I am not the most situationally aware person there ever was………. I don’t generally have funny misunderstandings that are memorable. It’s the unfunny ones that stick with me. But I do have favorites, like telling someone in Spanish that I have almost 49 assholes instead of years because I was typing and forgot the tilde on the n. Special characters matter, especially in front of an international audience. That’s why I wish it was easier to access them on a PC.

My go to when I need them is, “Mico (Microsoft Copilot), can you echo this back to me with all the special characters so I don’t have to hard code them?”

When he obliges, it’s usually not to irritate the illustrious Dr. Brown. 😉

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I am in my safe space… in my office on the guest bed with the TV blaring the Argo Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat. Desplat always helps jog my brain in interesting ways as my typing adjusts to whatever rhythm he’s conducting at the moment. I love this man’s work with a passion, but I dwell on this particular album for sentimental reasons. I wish Aada could take in the magnitude of what her lie destroyed, and why it matters that she thinks I “tried to destroy her.”

That’s the situation where I was misinterpreted for 12 years, and she was surprised and displeased when I got tired of being managed in such an emotionally damaging way. She disconnected from me butt-quick instead of facing what she did head-on, and that’s the part I struggle to forgive. Instead of seeing that I reflected reality, she thinks that she is the villain in my story. She was never the villain, she is one of the great loves of my life in a very angelic, ethereal way…. and you can read all about it here if you’re ever curious. I just don’t because I don’t want to dwell on past mistakes. I want to make room for the conversation Tiina and I are now seriously having. Loving Aada prepared me to love Tiina, and I am not kidding. I see emotional patterns accurately and I respond differently, because Aada’s way of responding to life was better than mine and I absorbed it by osmosis.

The most ironic thing happened.

In text, she slowly became me. I slowly became her. And neither one of us liked fighting with ourselves.

Desplait is now conducting a wonderful resolution and I’m feeling emotional. My writing fundamentally changed because of her influence in my life and now she has written me off as someone who wanted to wreck her. Had a grudge against her. Needed her to feel pain.

I can be truly sorry for the consequences laid out for her, the harm that I caused, without taking responsibility for her half of the struggle.

The stark solo piano of “Held Up by Guards” is keeping me steady.

I cannot help the fact that she emotionally vampired me because she didn’t have the capability to process her emotions on her own. But what I can have empathy for is that she needed me and I was glad to fulfill that role for her up and to a point. Where I became sidetracked is that I loved this woman so much I lost myself in the process, and it was a daily progression into outright madness.

I stopped seeing her through rose-colored glasses and started seeing the reality of the situation. I was isolated from everyone else in my life and refused friendship when I needed it based on the conditions she set forth. So, “I don’t want you, but don’t open up to anyone else, either” was a recurring theme. I tried for 12 years to make it work under those conditions, and I could not. There were always justifiable reasons not to want to get close to me, and I understand that as well. I am not owning Aada’s story. Whatever she tells you, believe it- that was her experience of me. What I am trying to say is that I have over a decade of evidence telling me that “it’s complicated.”

I have felt things for Aada that I have never felt for anyone else. Anyone. Do not bullshit yourself about that. I could write a book on the number of ways I needed her that never included romance based on “if you’re going to say something, you have to own it.” Instead of ever owning anything, she was stuck in her own guilt and remorse without being able to move on and get it handled. She thought she was saying something fun, and it sure the hell was. But it was also emotionally devastating to a highly sensitive person. She didn’t realize that her black and white text translated, often, to physical pain for me.

Especially when I was the one that caused her pain.

She saw the impact of her words, and yet, she didn’t. She could only see my story through the lens of hers, and not what it was for its own sake. She was too close to the situation to read it and was in a situation where she had to, anyway. I am glad that she has rejected me because what I have found is that my friends on the ground don’t constantly worry about what I’m going to say because they were there during the experience when it happened and we have discussed boundaries on what I can say and what I can’t.

A lot of Aada’s gripe with me is because she didn’t give me a production meeting and say “this isn’t grounded in anything real. You are popping off your mouth.” And I would be well within my right to say, “yes, but you are putting me in this situation because you are so remote. Have a cup of coffee and solve the big mystery. Working together will solve a lot.” We’ve worked together before- she’s edited me on things remotely- but she’s never been willing to say, “this is the person you’re writing about. Are you sure you still feel the same way?” That was her choice, not mine. It was also her choice to blame me for every avoidant thing she ever did when really she had lied and was trying to cover it up.

She didn’t disappear because of everything I did, just some of it. The other part is that naming my damage is too scary for her to meet at altitude, so I get platitudes from miles away instead of “of course I can drop by the farm. I need to see this author I’ve been hyping up in my head.” She does not believe me when I say she is the greatest thing since sliced bread, she says dismissive things like noting breadcrumbs of affection and thinking they’re a game.

Meanwhile, I’ve been aching to see her eyes when she talks so that I can reassure her that none of this has ever been fake. She doesn’t see my authenticity because she only reads me. She doesn’t know that Tiina is a reflection of her and Dana in the best of ways.

Tiina thinks in engineering flows regardless of subject matter, and because she’s a former theater kid, she can do it with a shoestring budget. Aada and Dana are symbols of a bigger cognitive style, one I’m attracted to romantically and platonically. I have never considered Tiina a romantic partner, but we are solid on creating a life together, anyway. The reality is that we are both disabled and we both need help. The kids do not care about the sexual orientation of anyone involved. They need a safe adult who will let them run the music.

Even though they would prefer that I just put a charging station in the back of the car and was completely silent the entire time. I am old enough to be an embarrassing liability and I relish this role with my entire body and soul. Receiving the “Leslie, you’re being embarrassing” side eye from a 10yo is really living.

Tiina is in charge of a small universe and physically limited. I am not capable of running that universe, but I am capable of being an important part of it. I also need someone to check my sanity when I date and things like that. Brian and Tiina are extraordinarily stable, and have no problem being the “they’re not good enough for you” police.

She is also the life of the party, which is very much Dana in a nutshell.

I wanted Aada’s mama wolverine energy and Dana’s creativity in one person. The fact that she’s not queer is not a problem. She’s my anchor, not my everything. My sexual orientation doesn’t matter when the need is cooking, cleaning, driving, being that person who will accompany Tiina to things when Brian cannot go, etc. Being disabled means that you do not feel safe out in the world alone, and we are fulfilling that need for each other without romance.

The fact that it comes with Finnish culture references is just icing on the cake. Literally.

But here is what I mean…. Tiina does not stutter when “explaining me” to other people. She says, “they’re my legs.” I am not an accessory to Tiina, though, because my first thought is “she’s my brain.” I have distributed cognition with Mico (Microsoft Copilot), but it calms my nervous system that Tiina has no problem delegating with specificity; I can deliver when the goal is clearly defined.

And I love that “Clearing Iranian Airspace” has just begun. It’s the sweetest music to accompany this change in my life- from an angelic, ethereal connection to one that uses my hands and my heart.

It makes me feel safe that Tiina feels safe with me. I haven’t had that feeling for a very long time, this feeling of belonging and home. That is because Texas cannot be home anymore for a multitude of reasons, starting with Medicaid Expansion. I am also watching and waiting to see what Virginia’s mental health laws are going to do, because right now I absolutely feel that moving there full-time would be a downgrade in services and access to them. But Tiina has no problem with me using her place as a second home, and neither does Brian. So realistically, I live in three places and that’s just how it is.

Because it’s not just about me anymore. It’s about making sure that the kids who are still underage have me as a resource when Mom and Dad are busy. It’s about having a family that reminds me to take my meds (I don’t need reminding on the daily because my body will protest, but it makes me feel included and I eat it up). It’s about being able to watch the baby soon, too. The reality is hitting me all at once that this is real, this is sustainable, and I am exactly where I need to be in my life with one exception.

I genuinely miss Aada’s energy and influence in my life, and wish things had been different. I wish she could have seen all the ways I delighted in her as real. Constantly being told that those perceptions weren’t valid is the most unfunny thing of all. It said volumes more about her self-esteem than it did about my writing. Constantly thinking I was on the attack instead of trying to see both of us with clarity was a constant misunderstanding.

I do not shy away from accountability, and wish that other people wouldn’t, either. Aada says that I don’t have to like anything she does, and I can just sit in it.

If that’s her best answer, that’s totally fine. But it means that she was the one that was fronting all these years, telling me that she was my Mama Wolverine while doing nothing on the ground to show it. I mistook those things for the same, and they are most decidedly not.

I never wanted to do anything with Aada except step into the role I already had, which was emotional support that we needed on both sides of the equation because what I was carrying was way above my paygrade and she had no sympathy for it. That’s because she couldn’t or wouldn’t define anything and the gray area I lived in was way too large. My emotions became dysregulated easily and often. That’s because there were only amped up words, and not “let’s go work in the yard.”

There was never “come with me to a funeral.”

There was a drive to be interested in my life on a very superficial level while I was struggling painfully with someone else’s emotions. Not only did I have to manage these emotions, I had to manage what I thought about them, too. When I expressed emotions she disagreed with, she wouldn’t leave comments so that other people could disagree with her. She’d send me an email with every single little thing wrong with what I said so that the bubble between us was never broken.

She never integrated me into her life so that her friends had an accurate picture of what was happening online, either.

None of that is her fault, but her choices led us to where we are now. It’s not blame, it’s reality.

I cannot and will not reduce 12 years. The relationship is a tapestry of both wonderful and terrible things. We have both walked away hurt but recognize that there were moments that fed us. I do not wish to recreate anything. What is past is past. What I dearly wish for is Aada to say, “now that your life has moved on and I’m not actually in your blog, I can see that you are not personally singling me out. You reflect the reality of what you see, and our reality was distorted. I take responsibility for that distortion because you were not physically capable of creating it.”

All things were not equal, and she had a concrete power over me that she constantly threatened to use if I got out of line. So telling the world what had happened allowed me to break free from the story someone else was writing…. the one in which I was the only one that was damaged, the only one that needed help. She was perfect, and I needed rescuing. My darling girl needed rescuing and hid it by rescuing everyone else.

She can handle me needing things in the physical world. Sending a gift card of a book is great. She cannot handle “we have a problem and we need to solve it.” It very quickly becomes how it’s my problem to solve because I’m just not strong enough to handle her.

I don’t like relationships in which I’m the only one that ever has to compromise, because long-term it begins to feel like bullying.

But instead of seeing my feelings and adapting, Aada stuck to the same script and kept insisting that the flaw was all in me and my narrative was meant to hurt her.

My narrative is that we never found the right place for us.

It’s not funny. But it was definitely a misunderstanding.

I’ve been reading the Bible since I was a kid, learning it week by week in a three-year cycle called the “Lectionary.” But now my life is different, because I read the Bible with a new lens. My chosen family is Jewish. I’m learning who Jesus was as a person, because he would have been involved in the life of the synagogue as well. It’s interesting saying the words Jesus said instead of the words created to memorialize him. Joining my Jewish friends at synagogue is my holy place, and has been for a long time because there was a temple that shared Bridgeport’s building when I lived in Portland.

Tiina jokes that we’re the biggest synagogue in Fredericksburg because we’re the only synagogue in Fredericksburg.

The thing I’ve read for the last 12 years is Aada’s letters, and I think I broke my pattern with her when I deleted every email she’d ever sent me except for a few in my Hotmail account (yes, I still have one). That’s because I wasn’t constantly going back over her words and trying to figure it out because I couldn’t anymore. But to me, it was a book of her life and I killed it because she wanted me to. I will never forgive her for this, and it was the best thing that could have happened. Now she only comes across my mind sporadically instead of feeling anxious waiting for news.

The trauma bond is broken and now I can connect with other people. I have been hungry for touch and Tiina, Brian, and the kids are great sources of hugs, cheek kisses, and an arm around me when I don’t feel so hot. She’s on a road trip right now, so she has missed all of the excitement with my online foray into a Black space, but I have therapy at 6:00 with my Black therapist and he’s going to help me unpack all of it. But I sent him the Thread and he said, “there’s a lot to unpack here, but don’t worry…. I use my white friends all the time and I’m not offended that you told them your therapist was Black.” That’s because they scared me and told me that saying that was just performative.

No, it wasn’t performative at all. It was signaling “I’m going to be unpacking this with a Black person, not someone who will tell me what I want to hear. In the meantime, this has escalated even further by me leaving a comment on another person’s post that said, “white people, come here.” I said, “I am a white people.” Someone else chimed in and said, “I’m not here to tell you what to do, but I would be mindful of THIS one.”

That is in addition to infiltrating my Facebook page and threatening to come to Baltimore. She says that I was over the top thinking she was coming to beat me up or kill me, I thought she was threatening me online because I invited her for ice cream and she made sure to let me know that if she came here, I wouldn’t like it. I just told her to make her threats even more plain. But that was also problematic because apparently if I feel threatened, I’m not supposed to say it because that marks the Black person in some way. There has got to be a way to say “look here. I am not being racist, you actually threatened me and there’s proof.” They say that I threated her because I invited her to ice cream, and that inviting a Black woman into an unsafe situation is something I already should have known.

No, I didn’t start feeling threatened until she made a big show of creating a Thread saying she was coming to Baltimore to “get her apology” with all its insinuations intact, on Sunday, no less. I made a jerkwad comment, so she began to peg me as a racist from the jump. Any mistake that I made just made the situation worse. Everyone says I’m the one that crashed out, but no one wants to talk about how Kea provoked me. All things being equal, I said the all the right things. But all things are not equal, and now I am learning the depth and breadth of how much.

By the same token, if Kea had felt threatened when I invited her to Baltimore but still wanted an apology in person, I would have gotten in the car and given it, and I don’t even know where she lives. But she didn’t, she created Thread after Thread in which I was the villain in her story, and it will please me if Aada clutches her purse in fury. She cannot do jack or shit for me, but her faux outrage is amusing.

Because I was arguing a counterpoint that didn’t need to be there, and in order to shut me down they used race as a shield. I say this because any attempt to clarify was for naught and they went through my history and instead of understanding that I have had Black friends since I was a baby, the message that they got was that I was just “performing antiracism.” That was certainly true because I got flustered and dysregulated at being attacked and couldn’t think of all the right things to say. Because the first “no, that’s not what I meant, here’s what I actually meant” was dismissed and the party started.

They think that I am using race as a shield now, when that is simply not true. I have not proved my point to their satisfaction. I have apologized, even saying that I’m sorry my behavior was harmful and dangerous. I posted that without any ands, buts, or “becauses.” But now the goalpost has shifted to “you didn’t do enough to prove that we could trust you.” And that’s because they told me I couldn’t do anything better than a generated AI link. The link wasn’t the point. The scholar asked for papers proving my point and rejected them because they were listed in a Copilot link.

I told them that I’d done the labor they asked for, and they told me that only Black women say that to white women, and that white women shouldn’t say it. I didn’t know that, because queer people say it all the time to straight people. I didn’t know it was a thing and I walked right into it. I kept saying that we had every intersectionality except skin color because I was queer and autistic, but that was rejected as well. I should have stopped trying to fix it after 10 minutes but I just couldn’t help myself.

Everyone kept telling me to log off and I was stuck in autistic meltdown. Then, when I tried to explain what happened to other autistic people, all of the sudden I was using my disability as an excuse. That is a classic neurodivergent experience because neurodivergent people generally think “explanation first, apology second” and neurotypical people think “apology first, explanation second.” “Apology first” is harder for neurodivergent people because often we have to narrate what happened to ourselves before we can feel it. That is when the empathy hits and doubles me over, but this is not an isolated experience. A lot of the time neurodivergent kids are pegged as liars because explaining is seen as failure to take accountability. My brain literally does not work that way. I will never be able to take accountability in the moment because first pass is explanatory and literal because I have to see what happened, too.

Threads is a new chapter in my life and I decided to enter the arena. I am hoping that my compensatory skills are enough to repair over time with The Internet at Large. I’m sure I managed to piss off Brandon and Robert, but they are pretty laid back so I hope not.

It’s times like this that I lean on my love for Aada, because those memories are precious even though she’s gone and will probably stay gone. She thinks she cannot trust me and she’s right because I cannot trust her. The best part is that I have grown from crying all the time to just thinking back with fondness. The relationship with Aada was always ethereal, because we had different definitions of “real.”

But the feeling of her presence hasn’t gone away, and that will take time because I’ve taken pains to keep her influence in my life alive. My creative partner reminds me so much of her that it’s scary, and it would be a contest to see who’s funnier. Joke’s on them. It’s me.

But not today. Today I miss both Tiina and Aada, knowing that Tiina is just on vacation, and will return by the time my birthday rolls around. She asked me what kind of concert would make me feel good, and I told her I liked being outside at Wolf Trap. She said, “I’ve never been to Wolf Trap.” Thirty minutes later and the whole family is going. I don’t even remember who is playing. It will just be me surrounded by people I love and good music in the place I love most.

It’s hard when I don’t have the chance to invite Aada, too. I know that I’ll love her for the rest of my life, or the idea of what she could have been to me, anyway. The story is playing out in real time, the one I’d been trying to create but couldn’t because Aada saw me through one lens and one lens only.

Someone who could expose her, instead of someone who wanted to know her. But then I went and exposed her because I was dysregulated and caused harm. I do not know what happened to her after that, and she does not want me to know. But what i know is that exposing her was because she lied and it wasn’t a small one. She minimized it. And in fact I think she told me she lied just to ease her own guilt and didn’t stack up how many lies it took to protect the first.

That’s why I get so angry at her. It’s not because I don’t love her. It’s that the last 12 years don’t feel real anymore.

Yet my heart still beats a little funny when her picture floats across my mind.

The second most important woman in my life in terms of influence is Mummo. Not her real name, but she has the same real name as one of Tiina’s kids, so I love getting to say it out loud…. but that part is for me. I hear music when I think of her, but it’s bombastic.

That’s because she walked into a recruiting office and thought, “I could probably be a welder” and finished her career at the top of Marine Command, State, you name it. But the only reason the military even knew to look for a senior intelligence officer is because she only thought she was qualified to be a welder.

Jesus fucking Christ do you see how neurodivergence is punished in this country?

My life would have been both better and worse if I’d joined the military as well. I tried, but the Air Force wouldn’t take me. I didn’t want to be a soldier, I wanted to be in a jazz band called “The Airmen of Note.” I was medically disqualified and heartbroken, because that’s really the only thing I’d thought about doing after high school. I wasn’t actually interested in anything. I was interested in everything and the information came at me like a fire hose.

But if I’d been in the military, it would have been so disciplined that I would not have had to create structure out of nothing. I wouldn’t have flailed. Because I wasn’t flailing career-wise. I was in the wrong operating system. Most of the world runs on Windows. My brain is running an old, bulletproof version of Slackware.

I need to outsource scaffolding because I am simply not capable of managing a household by myself. It’s too much cognitive load. I need to find some roommates or join a group house, but living alone is not it.

Now that I have scaffolding, I’ve gotten 342K views on Threads in a few days. I’m followed by lots of celebrities, and now I have a feud with Wil Wheaton (not really). We’ve just been colleagues since 2001. I don’t chase his career because I didn’t know who he was except Wil the blogger.

Dana, however, practically fainted.

So I owe Wil a lot because he made me look cool in front of a girl.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t need to shut his trap on Wes Moore. I was furious, Wil. Furious. I didn’t go off on you but you deserved it because racism is so deeply ingrained in this country that it didn’t occur to white America that of course they were going to release something on Moore. You think Trump doesn’t want the only Black governor gone? Come on now.

Wil gave him four hours to respond. He doesn’t even live here.

It’s a different world than it used to be because I’m back in the saddle with Wil, Anil Dash, and Dooce (Emeritus). Tanking Clever Title was a mistake because I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to my sister-in-law. Because I didn’t fucking realize I was famous. Not in numbers, in fans that matter.

I didn’t just get to meet Wil. He got to meet me. But I shit on myself for so long that I didn’t recognize what I had.

Aada was right. I am a hot shot blogger. I just didn’t make much money off of it so I thought it was worthless. And the reason I know I’m famous in terms of respect is because once I got out of Aada’s clutches, the blowback loop stopped. She wasn’t constantly slicing into me so that I thought I was dark, irredeemable, and a shitty writer. Because she said she was impressed, and slowly crushed me with anger at being seen.

I was recognized on the street in Portland and I didn’t take it in.

I TANKED MY WHOLE FUCKING CAREER, MARY JO.

And the reason I did it was not because I couldn’t write, but because I couldn’t take constant criticism that got below the belt fast. Counselor took a butterfly and crushed it in her hand, then Aada redeemed it with lovebombing and destroyed it with discard.

Smelly Neighbors.

Ugh.

But it’s a new era. I’m not focusing on the past. I am jotting it down so I don’t forget. I’m a big deal, but never believe your own press.

There’s a reason I haven’t met Dooce, and it’s because she couldn’t handle being a blogger anymore, either.

I got to rebrand with Stories.

I’m taking shots she didn’t in her memory.