, my beautiful girl. This is not between Michael and me. This is the dance between Frank and Idgie for all time.

I think my personal goal is just to be a bee charmer. You know Idgie would have gone on loving Ruth until she died whether Frank had fucked up and made being with her possible or not. Sure, there would be others. Just not in the same way. And she is every bit my Mary Louise Parker, apt because she kind of reminds me of Amy from “The West Wing,” too.

Being myself as a personal goal meant growing into the love I have for Supergrover (and Michael. And the kids. And the dogs. And the fish. And the books.). Growing into it meant allowing me to be me, because by asking questions without bullshit filters, most of the time I got what I needed to know and could build on it. Telling her that I had feelings for her destroyed all that , because she didn’t know how to react to me as a woman anymore. It’s cute and innocent in some ways, very hard for me in others. What’s easy is being ridiculously cute to each other online. What’s hard is knowing how much of that translates, if at all.

I am glad that she doesn’t treat me as if those feelings have to go away. They did, and we agree that they should have. They do not disappear as if they were never there, though, and it’s wonderful when she remembers that fact- she’s not my love, but has been, and is tender with me because of it. Being tender with each other is all I want out of our relationship now, and because it’s too unhealthy to interact, I’m glad I have a garden here on WordPress. I have lifted the plants, but the leftover roots season the soil. Romantic love has been allowed to attach to other feelings and the wheat separated from the chaff quite naturally. Love is a thriving aquascape of growth. The goal was just to make “in-love” feelings the chlorine you have to remove first. I never struggle with chlorine removal anymore. I have to protect life.

Things were unclear about meeting up in the real world and neither one of us knew (knows?) whether we’ll meet in the future. The reason I plan a future with her is simple. She is such a writer that she will kick herself when she thinks of how lame her last words were to me and she’ll want to say something better and so will I because I love her. Her last words to me were “obviously you’re the only person who can change.” I assured her that was not true or would ever be the case, but she disappears if I don’t say something against which she can rage. I am also trying to step away from a trauma bond, which makes your emotions play tricks on you, anyway. I waffle between wanting to cry on her like a four year old and being perfectly fine. She doesn’t deserve to come back at this point, because she’s not willing to change a damn thing. Letting her in would be a disaster, but I’ll never be strong enough to keep her out. It’s just not me. I believe everyone has a resurrection story, and I forgive them over and over. This often leads me into spending more time on a story than I really should. Not interacting has shown me how much I initiate.

It’s so hard, living in that disconnect between “it’s not personal” and “it really is personal to an enormous degree.” I always want to be the one to give her the next thing she loves to read. I don’t like it when she doesn’t provide me any reading material in return. It makes the relationship feel too one-sided, pouring emotion into someone where it’s not wanted. She doesn’t see that I love her in every color, in every dimension, and tries to say that I’m writing her as a flat character.

My boyfriend’s dog is better at context clues than that.

I set out to be a bee charmer when I realized she didn’t love her as much as I did.

The personal goals came in when I realized that I was talking about a universal problem. Women aren’t taught to love each other because they don’t know how to love themselves, especially as part of a patriarchy.

She says that I write about everything as if it’s not multifaceted in anger, as if I wouldn’t give everything to hear her tell me one of them. I feel like I am painting this journal with our emotions, and it would be great if she would also show her work. She’s doing all the algebra in her head and her teacher’s counting off points- not in judgment but because they can’t get there without showing their work.

The hardest personal goal for myself has been walking away from her in order to make my emotional life stronger. I want her in my life, but not at the steep, steep cost of always feeling terrible about myself.

She wants me to be her friend without her having to invest anything anymore, and her life is too complicated to go without investing in each other.

The second hardest is not feeling like running back toward her every time something doesn’t go right. To know that I really was meant to grow in this direction, and that she’s strong. If she sees where I’m going and wants it, she’ll pack.

The hardest personal goal is being yourself even when the one you love the most doesn’t like them.

Invincible and Impervious

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

I wrote something about Supergrover that made me realize I was saying it about her, but later something I identified within myself as well. I often find that most of Supergrover is me, but I don’t know that for sure. That I know I’m describing her, but I don’t know that I’m describing me until I read and reflect. This is not a gossip column, this is self-help. I know that she laughs and cries with me over this from a distance. We both participated. We both lost something. We both love each other and we always will. But whether there are more words to add to our story together is up for grabs. My heartbreak is not losing my relationship with someone that has power, as if she’s a cool accessory so I can name drop (I can’t, anyway, so this would be useless to me). I told her at last interaction that I had no problem going on and busting her up because I had so much anger that needed to resolve. I’ve been in this much anxiety since 2015. She says she has forgiven me and also been unwilling to discuss a path forward by avoiding talking about it. I know that she’s told me it depends on the future overall, but she won’t help us get there.

I once told her that this blog was a record of every twist and turn it took to give her a hug, meaning to be sweet and I think it was, but I’m not sure. Do you see what I mean? If someone has been creeped out enough that they ask a real person in my life if they need a restraining order, my rejection sensitivity dysphoria will go apeshit that someone thinks I’m trying to threaten them to that degree. And then to come back to me later and be unwilling to reassure me that we’re okay for years? It’s confusing as fuck to want to take care of someone and not be certain how. This is someone I have pined over like a teen romance from the 90s. Once you’ve felt that for someone, it’s always there in the smallest part of you. I can move on from wanting to be her partner. That was easy. But I cannot move on from trying to be affectionate to the extent that I can.

In the first couple of years, a line like “a record of every twist and turn it took to give you a hug” would have made her tear up a little because she would have thought I meant it platonically. Because I was direct in just asking her if she was capable of falling in love with someone intellectually because my heart ached too much not to know, now I don’t know if she’s moved on enough to accept that I mean those things platoncally again. That she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop and I’m playing her when I never want to hurt her for anything in the world. It would be a disaster. Not only would it alienate me from her, there were a very specific set of circumstances that led to those feelings like a WWII-era sweetheart, and trust me when I say it’s a bigger range than she’ll accept. I took on a project when I married her, and not that I mean it like a bitchy mean girl. I meant that in order to be her friend, I had homework. She didn’t think about what I do and when she told me who she was in real life (her name didn’t mean anything, just mutual friends so I admire her because of the company she keeps. Different playing field in terms of context to understand her, not context to write about her. If you come to this blog and it’s not there one day, know I did it for love. I’m not trying to goad her and provoke her because I’m trying to have content here. I’m saying that her shit has consequences, and it hurts me she doesn’t recognize that.

That because I talk about my everyday issues she changed the game and left me hanging. I knew this was a possibility from week one because she said something that really, really hurt me and had a cold response. She had a cold response to my grief over my mother dying and had the audacity to tell me she knew she was being a dickhead. It was basically along the lines of “why do you think I don’t understand. Why are you so special?” Because I think you think it’s weird that I’m still grieving and you have no idea what you’re in for. She said it around the anniversary of my mother’s death, and it was fresh. What we know is “fresh” is like the first three or four years. That’s because everyone could die around you and you won’t feel it like your parents’ deaths. You learn to live around something you thought you never could. In retrospect, she was a bad friend with moments of glory, but all anxious/avoidant attachments have this pattern. You binge/purge for all time until you realize it’s something a relationship can’t sustain. But what i was binging is not for normal people. Just imagine Kathy Griffin dating Steve Wozniak, but we’re not dating because it’s better for me to be the one that’d be there for her next husband should a thing like that come to pass.

I relaxed into it because of something she said. That you should stay with someone if you love them even if there’s no promise of sex anymore. She didn’t mean it in a negative way at all, she meant that a relationship is worth it if you love someone. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel that way before, I did. I just knew she knew what I was dealing with. That once all those feelings of wanting to be her romantic partner went away and learned the immensity of our bond, platonic marriage made sense to me and I began searching for images in media that represented those relationships. Not the couple from “The Notebook.” Jay and Silent Bob. The Doctor and Martha Jones. Aziraphale and Crowley season one, not two. An angel and a demon as platonic loves is my favorite quote on earth, even though Crowley isn’t an atheist. The quote is just the same idea as an angel and a demon committing for eons.

A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.

Pete Rollins

I am just not really sure she knew when I changed messages, and tired of not knowing because sometimes she showed that she did and it made me glow from the inside. That when I stare at her pictures now, it’s because I’m trying to feel her presence in the room when she’s not there. It’s so much better than wanting something I can’t have, because that attachment isn’t secure. Where we fail is assuring each other this is the case and acting like it’s not true. The assurance that she’s next to me is as brillian as when people talk about seeing Christ or heaven in a hallucination, and she doesn’t accept that she has that vibe by nature, not turner. That everyone else will focus on her nature while I don’t give a shit about her professional accomplishment when in the outside world, that’s all people would see and would judge her as infinitely superior to everyone else. I promise that whatever the straight girl equivalent of internailzed homophobia is, she’s felt it. Her profession’s got a bad rap among the fans and sometimes voters, historically. Nothing about that rap is bad, you just feel it as pressure like a preacher’s kid.

On top of that, she’s drop dead gorgeous so when she enters a room, people sit up a little more because they respect her before she talks. Her words, like mine, have a devastating effect on both of us. I told her once that she should propose to Michael like Chandler and Monica, both getting on both knees and meeting in the middle. She loved that image, and didn’t get that I needed her to do it, too, because whether or not we get along, we have business and always will, because she fucked us both in the end. I’m not angry at her because I led us here at first and she finished the job. She doesn’t see the wall of bullshit I walked into, and instead of taking responsibility like she has a child now (in terms of the level to which I can understand her without doing the homework, and the feelings you can’t understand when you try when the busier person will not tell you what they think of those feelings when it’s vitally important to our friendship. I need solid communication again, because she said she wanted it and it created a situation where it’s too dangerous to let go, because it was thoughtless to believe I wouldn’t need her if she’s looked at it from the perspective that my career might be important to me. I know she never wants to tank it because she was my first patron. She will come back eventually and read all these entries obsessively (hopefully with a third, dispassionate eye because she’s judgmental so I know I can explain until she understands. I do not mean judgmental like an asshole. Judgmental like “that’s the way she processes emotions because her last Meyer’s-Briggs is J. It’s the way we call each other out on the carpet when she’s not trying to please me and it makes our friendship all the better for it because we’re constantly speaking the same language).

Therefore, I am trying to make the case for platonic marriage, not judging her. I am neurodivergent and on the spectrum between autism and ADHD with overexplaining as a basic need. You cannot imagine how much crossover there is between me and Kathy Griffin dating Steve Wozniak. It’s impossible to date a person who needs to process their feelings and it ends up being onstage. It’s hard for Supergrover to like me now, but she has a thick enough skin to let me be as I am. She loves it when my admiration runs deep. I know she does. She loves that when I look into the smallest place inside me, I see my love for her. What she doesn’t love is when I get angry and call her out on her bullshit because she thinks that’s my focus. It’s her filter. She’s one of the great loves of my life because I’ve felt those feelings and they went away, like lesbians who have that bond and their partner moves on. I can’t learn to love her like a straight woman, but I can do this. It is hell on earth that she does not see what she’s done, and how devastating it is when she nopes out. She entered a contract (a Massey pre-nup without the clause to defeat it) when we signed it by choice and now can’t deal with the consequences. I call her on her shit and she doesn’t like it and knows it’s just as essential as I do. What I cannot get her to see is that I am not berating her for her opinions and judging her as a person. Her worth is precious to me, beloved Disciple, and a good description because she loves my writing and there’s a little bit of power imbalance, in retrospect.

Sometimes I wonder what Jesus would think of his story after he died, because we’ll never know it whether he was bodily resurrected or not. I don’t need magic Jesus. Anyway. I wonder what he would think of his weird little sect actually accomplishing something by committee, a first on many levels.

The immensity of feeling like she’s always going to feel wronged because I did it once weighs on me, because she only treats me like she forgives me on the surface. It’s having faith and throwing it away over and over, spaghetti code without having some together. Never debugging the code and versioning like Microsoft (the idea that you keep advancing the operating system without taking out the code that breaks for older hardware and software. I am writing a really identifiable story because there wasn’t a pandemic in 2015. They didn’t have empathy for an all-Internet relationship because they didn’t have the context of living on the Internet before it. I didn’t have a problem with keeping up that disconnect because I’d done it all of my adult life. I can feel my emotions without being in the room, but I’ve been in powerful rooms when she’s e-mailed me from them. It’s a lot. She’s a lot. But I’m capable if she’ll see it. I don’t think of this as public excoriation. I think of it as explaining my feelings to myself and others as a survival manual. There are consequences, not all of them good. It’s a gospel, a written account.

In the Bible there is no argument for God, only people’s reactions to them. I hope that I am coming across from this perspective. That I am not interested in being that person that makes her participate in anything because I’m obsessed with her, it’s that she made me responsible for something I didn’t ask for and I’m not even mad about it, but I need her and she doesn’t have time. it’s a straight up problem that could be solved in 10 mutes, because I wouldn’t feel the need to constantly explain why I’m not an asshole and she wouldn’t feel guilty about it and push me away. But she loves lines where it’s clear my love runs deep. Really deep. So far, her favorite line I’ve written about her is that she was a mother lion who carried me through the mountains, who has no trouble with tough love as it’s required. She doesn’t respect the authority I feel when my mother lion comes out as well. That it is not a case of loving someone in one direction like she’s been doing. She has the right to walk away, and it’s a pain I know she never meant to inflict.

I said that the things that make her invulnerable and impervious at work were killing her in terms of strength coming to her through her vulnerability instead. The issue on which I’ve changed my mind is that we are actually two separate people. If you knew her real life story, even she would realize that with my childhood, I totally grew up into her adulthood if she was looking at making those connections. That her people skills are built on my people skills and vice versa, because my inner child is older than hers and her adult voice is older than mine. Oh, my God do I ever become Lindsay’s childhood nightmare of older sister oppression. Supergrover has never been an older sister and I am willing to bet that her little sisters would be enjoying this if they knew it existed.

I am willing to say it’s just projection, but I think she’d agree that the things that make her piss excellence at work are killing her on the home front, because those two worlds are drastically different. She can be soft, feminine, flirty, whatever…….. at home. At work, there are rules, and breaking them when they just don’t make sense. Rule following gets me nowhere in my line of work, and i realized that from living in hers. But please know that I’m not slamming her in the slightest. If I got excited enough to go to the moon, I’m betting I’d have a strict set of rules to follow for something incredible. That’s my story here- that nothing is bad, nothing is even hard when we’re both clear.

She is my beautiful girll.

Lost in Your Mind

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Supergrover,

When my mind goes quiet, there’s a black and white picture of you that appears. It’s the only one you’ve ever taken just for me. It’s not that I don’t like other pictures of you. That’s not it at all. I like that you were thinking of me when you took it, and there’s just a hint of a smile with mischievous eyes. I wonder what your eyes looked like that day, and the days after…. in which we were clinging to each other and you kept whispering “you’re safe.” Beautiful girl, you whisper me to sleep with that one enduring phrase. I don’t sleep much, but when I do you watch over me, just like you’ve done since I was “young.” When I get scared in the night, I hear you in my head. “Maybe a doughnut will help.” I would have taken any vow that day, but the one I took was unusual.

Sometimes I feel like you don’t realize it’s unusual, because you’re big picture and I’m in the weeds. I know it would take you being on vacation for us to even have a chance to drink coffee together, so it’s just difficult having feelings you’re not there to catch because you can’t and shouldn’t be. Yet, I still signed the paper with blood.

The game changed from Old Maid to No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, beautiful girl. Please know that this is true. Feel it in your heartbeat. Let the knowledge settle in you, because I am not placing guilt or blame. I am asking “where do we go from here?” Our connection is pure, but not our communication.

This relationship just makes me turn things over in my mind constantly, but is only one cog of many. My complications are dependent on what I’m tracking, and I owe you an apology for making you think you’re not on the face.

I am so sorry that when you came to me with what you were going through, I reacted poorly. I was having a bad day and I exploded. A laundry list of what you were going through with no thought to what I was going through made me crazy, because it was just reinforcement of the last eight years. I express needs, you express avoidance. I was frustrated that nothing was changing no matter what I did. I thought you were blind to something that has been in place since our inception. That the things we share do not go away when we don’t speak. We are making things worse for both of us, convinced we’re right and without each other. It’s stupid, but I’ll live.

The reason, though, that I was upset is that I could have written the essay on what you were going through. I do not take my needs lightly where you are concerned because your time is more objectively valuable than mine (during business hours). I have to weigh how I feel before I talk to you because I pick my battles carefully. I don’t try to goad, provoke, or scold you. I agonize over every decision because I have to think “does this matter right now compared to what she’s doing?” There will never be anything in my life as important, comparatively, so by the time I’m brave enough to lay something out with you, I’ve thought about it for weeks.

Every decision where you are concerned comes with complications, and I’m one of the people that can handle complicated. What I cannot handle is a conflict between two people where only one person says anything. You explained to me what you were going through, but ignored everything I said so I felt unheard after years of saying the same thing.

While you’re off thinking I’m a judgmental dick about everything, here’s what is actually running through my mind:

Where’s she going? What’s she doing? Does she have all her meds? Where’s Michael on this? Did she get that weighted blanket? Are the girls going with her this trip or is she on her own? Is a driver picking her up? What’s his story? When is wheels up? When does she land? Will she have e-mail in-flight or will there be crap going on? Don’t forget to tell her you love her when you know she’s going to be in the air.

This type monologue has been running every day for 10 years, and intensifies when I know it should. I know you don’t necessarily like it, but I remember pleading with you- that you need someone to care about you and could you just let me? Please? I always want to take care of you and I’m sorry I haven’t done it more often.

Limiting our interaction stops me from feeling unwanted, but it doesn’t stop the monologue because we fucked up and we’re married now- without me ever being able to explain why I mean what I mean to anyone other than you, and so far you don’t get it, or you really, really, do and that’s why you don’t want to talk about it. My job is to be lost in your mind. To be the best at separating what can go into the character of Supergrover from what can’t leave the building. I am afraid that I’m the worst.

The simplest answer would be to just stop writing about it, and I say that to myself every single day and realize I can’t go anywhere else. In this space, I have complete control of the narrative. I can relax and breathe, because no one else can respond. I mean, they can. People leaving comments is fun. I mean that Bryn and I aren’t going through each other’s comments and responding on the other’s behalf. I tell a story, people only talk to me.

I am not just writing the you in the entries, but the you in the comments. The you that exists in my world vs. the you that exists in yours. It’s never going to go away and we are both cutting off our noses to spite our faces by pretending we can walk away as if nothing happened…. but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that you absolutely can walk away like nothing happened, shooting emotions like metal spikes while I’m telling you that nail guns fucking hurt. By the time you told me everything you were going through, you told me there was no space for me in a way that meant change. That I could deal with things as they are. Period.

It cannot be the whole story. I know it. But you should understand that you walked into this willingly. I don’t need you to say you’re sorry and disappear into the ether. I need you to accept the reality of the situation and say “what’s next?”

There’s no one else for me and you knew that’s what would happen- because it happens every single time. The information becomes more important than the connection. I do not say that to guilt you at all; there will be others, just not ever again in the same way. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for at least seven years (now eight).

Nothing about our situation is wrong and bad. I love you in a way I don’t have the capability to love anyone else, and that makes me feel unique and special in a way I didn’t before. My worth on the planet doesn’t come from you, but the perks to living here sure do.

No judgment. No guilt. I just can’t engage anymore because I can’t communicate where you can hear it.

If I send a letter by publishing it here, it’s because I don’t have any expectation of it being read. I don’t want to open the door to more fighting. I want you to be at peace, even if I’m not it.

We told each other we loved each other once upon a time. Now, that check needs to cash. I’m just not going to wait at the bank all day, leaving empty-handed at 4:00 PM.

But know that if we agree to meet, I’ll be in the lobby with your coffee. I’m tired of feeling crazy for doing exactly what you need me to do. I’m just working without a net, and afraid.

Until my mind quiets, and the shadows reveal your face…. contemplative because I’m lost in your mind.

Yours,

Leslie

Speak More to That -or- That’s So Interesting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

In my last entry I was talking about hearing people’s voices in my head when I type, literally transcribing a movie onto the page. Two of the voices I hear all the time are ex-girlfriends, and one of them means just as much as the other even though one relationship was seven years and change, the other was three months. That’s because they’re the two that caused me the most growth and development the fastest.

The first title comes from Dana doing an impression of her therapist. When Dana would put out a statement, she’d always say, “speak more to that.” Every time we got into an argument, pulling that one out made us both dissolve into laughter and we could proceed arguing again because it was never a case of right and wrong, but a case of figuring out how to move on. I didn’t want to pack up and live in our problems. I moved to Washington so I could say, “what’s next, Mrs. Landingham?” DC gave me the backdrop to believe I could be more than I was used to being in the world, and I am.

I mean something to someone who really means something. Her Wikipedia page would be better than mine. That my history is woven into hers in such a unique and beautiful way will never leave me.

Beautiful girl, whether you believe it or not, meeting you is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Just because there are complications doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Our Apple Watches also have complications, and we use them every day. I hope the day comes where our complications are in the right place. We both need to be on each other’s six, and I’m on it if you are. I just need you to want it more, and you can’t. Life is long. I’ll wait because you’re worth it, and you always will be. When we can say “one more mountain…. hey, so what” we’ll be able to say “trust me baby, this is love.” (That’s an Amanda Marshall song, but mountains just about cover it in terms of metaphor.)

Sometimes I hope I can resolve things with Supergrover, sometimes I don’t. I feel the same sort of push/pull I feel with Dana. That because Supergrover won’t talk to me the way she used to and it hangs shame over my head. I don’t want to live that way anymore when I’ve agreed to do big things for her the rest of my life, and I did that without really thinking it through in terms of being a blogger. Neither did she. Now it’s the tie that binds because I need you guys emotionally to support me and I can’t slip up. It’s walking on a wire every day, because she made it where she couldn’t not be my first thought. Clearly, she doesn’t want that, but it’s work product, not emotions that are my concern now.

I don’t know what to forget, and what to remember.

I can talk about absolutely getting wasted off her energy, but I can’t describe her too closely. I can only tell you she’s up there with Helen Mirren on my list of gorgeous women (no one can beat out Helen, stop trying…….. but Supergrover does think I have amazing taste in women). I can say she has power, but not where because it’s a niche and would make her immediately identifiable. I have to think like a journalist protecting a source, not a blogger with friends who have everyday issues not tied to working here. The power imbalance is absolute and correct.

So that means I think a lot about someone who doesn’t want to think about me, and not for malice. Just through the nature of how we work, which is vastly different from each other. The problem comes in when she will never have a problem smaller than me so that I can move up on the priority list while I am also struggling, genuinely. I can either move on and try to forget, or we can be close. In the middle is too scary because I don’t know what I’m doing….. and I’m a perfectionist, so it’s really hard to admit that.

I am sure that Supergrover thinks that me digging deep to let go is what should have happened long ago, but I didn’t realize then what I do now. We both regret making fuckups that affected our careers, but by not acknowledging it, we are keeping to our separate corners, unable to trust each other when we should lean on each other the most.

In my own life, it feels like I’ve given up a lot for her that she hasn’t recognized, and it hurts, but it’s not my responsibility to change her. It’s not even her responsibility to want to change. It’s deciding how much chaos I’m willing to breathe without putting a safety net under the trapeze. However, it was never in the interest of getting closer tot her, it was an added bonus in escaping from Dana and getting a clean slate. That’s because I cannot tell her story. Only she can do that. She cannot even tell it to me, much less others. Whether that part is ironclad or subjective is up for grabs, because I cannot know that, either.

I’ve made a lot of assumptions and missed a lot of messages. She stopped standing up to me and started telling me that I wanted too much, so she isolated me from everyone else including her. I have a legitimate issue where I need her more than anything and she’s the one person who doesn’t have any bandwidth left over for herself, much less me. I have a ton of empathy, and know that’s not the whole story. She gets offended, shuts down, and wants to rage at me, but doesn’t. She saves up my e-mails to reply later, because she feels guilty and now doesn’t have any context to make connections.

I wanted to stop that part.

There was an ironclad space for me before, and there isn’t now. I have always understood why, yet marveled at the time that’s gone by without us ever really getting to the bottom of anything…. or if I did, it was completely on my own, like having a therapist who disengages and you feel like they’re bored….. they’re not. They’re covering up how bad they want to scream “LEAVE HIM!” When I perceive disinterest, what they’re feeling is trying not to take on my problems as their own. Those messages are drastically different, and lost in a chasm if you don’t address it.

I don’t have that kind of relationship with Supergrover, but I do have that kind of push/pull. I need things and get frustrated. I express that, she tells me I’m the only one who ever ruins anything. Then, she won’t tell me why she thinks that. Why am I so impressive that I’m worth keeping around when your responses come off as defensive and angry? To me, when you love someone and think they’re extraordinary, it means you’re willing to invest. I caused the original rift, butt she said she forgave me. Our ways of moving on were completely different. She thought the best answer was never to trust me again, but keep up the surface level stuff. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. I won’t feel insecure in an attachment and keep feeding it. I don’t care if she’s mine in a way no one else is (and frankly, I’m hers in a way no one else is). When she doesn’t look at my letters with love, she feels guilty and runs away. She shits on herself every time, saying that something isn’t good enough for me when it’s just that we have more to work out, and it’ll keep. Life is long.

She doesn’t feel as excited and impressed by her as I am, therefore why should I be interested in her? Meanwhile, she is 3D chess built on a Rubik’s cube. As I told her, “if you think about your story hard enough, you should want to hit that, too.” That was a time in which jokes like that actually made her laugh, because honestly. It’s just true.

We are connected because “what God has put together, let no man put asunder.” She is not God in this case, but she’s the face I use when I need to visit that place inside me to work out my shit on my own.

Through it, I can maintain a connection to the God I serve and how it is both Old and New Testament, vengeance and promise, everlasting life, and even still I’m making it up as I go along with fake as Christianese.

I just think of it as “the church has left the building.” If I translate that into line cook, it’s “we don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it.”

Going into your closet to pray has always been an excellent turn of phrase for me, and now it’s even more important. I don’t have to speak out loud to be heard. You guys listen enough as is. But you are the God that can take it, the face made up of many names, wants, and desires. I use God as the punching bag, not my beautiful girl. I can’t be sure that God is listening, but sure as shit, you are.

The second title come from an old girlfriend who knocked me on my ass with clever. she was a Rhodes Scholar who had the facade of a kooky teacher, but that was for show. She was brilliant, and a fantasy. We were at different places in our lives, but that didn’t stop us from having a ton of fun and leaving each other better than we found us….. eventually. It was hell when we first broke up because we had to live with each other, anyway (that has no bearing on my current situation……… Jesus. She’s straight. I’m gay. And we still would have had an easier time of it if we’d had triplets. I can laugh about that because we’re both past the age where we’d want to have kids, anyway.

But I know her. If I said “let’s foster” even ONE TIME we’d have five kids by EOB. But to be fair, that was her 10 years ago. She probably just adopted half her neighborhood instead. It’s one of the things that makes her Supergrover to me. It’s fun to have a hero that is also approachable. I think it’s because I am, too. I just talk about my life and invite other people to talk about theirs. I don’t choose friends based on what they can do for me, as much as they think I do when I don’t feel my needs are being met despite fulfilling theirs. Deciding how much energy they get of mine when I’m not getting theirs. It’s not dependent on how each other feels, but how well we can communicate to a happy medium where both people feel like they’re being heard. it is much more lonely to feel alone when someone else is in the room.

My ex-girlfriend used to touch my hand and say “that’s so interesting” to show that she really was intellectually turned on by something. It showed joy and passion on her face for every subject on earth. The whole time I’ve been writing, she’s been touching my shoulder and saying “interesting” the way she’d say it just so. I hear her in my head all the time, as a lot of my life is so interesting.

I cannot speak more to that.

I just know it’s there, and I’m grateful. I am settled within myself in a number of ways. I hope for a resolution in the end, it’s just going to take more than she thinks, but less than I do. If she thinks love is best served by avoiding conflict, that’s fine. I just need her to not do it to me, because she’s reinforcing the idea that I am no longer a value add and hasn’t stopped…….. when to me, I am Jay and she is Silent Bob. She is Harold. I am Kumar. We would look so cute together in a picture because if she’d just posted a photo of us in real life with a caption that said “I’m dating Pete Davidson” people would have believed it. They would have thought she was just as out of her damn mind as his other loves, while also being quietly pissed that they’re not dating Pete Davison, too (or her, for that matter. Christ on a cracker.).

But one relationship taught me how to feed the others. My relationship with my ex-girlfriend settled into her feeling at home with both Dana and me. There was a much larger age gap between us than Supergrover and me, so I was used to the yin and yang of having different cultural references and having to look them up. They’re west coast, I’m Houston. They’re Tupac, I’m Bun B. Different issues, different playing fields.

I am not explaining the rules of the game. I am giving color commentary on what it’s like to play it when there is no discussion or alteration of rules. You have to improvise and work with what you’ve been given.

Yet the more I speak to things, the less information you have. It’s just so interesting.

I’ll Have to Ask My “Wife”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What does your ideal home look like?

I may have accidentally gotten myself married off this weekend. Of course it’s all in jest, but I did make a genuine friend. It all started with an in-group chat re: a woman saying that she had just been on her first date with a woman, and was already sweating bullets over what to do next. Here’s my reply:

She’s a woman. She’s on pins and needles. Text her right now before she has a heart attack. And yes, I’m kidding. But trust me when I say that most women who date women are not direct and it’s confusing AF. You’re lucky you knew you were on a date and so did she.

And then I said, “and if you post in two weeks that you’re getting married, SO HELP ME GOD.”

It was then that the real conversation started, because I hit a nerve I knew I would. It’s just too easy, because what I’m talking about is fairly unique to women loving women and common in every country/culture. It has become a joke over the years, so much so that I’m surprised U-Haul hasn’t built an entire ad campaign around it.

So, anyway, a woman replied to me with a gif of a woman driving a U-Haul and I said “we need to focus on her right now. Stop flirting with me.” She thinks that’s funny and we keep talking. We have someone ask for a wedding invitation and someone offer to plan it for us- in “colors that are bold, yet somehow neutral.” I don’t think I’ve laughed harder in months.

We ended up friending each other because of a different part of the conversation. She says she’s an introvert. I said, “I was going to tell you I’m an introvert, but it’s so much worse than that. I’m a writer. And if you really need an excuse to poke your eyeball with a fork, I’m also a novelist.” Her reply? “Omg. So am I. Jesus. We’re already married.”

It was then that I knew she was a keeper. 😉

Well, in terms of a professional contact. I really don’t have many writer friends, so I asked her if I could friend her to talk shop. What started out as a joke turned into a genuine connection in the span of a few hours…. even if we don’t end up getting married in two weeks.

Here’s how my old life influenced my new one. For the last 10 years, I have had a boss ass bitch in my head giving me confidence. I am no longer one of those women who can’t be direct and just goes with the flow right up until they can’t. I wasn’t treating women like I had to be afraid of their opinions. It is not my job to be likable. It is my job to be myself and to let the right people gravitate toward me. It’s not being mean. It’s being in charge of my own vibration and making it loud enough that people either boost the signal or walk away. They have control over the amps, not my volume control.

So now, when I think of the perfect house, the only thing I require is a space that is totally and completely mine. Reflection is what I need to decide whether a problem does or does not go to 11.

As for decor, I haven’t even finished planning my “wedding” yet. Give me another two weeks. 😉

To Emote -or- The Letter of the Law

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 19 Comments

Why do you blog?

Being raised as a preacher’s kid caused me to alternate between carrying my heart on my sleeve and shutting down so that my real emotions remained hidden. This is due in a small way to my dad’s congregation and trying constantly to be the one who doesn’t need anything from anyone. I was actively trying for perfection in this area, because according to my mother, I needed to be the perfect child. But she didn’t say that in words. It was more that we had a job to do. Stiff upper lip and all that. It was bonkers, because my dad was the one with the actual job and he never expected any of that crap. My mother was the puppet master, and I don’t know that she knew that, but we did. We all lived in fear of rocking the boat.

This is going to sound horrible, but you’ve never known me to do anything but tell the truth. I never told my mother to shut the hell up and get with the program, and I desperately needed to do it for my own sanity. And, of course, she’s not here to defend herself, but on this one, she really can’t. It’s the one time in my life where I thought, “I will never forgive her ever in my lifetime.” I was just angry, of course. I did indeed get over it. But it took a very, very, very, very, very long time.

When I came out, my mother cornered me in my room and told me “I will not embarrass this family that way.” There’s more to it than that, but thankfully I’ve blocked it out. Only that one line remains, a scar on my skin healed over with time, but never forgotten.

Here’s what she never really took in:

Everyone already knew and talked shit behind her back. They knew before I DID. People with eyes recognize baby queers, even if their parents don’t. When I was 14, they thought I was being molested and at least two people cornered her and told her she needed to get me the hell out of that situation. It was too late, because I was already gone. It was a Supergrover kind of love at the wrong place and wrong time. However, if that hadn’t been a factor, I do think I would have been stuck in a miserable relationship considering how I think marriage is working out for her partner. I wouldn’t be her for cold hard cash. I am sure that she professes her love to everyone no matter the case…… because she has more in common with my mother than she would ever admit. She’s the puppet master, and I don’t know that she knew that, but we did.

Actually, that’s bullshit. Of course she fucking knew. I had all the rights and responsibilities of a partner, listening to all the crap going on in her life that was wildly inappropriate for a teenager. But I didn’t have her. She wanted me to be the one that wanted her while she played blissfully ignorant. I didn’t get laid, but I was well and truly fucked. The situation didn’t have to be romantic for it to be terrible. Supergrover is actually a tiny, tiny bit older than this woman, and I’m picturing her at her age when I was 14, and that was my BAZINGA! moment. I couldn’t picture her telling me jack shit for anything in the world….. to protect me, the very thing that I thought was happening and it turns out it, in fact, was not.

At some point, I’m going to go see about a boy. He’s already married, so it’s not like that. It”s that he was my boyfriend before Ryan, so, seventh grade, the one that was there every single Sunday and could probably tell me a lot more than I could tell him about what was going on if he remembers at all. It’s not that I was insignificant to him, it’s that it’s been 31 years now.

If he doesn’t remember, his dad could have written the dissertation. He was one of the ones that really saw through the bullshit, and he didn’t stop anything, but he was really the first person that made me absolutely lock down.

Unfortunately, the F is no longer with us.

Contrast my mother’s reaction to everyone else’s, including the actual pastor in the family.. My dad told the United Methodist Annual Confereence to shut the hell up and get with the program. Very politely, of course. He went to the floor, where there were hundreds of his colleagues gathered to vote on whether “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” You could wake up a Methodist in the middle of the night and the only thing they know from The Discipline is that one line.

I would have been an incredible Methodist pastor. The best, really, because I learned from the best. I would have brought something new and completely different to them if they hadn’t taken me out like it was Trash Day in Harris County.

Here is a paraphrase of what he said, made all the more brave, crazy, and stupid because it was 1995. The other thing you should know is he did not tell me what he was going to do beforehand. He didn’t tell anyone. He stepped out on a ledge, and he flew:

“It’s really easy to say that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching…. to group everyone together and call them ‘the homosexuals.’ But it looks different when it’s Carol’s niece. Bob’s nephew. David’s daughter.”

The vote did indeed pass, but it was closer than it had ever been.

I went to the church that day seeking God. They weren’t there until my dad finished.

The Bible says in Matthew 18:20 “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them.” In that moment, no one else was in the room except my dad and me. It wasn’t the first time I had a spiritual experience. Life is full of them. But that’s the moment “Jesus wept” became extremely loud and incredibly close. The church itself was just an expensive building….. as if no one had bothered to invite him. He wept in sorrow for some of his followers, and elation for others.

Jesus wasn’t crying because I’m queer and therefore bad or unworthy. He was crying because these supposed “fishers of men” were trying to lift the net after they got into it. But they will certainly spend queer money……. because they love you…….. when you tithe. Otherwise, good luck. You can belong to a church for 30 years and give them millions, but they still won’t do your wedding or ordain you.

When I could have been a “contenduh.” I know I talk a lot of shit, but not about this. When I’m on fire, I’m unstoppable. It just doesn’t happen all the time…… but that’s not being a bad preacher/pastor. That’s being a perfect human.

My dad didn’t quit his job because of me. He acknowledged his divinity and his humanity. It is both too complicated to explain and above your pay grade to know why. But on the way out, he raised hell in front of THE PEOPLE WHO FUCKING DESERVED IT.

Not me.

But everything was fine.

You can completely ignore me and I will be totally fine until I explode, angry at the world because NO ONE IS PAYING ATTENTION TO ME. It seems so ridiculous on my part to feel like a toddler, but sometimes I do. It’s okay for no one to notice that I’m sad or hurt or depressed or whatever… but if they love me, what should happen when I fade into the woodwork and am not noticed for years? I can keep it up flawlessly right up until I can’t.

How I have turned needing other people into not needing them at all is knowing that everything in the world would disappear and it would take a lot for me to notice if I was in the middle of an entry. I am now in charge of taking care of me, and I am much better about expressing a full range of emotions, especially when I am sitting alone and writing here, because nothing is directed. It is not my job to have a reaction when I’m finished.

Again, I don’t need friends. I want them. I cannot be dependent on them for validation, however.

It is to acknowledge that writing itself is a spiritual experience, and you (plural) becomes you (singular) in my mind…………

Where two or three are gathered, and Christ walks into the room.

If I know Christ as well as I think I do, here’s what Jesus would have said to the Annual Conference that day, actually the words of “Paul” in the second letter to the Corinthians:

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts. known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant- not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.

The letter of the law killed me…….. and resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.

There is nothing more responsible for that rebirth than you are.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Coffee and doughnuts will be served in the Fellowship Hall. 😉

Which One?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

My parents didn’t split until I was 17, so the biggest thing I’ve given up that we did every year is buy a devotional book and take turns reading to each other during Advent. It didn’t have to be a book specifically designed for that purpose. One year it was “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.”

Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say she made the most of it. “Hey! Unto you a child is born!” she hollered, as if it was, for sure, the best news in the world. And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid—of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway.

That book is seriously amazing. It will have you hooked from the jump. The first sentence starts, “the Herdmans were the worst kids in the history of the world….” It is absolutely hilarious, and then you get to this part, which is very close to Christmas Eve if you time it right.

They looked like the people you see on the six o’clock news- refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn’t much care what happened to them. They couldn’t have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph.

It is too early in the morning to be this emotional, and yet, here I am.

In some way, shape, or form I’ve kept up with writing Advent/Christmas sermons, which my dad did for years…. except he doesn’t manuscript. He does note cards with choice phrases. I can do it, too, but I took this piece of advice from Martin Luther King, Jr:. “If you have something important to say, write it down.” This became even more true as I became a blogger, because I learned that if I only did note cards, I couldn’t publish anything afterwards. When I’ve hit home runs, people have seemed disappointed that it was off the cuff. It’s a completely different style, because you have to learn to read while not looking down.

The way I do it if I’m actually preaching as opposed to publishing is to write in LibreOffice instead of WordPress so I can make the font larger- at least 18pt. Then, I put it in a notebook. You can barely tell when I turn the page. But that was back then. Now, I use the Android version of Microsoft Word and put it in Reader View. Same software, different case. I love it because usually my sermons end up being 10 pages of double-spaced type and printing them out is impossible. Mostly because I have a printer, but I haven’t bought ink for it in seven years.

The last time I preached an Advent sermon has bearing on the conversation I was having in the Sinead O’Connor thread previously. I preach Advent like a physician, because that’s what Luke did for a living.

Advent is waiting for the baby. Setting out the layette. Watching the clock until Mary is 10 cm dilated. Our only job is to wait by the Pepsi machine until Luke emerges to say, with celebration and fanfare, that it’s a boy.

Luke reminds me of Atul Gawande, a brilliant writer and cardiologist. That’s because religion and cardiology both take care of your heart. Luke has a direct connection to God. Atul Gawande has the checklist. They are two sides of the same coin.If I cannot be spiritual, I can be religious. If I am not religious, I can be spiritual. Losing a connection to God makes you create God in your own image. It takes away from “the ineffable mystery” (Neil Gaiman) and makes it where, as Anne Lamott says, “it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Luke has the connection to God. Atul Gawande has the checklist.

If you focus on one, it will bring the other back around. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone to church feeling completely unworthy of all of it…… BECAUSE THEY TOLD ME I WAS. I knelt at the communion railing every Sunday until I felt better.

It took years.

If there’s anything I wish I could remember perfectly, it’s the first time I learned about Janie Spahr and the More Light Presbyterians. I wasn’t Presbyterian, but I’d never seen a church where lesbians were allowed to run the whole show. She started the movement, and then came Michael Adee and Katie Morrison, the first queer people to be ordained in PCUSA (Spahr was ordained before she came out). It was then that I learned to be “responsible and let go of guilt, mindful but carry no shame.”

That’s a story.

When I preached the first time at Bridgeport, I knew I would stumble over that phrase in the liturgy. So, to keep me from being nervous, I took a Sharpie and wrote “R,M” on the palm of my hand. Then, I did it every time after because you never know whether you’re going to have “stage fright” or not.

You put things out in the universe and have no idea what will stick.

It’s the one tradition in my family I’ve kept.

WE DON’T OWE YOU SAFE SPACE EVER

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had one of the most toxic conversations I’ve ever had with an ally because this time I could feel the anger instead of letting medication stuff it down. I also had enough strength to direct my emotions appropriately. I told her to fuck off and namaste.

I’m the proud mother of a gay daughter. But I’m also straight, single and well over a certain age. We live in a gay friendly town and never had any issues. The ONLY a reason I do not wear rainbows, is because it’s hard enough trying to meet a life partner without them assuming I’m gay. And I am not very good at telling when someone of either sex is attracted to me in that way. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t know I was on a date with someone. Perhaps there should be a special symbol that means “I support and protect you even though I’m not one of you” . Give me some ideas and I’ll design it and make it.

I told Zac he could have anything he wanted if he went to this thread and started it with “as the man Leslie met (while she was wearing rainbow shit, I’ll grant you- it was terrifying)……………

This is after an entire thread on why straight, cis people are problematic because you can’t be an ally AND scream “no homo.” That comes out in a range of ways. This is exhibit A, because it’s an example of someone who:

  • Told me she had a gay child, so she can’t possibly be homophobic.
  • Wanted me to do work for her instead of looking it up.
  • Missed all the messages where I was trying to tell her that she doesn’t deserve safe space from me or anyone else because she doesn’t need it.
  • Didn’t listen when I said she’s probably saying all that shit around her child and actions speak louder than words. You know what will kill us? Literally? Telling us to our faces that it’s just too hard to be us, so let’s just not do it.
  • Didn’t listen when I said that people were being let into a sacred space. That for a lot of history, queer people have needed those symbols to find each other because we were trying to avoid having our skulls bashed in.
  • Reacted with straight fragility and said something about mental health issues and not needing this to push her over the edge.

It was a rehash of everything I was trying to tell The War Daniel, hopefully in a less angry tone, but this woman hit a trigger without even recognizing she was doing it. Straight people do this to queers all day, every day, because it’s enculturated behavior. I do not get to say I’m not a racist when I do racist shit accidentally all the time. Here’s where we’re different. I TAKE THE FUCKING NOTE.

She reminded me of my grandmother, Rena, who would have put this woman away. “You can’t help it that you’re ugly, but you could stay home.” I am finding the fuck out that I am more Rena than anyone in my biological family. She would fuck you up and bake you a pie. That’s a Texas yellow dog Democrat in a sentence. Tell horrible people to go to hell, but make sure they enjoy it.

She missed the part where I said that I realized I would have to leave Texas because my life was too hard there. I needed to live with real grown-ups. This kind of shit makes me want to settle in Canada or overseas, because it’s not that those countries are SO much more liberal, it’s that queer issues aren’t a thing EVERY election. They don’t have to worry about federal legislation EVERY two years…… and during that time, there will almost certainly be a naturally occurring event that will somehow become my fault. The queers absolutely ruined New Orleans. Remember? You forgive uneducated assholes because too few people care and we’ve made too many allowances for racist, homophobic, and transphobic behavior. I will never again kowtow to people who say they just can’t change. If being with me is important to them, they’ll change. Otherwise, I don’t have time for people who can’t get it in their heads that their homophobia actually hurts. It’s not innocuous and stop asking us to pretend it is. If I ever have to hear “he’s just so set in his ways,” that person is going to be driven out of the temple with a whip.

This person didn’t mention anything about the church, but it’s responsible for everything homophobia is today. The difference between being a sexual minority vs. a racial minority is that if I got black and white Evangelicals together, they’d all tell me to go to hell because I’m a sinner and I deserve it.

Straight, white, cis people are not the only issue here, Dude.

I don’t call out the black church as often as I probably should, because I’m not black. Those churches do not see me speaking with any authority because I’m not black, even though the minority I represent is present in every congregation everywhere. China. Russia. Iran. Uganda. It’s all the same. Skin color makes no difference to me because on this one issue you’re all equally terrible people.

I hate it when I say things like “I could have been killed in the Holocaust” and it STILL becomes all about them.

You can’t be an ally and scream “no homo.”

I don’t owe you safe space. You’re not in front of the firing squad.