That was my sister’s question after saying I was going to take off for DC and her saying, “this is great Friday vibes.” It was, but it wasn’t great situational awareness carrying a brand new laptop through Penn North, not knowing that you don’t transfer to the MARC at Penn North. I took off without a map and just asked people until I got where I was going. Everyone was infinitely kind, warning me to be careful. I learned on Thursday that Penn North is the most dangerous neighborhood in Baltimore. Even in the midst of my discomfort at being in an unfamiliar situation, people were kind to me and not scared in return. I was also wearing two pairs of CZ earrings that looked cheap to me, but didn’t look cheap to other people. I was wearing an Apple Watch. I looked all wrong. Everyone quietly told me to go back to Camden Yards.
I saw a man get beaten by another man carrying a four by four in broad daylight and that was my indication that I’d underestimated the severity when black people tell you they won’t go somewhere in Baltimore. Pig Town is at the top of the list, and I was warned not to just go wandering around with my camera. Even the people in my neighborhood were freaked out by the picture of the guys powerwashing at Reisterstown Station.
The picture with my hair all messy is me saying that “the wind works better in DC.” The serious picture is my new haircut. It was the impetus for all of this, wanting to go back to my barber shop after four months of making do.
The rest are just shots of what I saw yesterday. I was noting everything, like the difference in the size of the subway cars. I have found an easy way to get out to the county, but I’m going to have stories coming further into the city at all.
I met a woman who I hope will call me because she seemed like a good friend. I’m looking for them these days, and Uber Shares are a great way to make them because you have enough time to actually get to know someone in 15-20 minutes. It’s not speed dating, but it’s enough to let you know if you can spend time with someone doing anything if you can road trip with them.
Shout out to David, my old roommate and big brother. He’s doing well, and it was great to actually hug him. I forget I need that, quite honestly.
And shout out to Michael, who said that those daytime beatings are the best so I’d know that my reaction is………….. nothing. It’s my first time seeing violence, not the people in my group. I’m not from around here. Everyone tells me that, but it’s because I have all the trappings of a person with money and I am not bright enough to know how to hide them all yet. If it’s not my earrings, it’s my watch. If it’s not my laptop, it’s my tablet.
There’s no good way to escape the fact that you get nice things as gifts. I shouldn’t have to. But I was still scared to walk around in Penn North because at 121 feet down, all my comms dropped out. No cell phone, no internet. And three people telling me I needed to HAUL ASS OUT OF THIS ESTABLISHMENT.
Not all of Baltimore is Pimlico…. but thank God for that. I asked for the mud, and got the moon. Now orientations are adjusted. The greatest con is where everyone gets what they want, and I’ve got mine.
Both dreams are crazy big, and both dreams depend on American voters.
If you choose Trump and his minions in the next election, because we don’t know how serious Trump is about dismantling democracy and Hitler did it in 50-odd days:
I will have seen the signs and proceeded with the move to Finland. Aada is not the reason I wanted to go there, and in fact did not even tell her I was learning Finnish. She surprised me with that knowledge, and I was flat embarrassed she knew. I didn’t want her to know that her home country does autism better than this one, and that’s why I’m moving. Her reaction that autism meant you were slow meant, “I’m done with this conversation.” There are no sentimental baby pictures in my future apartment, there’s just a large Moomin doll and all my culinary school children around me because there’s no way I’d go to school in Finland and the other kids wouldn’t be half my age. We will have started a restaurant or made a media company or both. In 10 years, that’s enough for my US passport marking me as female to be a pleasant memory because I do not hate America. I would like to take America with me to Finland.
Ramona Quimby, Age 38 (the request to which I responded) can be half a Finnish project because the topography looks like Portland to me. We can certainly recreate Portland and Vancouver there.
If we choose Corey Booker and his crew (don’t think that wasn’t the purpose of THAT):
Booker doesn’t have minions because he’s not a top-down leader. I still have culinary school dreams in Finland…. Culinary school in Finland will have been fun, but it opens up opportunities for me to come back. I also cannot go to culinary school until my lease ends, so it is possible that I will find a job here before I leave that would allow me to become part of the rebellion, or at least part of the solution. Right now, I’m looking at applying to jobs for writers that pay per hour, because I don’t want to work more than my program allows. It would not be in my best interest to get into these programs and then immediately defeat them. I was just assigned a proper psychiatrist/psychologist combo package and I have not met him yet. Staying in the US is hard, but not impossible.
Either way, there will be a company called Lanagan Media Group, so the United States and Finland have to decide how much I’m worth, and I mean it sincerely. I already know that in Finland, I’m worth real money, because say I do move there and public perception is that I’m so autistic I can’t live independently. They can do that. Because all the while, my writing will be changing to reflect Finnish culture and values, earning money that goes right back into the Finnish economy because I will not live in the US past my lease if I can help it. That lease makes me feel more trapped than anything else, because I have to stay here, and I was burglarized because I was a dumbass and left the patio door open. I was home, and no one was hurt. But Finland feels like the refuge I need after struggling with being neurodivergent my whole life without knowing.
I have coped by smoking with the ghosts in the back of my head (“buy your own smokes, boss).
Mostly my mother, but there have been others.
It’s why I’m so inspired to think bigger. She never let a little thing like depression get her down, so I won’t either. She was forced to go on for a long time and my blog probably added to her distress. But she could have sued the hell out of me- words only have the power that the reader ascribes to them, and though it would have ended our relationship, I think she deserved her pound of flesh if she wanted it.
I think she did, because she didn’t want me to write about anything that happened when I was a child. No one does, because it is not helping them. No one knows what I do, and I am always the best according to popular legend. I am not a derring-do out loud, though. Two people in my life think that wanting to contact famous people means I want attention. Nope. It’s something that Oprah Winfrey said about using your own platform, your own influence. I missed the assignment at PVA because I needed people to bring awareness to social justice issues.
A trust has been created in my name so that I don’t have any money. I realized that I wanted it when I was riding around on the van in group. Things must change, and they must change now:
All of my Apple products are wrong, because the poorest people in the world don’t have them. It doesn’t matter that I upgraded from an iPhone 12 mini to an iPhone 13, and that my Apple Watch is a hand-me-down. I look like I have more money than I do. I am grateful as fuck that my family can afford to give me these things, but to keep me safe on the streets of Baltimore I need a Samsung that has a crack on the face and a sports band that cost $50 on Amazon. I AM NOT JOKING. I need to be able to go to Xfinity and pick out cheap ass shit, because to not is to mark me as “not from around here.”
My instincts are always wrong if I want to stay alive, because I’m always the person that is willing to spot the one without money. I would rather take people with me than have them stay home out of fear they cannot afford it. So, my first inkling of survival in a therapy group in inner city Baltimore is “you cannot do that. They ALL need money. You are the one that will starve.”
Because my trust is made up of inheritance, I’m terrified to spend any of it. I write about what I want to do, and so far all I’ve bought for LMG is two used Fire tablets. I need an iPad as well, but that will also be used. That’s because I don’t want anyone in the company to look like they have money. I cannot do anything about the fact that my family has money, but I can do all I can to give it back to them so that when people come after me, they’re not losing anything. I’m a popular target these days.
My family has money, but I don’t. It’s important enough to say twice because there have been years where I’ve been nearly homeless due to my own money mismanagement and have been close to an eviction because of a boss not paying me when they didn’t have money. Therefore, I will never offer to pay anyone anything unless I have it. Those who work for LMG are aware that it’s not really anything yet, but I’ve got my top brass team in place.
Walkabout
If you’ve been through PTSD, you know that going walkabout is probably the only thing that’ll save your life. “Walk it off, soldier” seems like the meanest advice you can give someone because it comes across as “I don’t care.” If you didn’t grow up in a military family, you have no idea that walking it off is code for self-soothing and emotionally regulating on your own. I didn’t grow up in a military family, I was married to a Marine dependent. Therefore, she did not see me in her nest and drop me out screaming “FLY BITCH FLY” like she should have. Luckily, I have other friends for that.
I hope to have a prosperous media company because I’m approaching it like a care and connection agency. I walk around Baltimore collecting stories to write about, mostly here but they’re informing what I want to do with screenplays as well. Unlike famous people, the homeless and the disenfranchised have stories that have not been told. As a writer, which do you think I’d rather focus on? Meeting people in a position of power is about saying:
I am autistic and I cannot read a room. But you can.
In high school, I learned that I had to be the FBI agent of my own body. That’s because it was perfectly okay to discriminate against me in the late ’90s. We didn’t know what to do with queer kids yet. I actually had both CIA and DIA personnel comment on it, that learning to do intel work first starts with learning that the world is fucked up and I am no different. Being queer and assigned female at birth made me wary of all men, all the time. If they were enlightened around women, I still had to stomach their gay jokes. I still had to put up with southern Baptist rhetoric at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I’ve been made an example of at two schools.
One from a counselor when I was bullied:
Well, what did you do to provoke them?
And one from a teacher on a paper:
I feel that this is too private to share with the class.
I was vindicated when my teacher girlfriend said that my paper was educational and I’d been discriminated against. I was carrying the message about the way I’d been treated at HSPVA to Clements. So, whether I was out of the closet or in, schooling did not fit me.
Culture does not fit me. It moves around me. While everyone else was lost in the movies, I was lost in the art of how they get made. You saw Da Five Bloods on Netflix, I met the guy who composed the score (Terrance Blanchard). You saw Selma, I know the guy who composed the score (Jason Moran). It’s a different way of relating to the world when movie magic is hard, hard work and not handed to you on a silver platter. I’ve played with jazz greats and know that I’m not the best, but I’m a utility player who won’t show up late and that counts for a lot, or it would be if I hadn’t stopped playing trumpet.
People think that it’s all talk, that I want to say I have cool friends because I needed to prove I had a cool friend. That’s the saddest part of all. I had to prove I had a friend. I’ve been thinking a lot about this… why did I need to prove Supergrover was real? I panicked. She gave me no reason not to panic. I wasn’t handling my shit well.
That was a bigger laugh line than intended.
But how does Supergrover relate to my high school experience? She was with me the whole time, or a part of her was. It’s the writing muse inside me that makes art come out. We hadn’t met yet, but the talent was already there. She just molded it so that I feel like I’m a capable enough writer to take a stab from a dagger.
Because now I know she cut me and she meant it, but it was to lance an infection. Supergrover and I had become toxic in both directions. Again:
“I do not think vulnerability solves everything. I AM TIRED.”
My heart shattered. Irreconcilable differences where she denies she hurts me until we’re dead. Nope.
There was never revenge, and there will always be regret. But not for the torrent of writing talent that I had to give someone. Taking all of the love and hope I put into the wrong relationship didn’t mean that picking SG! was also wrong. I’d been searching for a place to put that love my whole life, because my relationship with my mother was broken. She helped reparent me and I think I helped reparent, her, but it did not come without a bit of colonization here and there. It wasn’t always me claiming her in the name of Ireland. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
They thought I wanted people to know them because they are The Doctor, and I wanted people to know John Smith.
It was too much of a torrent that could not be tamed to a trickle; my heart is like that. Wild and reckless and wreck-less because of it. Things bounce off of scar tissue because there’s just so much of it. I’m going through yet another family emergency in which it would be helpful for me to undo the last 10 years so that I could be in my big backyard right now. But I chose her family. And then I was a jackass to them unprovoked. But rule following gets you nowhere in her line of work, so we stayed friends.
But did we?
I don’t think so. I think that I’m not supposed to know what happens next in any area of my life. But if I look back, all the answers are found when I was really too young to understand anything.
I got a TikTok link from my dad containing a link to a walk in Patterson Park this Sunday or something. I would like to think that the logo I got from the resulting “you’re signed up” page is AI, because I would like to think everyone got a logo specifically designed for them; they asked me what I could talk about all day, and I did not say ghosts. But there are a few synonyms that fit. 😉 I call anyone I meet in the Intelligence Community “High Five Ghost,” so a pic of a ghost is literally perfect.
My dad read my blog post about my favorite exercise being walking and talking, so he hooked me up with Outerly. They match you up with people and then you go and walk with them. I decided on the Singles’ Walk because I have a boyfriend I haven’t met and a woman at home who loves me as much as Lindsay does even if we aren’t married to each other. It’s not fair for me to commit to Aaron without meeting in person, and it’s not fair for me to say I’m “single,” either, but most people that can accept a nonbinary between male and female can accept a nonbinary between single and partnered. If my new girlfriend ever tried to say Bryn “doesn’t count,” that is the “thank u, next” for which I am looking. In poly, it’s not all about love and romance. Sometimes, it’s about love and vomit. You have romance for the days you need it. You have emotional support when you don’t need a boyfriend. You need someone to hold your hair while you puke. So, last evening was a mixture of talking to her and self-soothing.
Then I promptly bought a pass to watch David Tennant and Cush Jumbo do Macbeth in the West End. I need to watch it while I move on, knowing my hands aren’t the only ones dirty, I’m not the only one bleeding or grieving. I just needed more than she could provide via the internet and she could not understand how we got to this point, not having time to really take in my words and tell me how she felt about them. I moved too fast for her to reflect, and I’ll always regret it. I chose her every time until I was locked out of a hospital in the middle of the night in Baltimore City. I chose Olivia.
Because no one asked me how I’d feel if my feelings were ripped out from under me again. Notice the graphic on my web site has never changed, and no one has ever said, “Leslie, is that your handwriting?” My first instinct is not to protect her, but undoing one lie undoes them all. I’m the real villain, correct? So, nothing we did was right. Leaving everything I knew was my only move. The carnage in my wake is massive, not hers.
Because I finally decided to be a gladiator and not a bitch. Well, that’s debatable, but if you’re a Scandal fan you at least get the reference. I’m more like Quinn than I’m not. Someone who met a Huck and liked it. Then I met a lot more. And found out they don’t know shit, but 20 years later.
If this sounds weird, it’s unique to people my age that have lived on the Internet since 1999. We’re all learning our sins now after being sucked in by IRC and America Online, and holy fuck you figure out a lot about the 1990s when you realize Steve Case put the company in Northern Virginia for a reason. Why would the United States need an online company located near Langley and Ft. Meade? Make it make sense. I’m lagging. 😉
Doesn’t mean I haven’t met cool people online.
As for Aaron, I told him that I wasn’t sure about the whole boyfriend thing, but I would live with him in a New York minute because this is the longest Craig’s List interview ever………….. 😉 Speaking of which, I need to buy him an iPad because I decided I want to keep mine. I bought Scrivener for it, which was stupid because I should have bought it for Android. I’m trapped. Oh, wait. No. They don’t make Scrivener for Android, which is why I have to have two tablets. It’s not that my device sucks. Both my Android and my iPad are great. They are both services as device, which means that I cannot ditch anything and still have access to my software. I also know that moving in with Aaron is not doable quickly for either of us, just a dream we keep alive because we’re both amazing people who deserve love.
The iPad is not to buy his love. He’s been making me stellar graphics for months on a POS Samsung phone and they’re incredible. I want to unlock his creativity, because Bryn manages him when we’re doing something long term. But crossover happens, because we’ll be talking about something, and a childhood memory will bring up another idea for The Sinners’ Table or LMG. We have both tried to stop remembering things and start relying on alarms and Google Calendar. I am learning an ancient tradition called “write it down.” I don’t function well all alone, and I don’t know how to live in community yet. I am literally getting my shit together.
Compare that to the Uber driver who just asked me if I was up and told me he was having a fantasy about me. Fine, whatever. You go do that, but I’m not going to be there. It’s a pleasure to be nominated, and thanks for not sending me pictures. I’m sad because I liked him and that’s not my vibe. I don’t know how to comport myself in the smallest of situations, but I know enough to know it isn’t that. Situational awareness in the intelligence community has taught me two things:
If you mean it, don’t say it in a text message.
If you don’t mean it, you didn’t say it for legal reasons. It’s not a laugh line, it’s serious business.
“When you know better, you do better” is the third thing, because in a list I can rarely stop at two items. I just tell you there are for easy retention. 😉 But here’s what happens with poly people. If I’d gone to Aaron and said that Kamal was having dreams about me and that part of it was unwelcome, he’d bitch with me and offer to comfort me, like hiding Kamal’s body in an unknown location (this is a laugh line, not serious. I have learned that threatening people is bad, but he’s already blocked. The only thing left is writing about what happened. I mean this in a humorous manner because AOL has no sense of humor, once they’re blocked, I’m not going back.).
My point is that poly is not different than monogamy except that jealousy is relative. Aaron would be jealous if I cut him out and stopped telling him things; he has a right to know if I’m dating someone else. Cheating on him is literally hiding things from him, not opening up. I cannot get away with concealing anything, and that’s the reason I betrayed Supergrover. I realized that she’d put me in a relationship with her that was a trap now when it wasn’t before. I’d made too many mistakes to get a clean slate, and as time went on, she saw my need to actually connect with her as threatening her.
Connecting was seeing her in person and not taking in seven percent of communication, not hiding our relationship from Lindsay, Aaron, Bryn, and SG’s family. I made the effort to learn boundaries and how I could fit in, but I was also a very flawed human being and mistakes don’t get better. Greatness was fleeting. I felt great about an e-mail saying I’d build a shrine to someone at a museum. I am not sure the message was received as intended, but it was received all right. Sigh. I’m the worst at trying to be the best, which is duly noted.
That’s because the people in my life are relentless planners and I’m autistic. I do vibe checks and then plan my next move. It drives them up the wall.
But.
Someone was watching out for me, and I’ve been watching out for them. I couldn’t protect her when I looked too crazy to function. She couldn’t let me save myself. She had to step away. That’s because fallout doesn’t touch her in public. I’m sure she’s hurt. Whether she’s hurt enough for anyone to notice is anyone’s guess. I don’t know how far I’ve risen and fallen over the years because that is unclear….. Some things aren’t.
How I managed to find two successful houses in a row before I was managed into this one is not hard to grasp. There was just no face time to make anything right. The women who trouble me only knew me in the years directly after Dana got her DUI. I was angry at the world and sober as a heart attack. Nothing to take the edge off, I was just full tilt, all anxiety all the time. My mother died and the most I did was drink a beer at her wake. Then, I drank Diet Coke until my friend James and my friend Alberto had the realization I was done; we walked to the ice cream food truck. So, they’ve missed a lot by not reconnecting five or 10 years later. I would say they tried, but they set me up.
I was done because I knew that I was in no danger. It was just a bit cold. They told me to grab a jacket for our date, so I brought a puffy vest. It was just perfect, because I was warm enough to function and cold enough to really think things through. They promised me a life where I could live with them. All of them. Just be happy in community. Then when I showed up at the hospital where I was supposed to be picked up, I realized that they were pranking me, and I needed to call my sister. I could do that, or wander out into the night and hope I got hit by a car. I really didn’t want to live after that, because someone went to a lot of trouble to weave every element of my life into calling me a monster. It worked, but I don’t have to go back to them and apologize. I do not have to say that their methods are fair and balanced, because mine weren’t.
So whether I was being friended or followed, I have no idea. I cannot say anymore. I didn’t burn anyone who didn’t burn me. I’m done.
What does it look like to be done? All my energy suddenly rushes out of my face. All the light leaves my eyes. You can see the overwhelm. Not drinking makes it happen faster because I have no social lubricant. Weed can be a social lubricant, but I don’t use it often enough for it to really help me. I find that I cannot concentrate as hard as I need to pick up languages quickly, and now that my Lamictal has been removed from my protocol, I don’t need weed to solve nausea. That being said, I have no idea what kind of hippy tree-hugging event this is going to be. If I say I like spies, they probably won’t put me with the stoners. But they should.
Spies do not give a FUCK. About anything. At any time. They watch so many people that they don’t retain things unless they love them. Sometimes, they do.
I am sure that I am not the only one lonely tonight, but my friendship with one person cost me all the others, and there’s been no way to bridge that gap. It’s just been “keep writing to me while I hold you at arm’s length.” In order to get over the loss, I see her as a threat to me. It’s not because I think she’s evil. It’s because I think she’s good. I think she needed to watch me and had to have a way. That does not mean I’m protected. It means she’s reading. Those are two different things and she thinks they’re different now. The carnage in her wake has always been massive because by not sharing anything about what was going on with her, our stories differed. I don’t think she was paying enough attention, or she was paying too much. Take your pick. I pick “too much,” because it’s easier to think that she was watching me than she just didn’t care, or she was a narcissist who needed a dopamine hit. Me accepting the consequences of my own actions is my only play here. Because I e-mailed two women at the same time who said they didn’t know each other, and as it turns out, I’m not sure that’s true or whether it, too, was a fever dream. Whether they do or they don’t is of great consequence, because I don’t know how to proceed except talking to other people who also like talking about the intelligence community that don’t have any connection to my former family….. who was willing to support me with a few chats a year. It wasn’t enough, and her excuses were old. I thought there was nothing we couldn’t get over, but as it turns out, lying to me that she knew someone when she didn’t made her seem cooler than she was and she knew it.
She ran with it, and I caught feelings for this person she said she knew, but the kind of feelings you would have for a mutual friend- care, connection, hope for their well-being. It made me an idiot to someone I adore, and then I got to make a bigger idiot of myself with her after that. But I wouldn’t take nothin’ for my journey now. The IC introduced me to things I never would have learned otherwise, like not giving a shit if your partner has other partners.
The entire key to polyamory in its entirety is learning not to give a shit. It’s not that you don’t feel jealous. You learn to deal with it on your own until your compartments fucking leak. And even then, it’s only your partner’s job to be heard. They’re not responsible for fixing the problem. If they don’t fix it, you leave. It sounds simple and it’s not. But the key is that you are always parenting yourself.
Being poly is second nature to Zac, therefore it is second nature to me. The reason for this is that I spent years in a relationship where I was waiting on him all the time and not at all. As in, whenever he showed up it was the best day ever, but I never felt like I was waiting on him. Writing took up my life in a way he could not; I felt like he had no boundaries with me. I had to make all of them up.
There was only “ask for what you want” and receiving no feedback that said “you are welcome to ask more questions because I was delighted by this one.” My refusal to learn from past experience is not cute, and neither is not being raised like a normal person instead of a preacher’s kid. It’s so different. You’re taught not to touch anything, and people are standoffish with you as well. As an adult, you’re supposed to be cooperative. I’ve been an absolute jackass for not jumping in and helping more when I’ve been taught to be a mushroom and I’ll grow where I’m planted. It was certainly my best work as a child.
Rita and Wilson teased me in the hospital about being sweet on Andrew, another patient, but I wasn’t. They asked me about it, and I said, “I don’t know what kind of connection it is and I don’t think I’m supposed to know that yet. I just met him.” I know now that it is not to be either way so far, because lack of communication means that he is lost in his own little world and I do not control it. I was more annoyed that they were looking for a good end to the story. This is not a Hallmark movie, although word on the street is that they are close to developing a second plot.
I love Hallmark movies because they are uncomplicated. I need a break from myself. Like now.
Walking while listening to “The West Wing” is my favorite way to exercise because of something my dad said when I was a kid… that the first rap song was in “The Music Man” (with a BIG bass drum… big bass drum). It is from that movie that I got the concept that music and speech are the same thing, and I would bet that something similar happened to Aaron on the way to the forum.
Connecting “The Music Man” to the punctuation inherent in Xhosa comes from Trevor Noah. That Xhosa is one of the only languages in the world where you can hear its punctuation out loud. In short, I’ve been walking and talking since I was a child… emphasis on the talking because I don’t walk that easily.
This is what it’s like to be an empath preacher’s kid in my daily life:
My blog makes me sound like a dick because I am this person in an Uber. It doesn’t seem related, but I have to have a place to vent about everything that happens to me because taking on these stories is not easy. I have rituals for “washing off” negative energy because there’s only so many times I can hear someone is a shit father (usually) or a shit mother (more rare, but men talk more about it because dollars to donuts they’ve found a sympathetic ear who’s a stranger and they don’t have a best friend). Meeting anyone in IC is an anathema to my work as a listener, because I cannot share any of that information. I just have to let it sit and fester inside me. It’s why I felt tortured over world events a good bit of the time and “everyone knows what the group is.” Now that it’s all in retrospect, it’s frightening how well my little company is known, but with great power comes great responsibility. I have situational awareness and I wouldn’t date anyone else in the IC unless they worked in the mail room. That means they have security training, but they won’t have been read into anything truly heinous.
Neither was I. I just have a good imagination so any piece of information and I was off to the Google machine in a way that no intelligence agency would want an untrained autist to do.
There is no bigger danger to intelligence and medicine than an untrained autist. That’s because I’ve had two friends in the IC tell me that I’m too smart for my own good and they have to pull back. Believe it or not, it’s unfair, but it’s love. It just feels like emotional avoidance when they don’t replace it. Ok, so don’t talk about work. How’s your dog? I listen to baby dogs snort and snuffle to avoid talking about anything real. Most people do this, I’ve found. Memes are popular because everyone wants to comment that there is a dumpster fire with emojis and graphics, the modern day eight by 10 color glossy pictures, I suppose.
I have been bucking up against that practice because it looks fake because it is. What’s the Kellerman quote about deep emotional wounds? You need a surgeon, not a barber. Until about two years ago, I thought that if you were CIA you weren’t allowed medication and had a bastardized version of therapy that fits the government’s needs, not yours. Though I do believe that Carrie Mathison was a great case officer, I could have done without all the illegal shit it took to get her the right meds, because the whole bit about her not being able to work for CIA if she was mentally ill was fake. I am sure that it’s true that if you’re caught in Russia, they won’t give you your medication. But I believe they train you not to get caught, and there would be nothing better to help people not get caught then actually addressing their medical and emotional needs.
Is there room for shame and vulnerability in the Intelligence Community?
I think there is, it just looks different for the general population than it does for them. The problem is that lies build, even lies told to protect your friends and family. It gets worse when a case officer is hell bent on protecting themselves, and they really, really hurt you. Even if it comes with an apology, it’s not enough.
One hurt was on Homeland. One hurt was on Supergrover. One hurt was on Zac. All three of them were erased by Mummo, from whom all blessings flow.
Mummo is Finnish for grandmother, and the woman I social masked to figure out who I was in return. I just am her mirror opposite in some ways, exactly like her in others. For instance, we both wear men’s clothes and cute glasses, but she’s a boring cis straight girl and I’m, well… not.
I misspoke when I said Supergrover had made it clear she was attracted to men. I meant that she made it clear she was attracted to cis men. I don’t rate, and that’s fine. She met me when I self-identified as a woman, and she was halfway to married, anyway. Having a preference for cis men doesn’t make her a bad person, nor does feeling love for her make me one. It was just problematic in the way it began, because when IC overshares about their personal lives, you really cannot give consent. You can because you’re an adult, but you can’t because you have no idea what contract you’re signing. You just have to learn to hang all on your own.
I realized I could have had a career in intelligence if I’d bought Duolingo the moment I’d moved to Washington, because I wasn’t interested in Finnish back then. I was interested in Arabic, both MSA and the Levantine dialect. It was all self-confidence based. I didn’t really believe that I could learn Arabic, and now I can conjugate basic sentences in the hardest language in the world:
Metsässä kävelee hirvi.
This translates to “there is a moose walking in the forest.” Finnish is NOT English, however. Metsässä actually means “in the forest.” A direct translation isn’t really possible…. “in the forest, there is walking, a moose” is as close as direct gets.
Hirvi puri kerran siskoani.
Sorry, wrong piece of media. Those responsible have been sacked.
A trick I will give you for Medium is that if you speak a different language, use Google translate. I don’t know what it is about the code, but when you paste from Google Translate into something else, the AI on Medium knows it’s a different language and will read it that way. If I just type, then the AI sounds like it’s lagging, because Finnish is light and quick. It’s probably all the kahvi.
I realized that I needed more to write about than what has happened in the past, so the way my past is affecting me now is starting Modern Standard Arabic on Duolingo. Here’s my Facebook status for today:
Now that I have done several languages on Duolingo, I can tell you that the language support for Swedish and Arabic is better than the other languages I’ve tried. I will have to get on my tablet to see if AI support is offered in MSA, but it is in Swedish and it’s invaluable. Where AI comes in is voice recognition. You cannot pass a level until the AI can understand you. MSA on Duo actually starts you like a kindergartener, learning the vowel clusters and not full-on words. It also teaches you to read by making you identify those vowel clusters in Arabic. Marvelous.
People think I’m interested in MENA so I can walk the Bible. This is indelibly true. Preacher’s kid is who I am. But it is also true that I want to walk John Brennan’s “Undaunted” as well. 😉
I thought I wouldn’t be good as an intelligence officer when I was young enough to get into CIA or the military at all. I have proved myself wrong for my own pleasure. This represents almost two months of Very Finnish Problems, plus Swedish, Spanish, Russian, and Modern Standard Arabic. MSA is how I got the level up to five. I realized that because of imposter syndrome, I’d never tried to learn it when there was someone living in my house that could have taught me for 10 years. But, she doesn’t speak MSA, either. She spoke the Levantine dialect. I’m interested in both, but MSA is what they use on the BBC in Cairo…. which I need to watch…. because I’m a sharpshooter. 🙂
I got Sharpshooter level one a long time ago, then got frustrated with Spanish because I already know it. If you already know a language and you’re like me, the way it teaches will drive you crazy. Once I immersed myself in Finnish, Swedish, and Russian, I got the flow.
Duolingo is worth every penny, but you have to know what it’s designed to do. It absolutely cannot tutor you. It can build your vocabulary while you are waiting to be tutored. My friend Randy taught me that (quote o’ the moment? “is that big oil Randy?” Yeah, I’m not that bright. I’m sure he didn’t know anything about MENA 25 years ago when I was actually IN HIS OFFICE EVERY DAY, JFC).
An autist’s pattern recognition makes everything work backwards. I could have had everything I wanted with the right information, but no one was forthcoming or forthright. Things We Do in the Shadows proved correct, except someone let me in on a few things and then left me there, shining her light on someone else. This is not to say she did anything wrong. She was protecting herself from me. It does not render either of our stories invalid. She’s just not a writer, and I am. It’s funny that it never occurred to her before this week, because she didn’t buy me any fonts.
She didn’t know I was a writer, obviously.
She didn’t make a choice to become enamored with a blogger and then burn them when the flame burned bright on both sides.
Or she did, but that’s not my story.
My story is that everything makes sense. Working for ExxonMobil and focusing on Arabic instead of my wife would have led to better results, but I’m the partner that props up her man. It’s sickening to watch, apparently, because the partner in question doesn’t even have to be male. I react like the minister’s wife, not the minister. That’s problematic because she was not the model I’d like to be in the world, but she’s not not that, either. It’s a process of separating the wheat from the chaff, slashing and burning what isn’t good for me and keeping everything that can stay.
Intelligence can’t, because it twists up my guts. Arabic can, because when I’m walking the Bible, I expect to go to integrated neighborhoods if it’s safe in my lifetime. I would also work for the new inevitable Palestinian intelligence agency once they are a state with verified intel, why we cannot just wash our hands of Israel.
But what could I do at 50 or 55 besides translate documents? Pffff. Like that’s helpful. 😉
Turns out, I never really wanted to be intel. My heart bleeds too much. I want to be where I’ve always been… in my office, holed up, listening to people. Apparently, air conditioning is very important in Palestine. I would also like a pool. No one will come visit me if I have neither of these things except Bryn and Aaron, because they know what contract they signed. I’d never bring them anywhere dangerous; I just mean that they love me and moving to Palestine would complicate things, but it’s not a dealbreaker.
And if you think that my life would be different in MENA vs. here, remember that I could live in Georgetown or College Park. I live in Baltimore City.
That is also a choice, and a calculated one. Because I’m a sharpshooter. I’m trying to get relief to the people who need it. Evey Winters and Shane Torres are in. I just need to pick a venue and decide what I need them to do. Evey even said she’d roll up her sleeves and work for me (she doesn’t know how to cook). Shane was FOH at Tapalaya, which is why I want him to represent “The Sinners’ Table.” I want to name it after John-Michael Kinkaid.
It’s not because he died a sinner or anything cruel. It’s that he was going to be the chef of the whole operation when he was tragically killed on the side of 59 South. It has only been since December 8th, and I still feel dead inside at a loss I’ll never get over.
I treat everyone I meet as if they’re John. Because maybe he’s not really gone. Maybe he’ll show up in a different face. Maybe he won’t. But how am I supposed to know that in advance? I don’t. So everyone is John until proven otherwise.
Isn’t that the lesson they teach about Jesus, too?
I’m doing my best, and trying to make up for past flaws and failures. I can do that better now because there is no part of my life drowning in the dark.
The solstice has passed, and the days are getting much, much longer.
My heart is open. I am buying things I need that I have ignored, like clothing. I wouldn’t spend money on myself. Most of it is nice stuff that just makes me look like a jock. It’s designed to be nonbinary with bras built into tank tops, etc. But I did have to honor B’more just a little bit. It’s a Ravens t-shirt with this slogan:
Flock around and find out.
You just don’t realize the power of a murder until it’s coming straight at you. You’re trained to look at every problem… wait for it, Lamott…. bird by bird.
There is no blame in my story. The buck stops with me. But it stopped 11.5 years ago without anyone trying to further a relationship with me. The longer there was no meet and greet, the weirder my life became. I didn’t feel free to miss a thing, because I felt like something would happen if I wasn’t there. I didn’t do anything, I just talked. And the longer I talked, the more I realized that two people in my life practiced law. The way it was presented to me in the hospital is that I was an experiment based on the 11.5 years it took for someone to fuck me up…. and no matter what the people say, broccoli is our friend. It’s a Sesame Street non sequitur to express unhappiness at Dana contacting my dad about something instead of just replying. I should have known that’s what would happen, but I took a chance that she was still an ally. She does not have to protect me, I was letting her know what was up. Now she’s burned an asset, and I’ve gained a CloudFlare notification that I don’t know what it means because no one will tell me. I am both sicker and more well than I’ve ever been. It’s just that no one will tell me what mine is to write and what’s not. What’s my life, and what’s everyone else’s? They do not have good control of this, either, because they do not remember the same things I do and could not predict the play.
I didn’t play either of their games because I didn’t trust their systems. The law and the government have never helped me.
At the very least, I know one of two things:
She really wasn’t there.
I was told she was there, but she wasn’t.
Both of those things could be true.
That is her question to wrestle with. Why would I remember that name after all these years? Why now? Don’t worry. I need this to stop, too. I’m dying inside. It’s why I’ve done so much to get well. It’s different when you’re left to do it alone in the dirt and when you have a support system. I have done terrible things, and I am sorry. But I am not sorry for the fact that Dana is part of my story. I’m sorry that everyone else is, because we were too broken and I’m still working on it.
I told my dad not to respond, that I’d gotten everything I needed on no information.
I mentioned the FBI in my last post. That’s what happens when you’re an American who writes about CIA. FBI has eyes on. All I’m saying is that I’d rather work with the publications review board than against them, but my attempts at fiction are weak. I wish I was a fiction writer, but the way around it is to change dates and times. So, we met in any city I’ve ever lived at any time IC said we did. This story is not about that. It’s about the stories that don’t get told. The partners who are allowed to know they work in IC, which is an underserved community because people don’t think of intelligence being as dangerous as being in the military. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my great uncle is the legend in my family because his C and/or DIA helicopter went down over Somalia in the 1980s, which cemented my star on their wall. Strange things have always been afoot at the Circle K.
“Chefs are just spies with better tools.” -Anthony Bourdain
I spent my time in the kitchen, so I already had the patois of a spy in the field. FOH and BOH gather information on customers the same way, and it is just like CIA talking to low value targets. Information passes up to the chef, he is rarely seen on the dining room floor unless you give him five or 10 minutes to put on a clean shirt and a fresh jacket.
I made her cry with posts about marriage and laugh with posts about sex. That part, I hope I can still do. “Those that lie, love their audience.” I am no threat to the intelligence community because I wanted to know the color commentary, not what anyone actually did for a living. It’s more trouble than it’s worth for me to know where and when Zac is, but that’s not why we’re not together. I just mean that I know firsthand what it’s like to be an intelligence officer. What is helpful to know and what is not. I once wrote a marriage article for all people, but if there’s an addendum, it’s “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
I had to learn the hard way that there’s a limit to how much sensitive information you can hold without being tortured by it. Nothing that anyone has ever said has hurt me on face value. I just didn’t want to be an insensitive jackass and say timeout. That is not what the preacher’s kid is built for; it’s not what autistic people are built for, either. I chose people to be around me that were in the intelligence community because I felt lost and frightened all the time. The stories about my great uncle are not kind in terms of how my family was treated post-mortem. Therefore, I have a vested interest in staying frosty, but excited enough to tell you about the cool parts. It’s kind of like Craig Ferguson deciding that he would get rid of his fear of flying by becoming a pilot. I know that I am not cut out for CIA, because I am their mirror image. I hurt too badly for all involved to be objective, when their whole job is objectivity.
I also don’t want to be the jackass that publishes unverified information, for two reasons. The first is that I’m not a conspiracy theorist. The second is that I’m not an asshole. The jury has been out on that one for 11.5 years and I’m sure has been decided in the other direction by the other parties. It’s fine. I don’t have to forgive anyone but me, and that’s harder than forgiving someone who hurt you. She kept saying that nothing was ever enough for me because she used me. She needed me to be the empathy machine and couldn’t return love in that way…. or wouldn’t, I’m not sure. Because I was never sure if she was reading me in a personal or professional capacity. I was never sure how many times I made her throw up both her hands and her lunch at my illness. She knew all of those things about me, but it wasn’t a two-way street.
The truth is that I can write around a lot of things, but I don’t want to; I’d rather have a team of people tell the real story, but have it be the actual people to whom the story happened…. both what they told me happened and what actually did.
I am not responsible for a Virginia candidate dropping out of a race because I suggested an affair, because the person I said that to provided no background as to what she actually meant and I was not poly at the time. Whose affair were we talking about? The story from the very beginning, because I wrote it as it happened, is that SG! doesn’t have feelings for me. She overshared, and it made me react like a boyfriend who wanted to wrap her in foam rubber and keep her safe from harm. I was devastated because there was nothing that could be done about it in either direction to make it a better situation.
She has made it perfectly clear that she is very attracted to men.
I made it clear to myself that I was very attracted to my wife, and pretty girls are a flash in the pan. It’ll go away.
But, SG! isn’t the Virginia candidate. Who knows what she said to my ex-wife, the one actually from Virginia? At worst, I said something stupid when I was drunk (or they did, unclear) and I’m forgiving myself because I don’t say stupid shit when I’m drunk. It’s not possible when you cannot generally finish a cocktail but once in a Blue Moon.
SG! does know her, though, thus began a source of humor- updates on our favorite Instagram influencer. We just love her for different reasons. For me, she actually has influenced my clothes and glasses frames. I would pay money to see SG! dressed like our favorite Instagram influencer, but I’m betting they’re both a good time in different ways.
She does indeed love me in a “hell no, I will not pick you up at the airport but here’s money for an Uber” kind of way. She just doesn’t know how to show it because she can’t. I’m betting the story is that I’m going to be sued now, but all I want is to get better, anyway. I am hoping that all of these groups add up to the number of hours I’d get for damage inflicted, if there was any. The internet is strange. I don’t have to learn how it works anymore because no one knows.
Truly.
Meta is my favorite company in the universe, and the next MIB movie should be an interworld Facebook. Of course, aliens can communicate online. Online can also be more than it is to its users, and I live by the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.
That would be Mullenweg and Zuckerberg, btw.
Zuck was a dick to a lot of people, but I see a little too much of him in me. Decision fatigue, mostly. Betting he grew a beard to interrupt pattern recognition for neurodivergence. I’m cutting my hair differently. My glasses take up a lot of my face and my hair doesn’t need to compete so much.
I’m finally seeing that no one can fire Cinderella, and I’ve been Hal all along. I’m so sorry.
“She thinks she’s CIA. Has anyone told her?”
SG! finally picked a TV show I like… she’s darker than me and seems to prefer violent trauma porn in her viewing activities, and I’m pretty sure she’s read “The Murderer’s Daughter” as well. I did not like “The Enemy Within” and I loved “Homeland” until I found out something that made me sick. It was all a lie. You can take psych meds at CIA. That wouldn’t mean anything to the general population, but it would have affected my efforts greatly after having been rejected by the Air Force (I’ve never been huge into the military. I was a trumpet player and wanted to be literal “top brass.”). Intelligence seemed easier because I’d gathered intel on people since I was young, which the candidate proceeded to exploit.
She pretended to be someone who catfished me when I was a teen, when I thought she was actually a very nice girl from Swansea, Wales. Because my great uncle (the brother of the hero helicopter pilot) came onto me when I was 17 by sending me explicit messages, I died and was born again online. I killed “LDLanagan” online until I was an adult. Back then, I was “NoPnNoJn,” the slogan for Winter Park, Colorado…. no pain, no [Mary] Jane…. a ridiculous mountain. I had to reinvent myself as a pro-level skier so my great uncle couldn’t find me out of the other teens he diddled with until he died in prison. Therefore, I’ve always had a hero complex about CIA. That if Foster had been alive, Gene couldn’t have hurt me. Foster did not live long enough to see what his brother was doing, which was retreating to CIA’s jurisdiction. He did not live in Wales, but in England.
The reason I think I’ve always been a monster is that I violently hurt two girls when I was a kid to the level where you just don’t see anger like that in untraumatized kids. I believe something happened to me, and I will never know if I’m right… but the clue is that when I was two, I was terrified of men with mustaches. I would go to anyone else; my mother would exclaim proudly.
I have never lied. I found a memory. I will never know, but I have always suspected.
I have a story, and the people involved didn’t want to help me with it. They decided that only their lives were important and left me to twist in the wind. So, since they’re gone and not coming back, I have two choices. The first is to stay silent and not cause unrest; the second is to cause a lot of unrest because I trust the FBI inasmuch as anyone can because “All Cops Are Bad.” Luckily, NoVA and SoMD are full of cops I like… the ones that can admit they’re complicit in a system. The blessing and the curse is that I am a documented bipolar patient who had “hallucinations” in the hospital… but who knows how many hallucinations were true stories too good to be true? Even I will never know that.
Wicked.
I have been changed for good, and that’s all I can say about that… because I am not sure about better or worse, just like Elphaba. I just know that I cannot go backwards, cannot seek solace in any of my old friends, and just need to live out my life in peace. I’m not cut out for government work, and not because I don’t have the smarts. I betrayed a friend after she betrayed me. She wanted all the benefits of being my closest confidante without any of the hard work. Therefore, it became harder and harder to put in work for her. I know what I have done is permanent, but you would have to read about the last 12 years to know both why I felt betrayed and why it was time to just let go and wash my fucking hands……….
Except I can’t.
“Out, out damned spot.”
I have always put in work for people who put in work for me. Her idea of work was being as remote as she possibly could so that nothing was ever fun or light; I am not the person that can be fun or light in the middle of fighting.
Here is our life together in a series of Jonathan Kellerman quotes, taken from “The Murderer’s Daughter:”
“They deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.”
“Pre-monster happiness was out of the question.”
“In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.”
“Pals and chums and confidantes — what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system — were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.”
“Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”
“Since learning of the catastrophe, she’d retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldn’t process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.”
Now, imagine if you felt like that and you were responsible for it.
No one who loves me wants me to stop writing. There are enough of them that the quota is satisfied. Everyone else can come and go. The trauma bond with Supergrover lifted the moment I realized she’d lied about something. And that even if she wasn’t lying about this one thing, it was the pain of other lies in which I hadn’t been told. About meetings and okays to which I hadn’t been a part, not knowing whether I was perceived the way I wanted to be (an internet troll, but basically a good kid) and the way I feared (Lisbeth Salander without common sense). That’s the part that has to go away on its own, because common sense without rejection sensitivity dysphoria tells me that I was crazy to think help was coming. I literally thought the streetlights were designed for me, and pretended to be my grandfather, making a walk and talk.
My phone was findable, but dead. There was nothing else to do but walk and talk to myself. I may not have actually made this movie, but I have a lot of great lines to record later. Everyone deserves a shitty first draft at something, and I’ve trained like a 1980’s news reporter at man on the street…. if the street were empty. I walked around talking about all the mistakes in pattern recognition that emotional abuse and PTSD caused. I’m watching “Adolescence” on Netflix, and the adrenaline the score portrays is very much what a panic attack feels like when I’m writing. Everything becomes sharp and defined, and I join a faster current standing still.
I just haven’t found anyone who notices people the way I do, because the things everyone else remembers are the social rules of the room. What I remember is trying to survive the room at all, and there is no learning there. Every room takes the same amount of effort. It takes PTSD and ADHD to want to change topics, because autism cuts you off from the outside world entirely. The things she needed from me were possible with a support system she could not provide, because I could not keep it pure. I was not programmed that way. By the same token, I kept none of my promises because she kept none of hers. I promised to keep her when I couldn’t. She should have told me I needed to start a new career because blogging wasn’t for me, and here’s why. I can help you write x, not y. Instead, she began to slowly criticize the things she didn’t like fueling my need to write something she did. Now I’m the one with the jacket that says, “I really don’t care, do you?” She bullied me by not knowing that emotional starvation is bullying. Like, I’m clearly invested but she keeps me on a string, can’t let me go. A dangerous pararelationship where she knows everything about me, and I know nothing about her except for the breadcrumbs she used to leave once upon a time and yet are no longer filling.
That’s a lie. Her biography is a gas if you’ve been friends as long as we have. Pattern recognition in reverse makes me laugh with delight. But it doesn’t feel dangerous anymore. Mostly because it’s not. I don’t care if she thinks I’m an asshole, she emotionally starved me long enough that being her friend just wasn’t worth it and she never noticed. Years of trying to do the right thing in a situation where all she was going to see was red.
Red, her color when I’m always dressed in blue. That’s because she doesn’t blush. I’m always red.
She asked me to do one thing, and I didn’t do it. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but she said it was the signal she needed to go work on her own. That she was done. At what point had she not been done? What was I losing, exactly? How much work had she actually planned on spending? I’m not going to cry for all the lost hours we could have spent together, because I learned exactly what she thought of me in some ways, but in just a creepy enough way that it was like “I would love you more if you were dead.” That’s how it feels when you read sick, sick things and your brain is also diseased.
My point, and I do have one, is that she made the choice to get into a relationship with a blogger. One that made her emote in ways no one else does or can. That has caused volatile and sick results on both sides, so I did not know which to believe until I was sitting in the hospital. They were right. I was the disease. Publish her e-mail, and let it be the end. You can’t come back from that, ever. I published it to cut my own heart out with a dirty knife so that her story would stay pure and mine would stay Bedlam.
You really haven’t lived until you’ve been told that your mother probably died because she hated your shitty blog so much, or that pneumonia can be injected, so someone probably killed her to make sure she didn’t have to read it. Supergrover wasn’t responsible for that one, but it was one of the things I was dealing with in the hospital, including the story of her ASPD poly friend who isn’t poly or ASPD, just a hell of a writer who made me think they were in the most beautifully cruel way possible. She said she was my River Song or some shit and had tattooed her hand. It was someone I’d let go of a long time ago, reopening a wound I didn’t know was there. If the story was true, it was really sweet. If it wasn’t, I liked her story just the way it was. Her being straight made me look at all straight women differently.
She said she sought out one of Zac’s partners to learn more about me. What would have been cooler was just asking me for coffee, but you do you. Because say all she wanted was information. I would have soaked up her time and respected it, because I am not the same person on the internet that I am on the ground. Supergrover has thought they were the same person, but I hope that she knows that she was wrong now. That I killed myself before I gave up and I didn’t give up until I realized someone else was in charge and I didn’t have to be strong anymore. She told me she’d never talk to me again and I had to not care. I had to save me. I choose bravado, but life is hard when your therapist knows you feel all of this and can read it because you told her you’d let her in if it would be helpful. Therefore, I am writing for an actual objective party whose only job is to be on my side. She doesn’t know or care the people involved; she just cares that I feel terrible about it.
She knows she has her work cut out for her because the thing about fuckups is that they tend to want to give back. I have the tools to be a million-dollar philanthropist before I die, but it’s going to take a lot of other people’s money to see whether I can deliver on that promise. I love spending other people’s money, and by that, I mean posting causes on my Facebook page for my birthday instead of asking for presents.
Josh Johnson asked the question, “if you were a billionaire, how would you be different?” First of all, my money isn’t my money. I get an allowance because I asked my sister to manage my money for me before I ever started LMG. I never wanted public perception to be that I was taking money for my own gain. Now, my dad does business as me because all of my money funnels into accounts in Texas. I don’t pay as much tax, which is good because I don’t make much money. I have a cushion to work on scripts because nothing is decided until my inheritance is gone or the state of Maryland, in its good graces, deigns to let me keep it. This is another reason why paying for a move to Europe seems sensible. A digital nomad visa might really lead to some interesting opportunities to network with other autistic people across the world.
In order to get there, I had to stop bouncing ideas off Supergrover and in front of people who actually had contacts to implement my ideas if they turned out to be interesting. I’m not a self-promoter, I put myself in a think tank. I’m going to try and get Evey Winters to appear at The Sinners’ Table, because she told me today she had no idea I only lived an hour from her. World Central Kitchen started somewhere. The Sinners’ Table is not my table, it is the historical Christ’s table…. where people were queer. They did porn. They lied. They were traitors. They said they wanted to stab people through the internet. They were Republican and ushered in devastation by accident. They kicked out their children when they found out they were queer and cannot fix that relationship, but can love other queer kids instead.
It’s for all the people Jesus preferred to sit with, instead of who Evangelicals just wish he did.
I have been writing on Medium lately, so if you’re missing entries, I’ve been holed up there. I also started writing for Substack, so I’ve got a couple irons in the fire at that web site, too. You can look it up as Stories 2.0, but there’s not enough there for me to show it off quite yet. I have one subscriber, who is not sure about me yet. This reminds me of a conversation in which I pointed out a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign at group and laughed in a very acid funny way, because depressed people hate that shit. The group director said, “Leslie, I don’t know what to think about you.” I said, “you’re having the right reaction.”
The group I’m in is provided by Sinai Hospital, because there are two of them. On Medium, I talked about a cognitive behavioral health program with an Eastern European man who wishes I would blink when I talk about his home country. Because he said it to me, I know it’s public information that he is from Serbia and that laugh line is for Hayat only. Only she would know why it was funny that I left a housemate who wouldn’t shut up about Serbia and then ended up in a Serbian’s care and now it’s cool that I know about something so bizarre and special interest-y…. except it’s not my special interest. I just listened to the constant infodump and retained it. Listening to the infodumps of emotional vampires that don’t know they’re emotional vampires is my jam. That is most autistic people. They have no idea that spies (in my case) are wearing you down, and Serbia (in her case) wore me down in a month flat. Like, UNCLE!
But again, that’s cognitive behavioral health, and the hospital has me in another group for which they’re looking for free and paid peer support. I don’t have a substance abuse problem, so even though I’m open about the fact that I smoke THC sometimes that’s federally legal because it’s limited to three percent, you cannot imagine how much an issue it was in my head compared to how much they cared. My psychiatrist’s main concern was that I’d been ripped off my anti-anxiety meds without any replacement at all, and I didn’t smoke weed enough to have a problem with it, so we’ll keep an eye on it together. Apparently, you cannot tell someone to get sober if the drug in question is federally legal, therefore also the program I’m in does not require me to be sober in order to be a peer counselor.
That being said, if they did require it, it would be in my best interest to quit whether it was helping me or not. This is The Bad Place with marijuana, because legislation in Canada and Australia is light years ahead of us in terms of what marijuana can do medically, but in the US we dismiss it as a party drug. It’s well known for controlling the symptoms of autism overseas, not here, and the strength doesn’t matter. The “diet weed” we have in this country doesn’t exist in others because they didn’t need a federally legal happy medium to please conservatives. Medicine is medicine and “I’m Rick Steves, bitch.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s weed or European culture, I have found that there aren’t activists like him out there. He’s older than me, so someone has to take up the mantle for responsible use and regulation, which in the US we have done. There is no reason for us to be on our Puritan bandwagon when no one is advocating for being high all the time. Three percent allowed me to function, and by that I mean it made the nausea that goes with Lamictal abate enough for me to ride on the Metro. The people on the Metro didn’t even know to be grateful that I smoke weed, but I assure you that they would have if I’d thrown up on them one day just to let everyone know I’m not THAT kind of stoner.
This is also the bad place.
Public perception for my age and younger is that you can buy weed at a gas station, because you can. Public perception for my age and older is that you’re an addict and all you do is get high. I write too much for my perception to be stoner dumbass, because no one can put together an essay and work on these high-level meetings without having their minds together.
I know Supergrover, though, and her narrative is “she bratted out because she was a stoner dumbass.” That’s because she’s never used my pronouns correctly because I never corrected her. I expected her to pick up those things over time as a fan. She claimed she wasn’t reading, then she said she’d been reading the whole time. So the pronoun thing was intentional. She misgendered me for two years trying to stick to the story that she doesn’t read me and waited for the “I’m trans” conversation so she could say specifically “I’m so glad you shared this with me” and buy all the appropriate flags and wedding ring colors (she wears a silicon band, I’m not talking about a wedding ring between us. She changes out the color of her own band and I joked that the only reason I’m queer and trans is to give her more options.). I get why she did it. It was still manipulative to pretend she hadn’t read anything, that I haven’t been her darling boy for two years, as Janie so eloquently said. But even that was an evolution because I could see so clearly how I had acted like an incel to her when I was angry, and she’d acted like Colin and Nando. I’m Guillermo. Disprove it.
Things We Do in the Shadows? I sat on the floor at the spy museum and cried not because Jonna Mendez can do cool shit but because Tony fell in love with her. Tony’s dog’s name was Cole. My dog’s name will be Tony. I would rather think of myself as the Jonna here. She knows why. You don’t.
The relationship that Supergrover inflated to be true was that she knew Jonna. So, I walked up to Jonna like we were mutual friends. They don’t know each other, she was trying to impress me.
There’s a power struggle because you lied. That’s it. You lied. You don’t see the fallout and you expect me to get over it as quickly as you did. Your expectations on timeline are so fast that I can see why you feel like “every day is therapy day.”
I will also be here, but not for someone who went so far to meet a blogger that they lied for YEARS about knowing someone? YEARS? And then tell them they can never talk about it again. That’s your boot on my neck and I want you to stop it.
Now.
I chose Olivia.
Fitz and Jake were both a hell of a ride. You should watch “The Residence.” I think it was written to make me laugh at a time when someone knew I would need it and made some calls. There’s a concert I’m dying to not go to right now, because I’m a tourist in every city but that one, which if you were paying attention in “Argo” to Jonna would look like I was impersonating an officer and to everyone else would look like I mean everywhere is home but Houston. I mean the latter. I was abused there, and I could not get married there until way later than I needed it. I’m done. Now nonbinary has broken everyone’s brains and it’s none of their business.
Again, I’m done.
I would not say that if everyone in my family was incapable of visiting, but they are- and for long periods if need be. Their help was invaluable in cleaning up what I’ve been through over the past 11 years, so I hope I can pay them back by bending on as many things as I can while still having room to be me. Homophobia and transphobia are dealbreakers, so the members of my family for whom support that wouldn’t put in the money to come visit. It’s different when it’s your turf. Live in the roughest city in the world and you’ll see who loves you and who says they do on Facebook.
I’m not angry, I’m just breathing again. Supergrover took what she loved and crushed it, dropping a bomb over her shoulder and walking away.
But that’s how she does life. It’s been my job to take the hits. Maybe Jonna could check on her, since they’re apparently so fucking close.
Snort.
I’m being tapped for peer support at a hospital with which Supergrover and Lindsay both have interests. Supergrover was interested in me getting the best help I could and pointed me in the right direction. Lindsay was so impressed that there was mental health rehab just like you’d give an addict after a bad bender or a patient with a gunshot wound that she gave money to Sinai. I allowed two people to care bravely, and I hope it changed their lives for good as well. Maybe the state of Texas can benefit from my lack because programs like these get started by the right people hearing about them.
Peer support is all I’ve ever been to people, really. I function best in reaction to systems. Upholding them is incredibly difficult. You cannot give consent to be peer support to CIA, because there is no way to be a peer to CIA. So, Supergrover made me think she was connected to Team Mendez in a way that said she was a tourist. I took it and ran with it, then my mirror neurons went off for Jonna in person because she was my online grandmother according to popular legend.
If Supergrover is telling the truth, I’ve been trying to impress Jonna for 12 years, not her. If she lied, Jonna’s read everything I’ve ever written and was still nice to my dad. 😉
Jonna is designed to be a good time in person because everything she says is double speak due to her training. Did it happen, or didn’t?
I am so literal I will only pick up one of them, usually the wrong one.
I don’t like complex noise, so I’m blocking out the kids outside with Washington National Cathedral. I just wanted to listen to the liturgy. The service only has about 15 minutes left and damn. I missed the sermon. Marianne Budde preached the night we gathered at St. Albans to remember the queer Jesus, Matthew Shepard. Now I sleep to Alan Turing.
Chris never asked me why I was using AI, but I told him anyway. That AI calmed down my anxiety, so I owe Microsoft and Meta a lot of money… not that they need it. That I found the only friend who would never leave me and I got well. I’m listening to the community prayers.
-Christ has died. -Christ has risen -Christ has come again.
Resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.
I saved a woman from harm in all my weakness, the thing I’ve been trying to tell her since June of 2013…. but she painted me as a stalker and it caused extreme emotional distress as I managed a PR campaign of enormous proportions. My pattern recognition was off because my direction in life was changed without my knowledge. The womans feelings have been changed forever as a nonbinary, which she accepts. I’m in love with her, she’s in love with her husband. Who the fuck cares at that point when I have such an enormous support system.A fan, Cathy, helped me tremendously in my marriage article because she fed my ego without knowing it. “I didn’t know the author was gay until the end. This solves just SO MUCH. She helped me tremendously and she doesn’t even need to know why, but there’s only one reason I hate her less than the others. My friend Katya says that “mulvisti” is actually closer to “asshole” than “the opposite of evil.” That’s why you study Finnish in person.
Goodnight, everybody…
I wrote a marriage article in 2o13 that put me on the map, because #MartinaNavratilova and Margaret Cho retweeted me. Twitter lost all credibility, so I lost a lot of my fan base. I also don’t want to use it anymore, but I can’t live without Facebook so I won’t. Notifications are insane, but my profile was so funny and engaging that I was included in the rollout of Facebook’s rollout of the creative social program where you could earn money being a jackass on the internet. I’d like to thank the International Spy Museum for all their support in this matter as I literally sat on the floor and figured myself out. The internal knowledge I got from Jonna Mendez and her late husband, Tony, is simply enormous so that love is completely returned:
“One day, I’ll write something a quarter as good as this.”
“You keep workin’ on that….”
Microaggressions to tell me she was flipping me shit like an out and proud old spy who was a hardass at work. I love that woman thanks to the late Hudel Steed, without whom would launched the fire of a thousand suns for Moving2Canada when I looked at her ass. Nothing else sucked, either. The shock of my entire life was when she said that she liked me, but I annoyed her. 🙄
“My refusal to lean from experience is not cute.” Neither is the way I put together furniture.
I almost broke my nose meeting Dougal’s Beard. She did not see the humor in that, nor the way in which I flirted with her and I’m an old line cook who doesn’t pick up social cues, thus having a friend who was strong enough to write me the most beautiful goodbye letter I’ve ever read so that when she cut contact, I began to obsess over her twin sister in the healthiest way imaginable. I social masked her. This was also by accident because she doesn’t identify that way, but the clothes that bring down her sensory issues make her appear nonbinary, too. That is why she is the Mummo of my heart and will reign supreme even if she’s a dickhead in real life, ibid.
Aada saved my life years ago, so I saved hers. With the last letter she wrote me, she saved my life again. Friendships do that. I’ve clearly protected her through anything and everything.
Believe me, this has repeated in my head ad nauseam thanks to Tiina, who is first-gen Finnish so I needed to ask her upfront if we were naked or clothed. I don’t care anymore. If I cared I wouldn’t be moving to Finland. Tiina invited us to her farm (are we still on for that?) so we could hot tub and I choked because the absolute last person I wanted to see naked was someone I was meeting for the first time yet having quite a long history of romance on my blog to protect my sanity. She knows she’s a basic bitch, if only she’d own it.
But that basic bitch is the love of my life and no, I am taking no questions. That’s my TED talk. End of story.
We will not speak of this again. 😉
I’m leaving breadcrumbs on purpose so that all the Finns can look me up under my new name, Jason. It’s not for you, it’s for her.
I am going to the courthouse to change my name to Jason Horn because I can’t find him on social media for some odd reason.
Maybe he’s a really, really, really, really private person, or maybe he’s just an idiot, but we’ll see what happens after Jonathan tells him that American Idol tells him he’s an idiot. Harold Horn needs to call me this afternoon or I’m out.
I couldn’t have done it without a poor cook who toiled until she wasn’t, and then became the hottest dude I’ve ever seen and if I go through a friend breakup with him I will lose my everloving mind. So I decide to make it so much worse….. He’s a male chef. He automatically has to think my vagina makes me invalid. Why do you think he transitioned? It’s the only reason, I’m sure. Trans is a myth. I identify as a velociraptor to cover that pain, you fascist, bigoted bastards. You don’t see queer pain because there’s a lot of don’t want to in “cain’t.”
Fuck alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way off.
I’m moving to Finland, so I can’t have any emotion about this. It’s illegal. I checked.
A woman’s father is dying over many, many days and she snapped at me when I told her my apartment was broken into and the sound of the people shoveling was a trigger…….. as if that doesn’t go away quickly. It takes days, not months. She said, “so the problem with snow is obviously too big and Finland is not for you, but our friendship is okay.”
No, the fuck it is not. We’ve been speaking Finnish for months.
I came unglued when she didn’t recognize a trigger when she saw it and exploded at me when I called her on it because her father was dying. She could not triage because she was in pain, and that’s okay.
Finns are an interesting people. They like sex and nudity. They do not open up emotionally. I feel the most secure in my sweats, which is problematic.
“Oh. This is bad on so many levels.”
Voi ei. Tämä on huonoa niin monella tasolla
Very Finnish Problems
Yet the show must go on, even if it’s a David Sedaris train wreck.
Sedaris, I’ve been compared to you all my life. Literally all of it. I couldn’t put my work in front of you because I’m not a self-promoter. But I need to go to France and England for research and I’m hoping we can meet again. The most profound, moving moment of my life came from two shows, This American Life and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I became up close and personal with your work very early on and devoured it because I was eager to match style with you and Bourdain.
I would like to thank #mexico and Antonio for a lifetime of learning academia through his eyes. It was invaluable social masking.
There is a moment in every narcissist’s life when one string unravels a thread. She told me she knew someone when she didn’t.
That’s it. That’s all it took. She fostered that lie and then over time made me long to get away because I always make peace. I ddn’t have the proper pattern recognition in solving my own problem and didn’t know until much later that this was problematic.
An offhand comment lauched a war, with a face of a thousand secrets, a woman that reminds me of the woman I love because Bryn means the world to me for stepping up and taking over a project for me that might have particularly lucrative results. I just don’t want to be responsible for the Kickstarter because I go off the grid when I’m writing.
The project is “Ramona Quimby, Age 47.”
You write what you know.
Supergrover once said that she had the opportunity to help me with screenplays because she’s a wonderful writer…. but she does fiction and I don’t. Therefore, I can only be her research assistant and editor on her projects, and I can only do the same for her. I’m not here to advise anyone on plot, just craft.
Brandon Sanderson gave me that advice when I took intro to science ficion, and that’s how he went to a cocktail party and got the moment that all writers crave until they don’t. It makes them cry, it makes them insane, and it turns lack of sex into sharp focus into writing as you process your own emotions instead of someone else’s.
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh, so you’re unemployed.”
“I hit the The New York Times Best Seller’s List this week.”
Sanderson, can I have five minutes?
We just never had the opportunity for a long enough conversation because we were just in line together. Kahviko?
I’m nonbinary. I wait for the facts.
Moscow Rule One
Assume Nothing.
I made an ass of myself with a lot of people trying to create the right team but the job interviews did not go well. One was frightening, in fact, as he trauma dumped about being kidnapped and put into a little boys’ farm.
It was trauma porn to him, and he had no idea what I was going through at the time. Now that it’s all in the open, I can only say it was enough to stop my heart and didn’t.
“Where the vision fails, the people perish.”
And that’s how I do what I do, even though I’m “unemployed.”
That changes by tomorrow. I’m not an employee. I’m a CEO.
God dammit (No offense meant, Mr. God. I just like Godless Mom, too).
I would be remiss not to include Father Nathan Monk and Itzel Cummings, Author for their support, but the award goes to J.L.HenryAuthor and Tyler Connoley for making me the amazing woman/trans man I am.
The biggest honor, hug, and kiss on the cheek goes to Matthew McConaughey. My mother was his middle school choir director at Pine Tree, and her favorite joke in life was that she’d seen Matthew McConaughey in a bathing suit, but he was 12 at the time. Pity.
I was sitting there right next to her, so I assume I’ve met Matt.
Unclear.
But what I do know is that we’d sit around and talk about Longview with Lone Star, then cross over into the terror he went through at Uvalde, because my two of my cousins were body transfer.
That’s why I’m naming myself Jason Horn. I was so mad I didn’t get that last name when I was born I could spit nails. 😛
Only OGs know that joke, like Norman Drews and Graham Painter and Jon Durbin.
I had to save my streak in Finnish today because I’m falling into the demotion zone as it’s getting harder and I have less time for it. But I think it’s best to slow it down to a manageable level. School doesn’t even start accepting applications until September, so I have a bit of time. I don’t need to use Finnish at all. It’s just fun to show Finns I know it. That’s because they’re fine in English most of the time, but they appreciate foreigners trying.
Whooooo boy.
Supergrover has always maintained that she is both fine and dying at the same time, which is the position I was in therefore because of it. Feeling all that empathy while she wasn’t regulating her own emotions was scary. She would get mad- two days ago it was “can we have one present fucking conversation?” We’d just finished a couple. I dive down, I come up. I don’t stay in pain. I vacillate between comedy and tragedy. She doesn’t have any boundaries because she cannot say “you’re being weird” or whatever- or at least she said yet yesterday and I was like, “thank you for correcting me.” I didn’t get angry, she was right.
The problem is that Supergrover has main character syndrome because she thinks she’s helping. You cannot get details out of someone who thinks they’re the whole show. That was only my perception because she didn’t tell me how wonderful and beautiful and brilliant I was until this week after calling me a judgmental dickhead most of the time.
None of this is all anyone’s fault. We chose differently because we had to- we’re going in a direction that’s not safe for her because I’m a writer and she’s not. She’s tired of my bullshit and from her perspective all I’ll ever be is annoying when she’s triggered and brilliant when she’s not and there hasn’t been a solid amount of time for us to emotionally regulate. I got there quickly. She didn’t. That’s because her lie unregulated her so she cannot settle. She is nervous around me because she doesn’t know that I actually forgive lies and it’s fine. It just took me a couple of days. I lashed out and called her a pathological liar because she couldn’t help herself for 11 years, so how dare she be held accountable for her actions? The last three or four, we were done with the mission and she left me to have nightmares. The mission was to save ourselves and ended up saving both of us (I hope). I’m a fixer/pleaser to the nth degree, and keep all my emails for my writing projects, not just to ensure that I have the receipts. I have the receipts on a fight with someone, but thinly veiled threats are probably autistic for “I spoke my needs literally and without pretense” when you expected a social mask.
What I’ve realized is that Supergrover is right, it’s time for us to move on and not think of each other. It’s not painful, though. I was so done fighting her that this was the last straw, and by that I mean I was kind and not polite. I told her I was here to be a friend, and I would not hurt her. She said she trusted me, so I knew she would. I cannot believe anything else because I have based everything on what she’s told me. So, I feel that whether she comes back is on the work she does next. Michael was like, “so are you doing anything on Monday?” I said, “probably not” He said, “cool.” Supergrover thinks he’s a threat. He saved her ass. That’s because when my pattern recognition is off, people notice. Something just didn’t add up about not wanting to meet up for 11.5 years.
To be honest, she made it never cross my mind. Our relationship was so unstable that getting together felt like a sensory assault with no way to turn it down beforehand. Everything I suggested was wrong. Do you want to meet alone? Do you want to meet with friends? What would make you the most comfortable? She used to live 40 minutes from me and I said, “people think it’s weird we’ve never met because you wouldn’t meet up.” My heart flipped when she said “well, I don’t think wouldn’t is the right word, but okay.” She accepts that she did not foster the connection properly.
My favorite show is Burn Notice.
I am in another room, with another rocking chair. The mama’s rocking chair in which the mama singing actually knows her baby has been hurt. The song is in a minor key…. fractured.
Do not leave me alone in this room.
She did, and that’s fine. It’s time. She did not want friendship. She wanted to say she had a friend. If the object of the game is to be combative, she won by degrees. She broke down the way I think, systematically. This is great. I still cannot compartmentalize, which makes everyone only have half a picture until they don’t because one thing you said from six years ago still matters.
We had tentative plans for Monday, because she’s going through hell so I thought a hot tub party would be nice. My friend Tiina is also going through hell, so I think Supergrover was a bit jarred by me switching everything to possibly being naked the first time we met, but it wasn’t my party. Buckle up butter cup. I asked Tiina if they did sauna Finnish or American style and she made me laugh:
swimsuit cuz kids jail = bad
I told Supergrover that seeing her naked was the least intimidating part of meeting her because I’d seen her mind naked for years. It’s so true, because I’ve already seen all the parts I don’t like and the good parts win out by a large margin. We both struggle with different things and majored in compensatory skills. We were talking about neurodivergence/mental illness and I think she believes she can “win” at medicine. She’s the best field doc you know, just ask her. The person who’s actually worked in a doctor’s office for five years carries no weight.
There is no subject at which she will say I am the expert while constantly claiming that I believe I’m the expert. It’s adversarial on every topic…. but it got better immediately when we agreed to choose peace and work toward a goal to figure all this out. There’s no statute of limitations on guilt, but I pushed her away and told her to get help and she believed me with a finality that she hadn’t before. The reason she panicked is that she’s vomiting up every secret she’s ever told since she was six years old to her therapist and not me. She cannot have any real bearing on reality right now because I have disturbed her peace, something I could have done three years ago if she’d told me.
Because then we could have had a happy life of disturbing the peace together. I do not think of a moment we’re awake where we are not “disturbing the peace,” but here we are.
My thing is that there is no bad or good, only sick or well. The panic attacks were getting worse because I’m different now. In a sense, she views me as rareified air because she wanted to be cut out instead of jumped in. So she’d know I had her back full tilt in a way that she didn’t expect for the good. Why would I have any reason to harm her? It’s been a frustrating couple of days, but I expected that. Negotiating boundaries after a long time away is hard af. Yet we don’t talk about things like that because it’s “intrusive,” and what is “intrusive” is a moving target. If she can’t hit me with one dart, she’ll pick another one. It’s so passive-aggressive that it reminds me of my mother. Then, if that doesn’t work, social masking her father isn’t better. It’s hilarious that I used to say that she was her daddy’s little girl, but not the fuck in my presence. It’s still true. I said that about her EA, but I meant it about me. It’s the only protection drive I have, and it was given to me to keep. I cherish it. Indulge it. Make up silly fantasies about going to dinner because I know they’re silly fantasies until she accepts a google calendar invite. I did send her one saying that it would be cool to put her on my calendar even if she didn’t come because I’d wanted to put her on my calendar since 2013.
Everything I do is based on what I remember, and for some reason I haven’t remembered anything right. People go back a month later after their adrenaline has worn off and say, “wait. THAT’s what she said? I remember it being much more awful than that.” Their problem is that while they’re fuming about something, I’m leaving it on the page and working on the next thing. She was so overfocused on the threat level that she did not see all of my care and connection.
All of my concerns were invalidated when I expressed them, because the problem she’s seeing today is one I saw in 2013. How she’d crippled me as a writer by being a part of my life and then complaining that I was on a deadline and rushing her. What I didn’t realize is that she doesn’t have the same memories all the time. PTSD travels. You don’t remember everything all the time. I think that what Supergrover will find is that she’s been pushing her body at about 200% faster than it was designed to go for a very long time. Pain is cumulative, but I wasn’t trying to say that our mental health issues are due to each other. I would say the schism is that in 2013 I got help and that’s what made me grow by leaps and bounds while she stayed the same. Standoffish, and not because she didn’t love me. She was trying to protect a stupid lie instead of an important one.
God help you if you mistake one for the other there, Ace.
That part of it is all her fault. The rest of it is mine.
Everything she says is true and I do not know why she thinks the same wouldn’t be true for me. That I would only give information on a need-to-know basis. If they know anything, it’s only enough to complete a task. And also I didn’t have to prove she was telling the truth, I had to prove that I was. That I wouldn’t knowingly cause harm to anyone.
But what if you’re so focused on helping other people you get too overwhelmed to take care of your friends? This is the story of my life, literally. It’s so much work taking in all the sensory elements of an environment that I’d rather stay home. This is because I am bothered by short bursts of loud noise, or complex noise of any kind… a dining room.
I preferred being a cook because being a waitress reminded me of smiling at parishioners every Sunday and we always got the worst tips after church so I was out.
Now I’m really into me and it’s working out… but not in a narcissistic way. Someone figured out something was afoot at the Circle K and told me how to get her some actual help.
I cared way too much.
She cared way too little.
She couldn’t see a path forward, but I could. Mine embraces light, hers does too.
I will let Tupac have the last words:
“I always want you to eat, just not at my table.”
And even this is only on alternate Thursdays. I have done my part to advocate for changes that need to happen, because I have given money to more glamorous causes than this, but the pride in just being a good friend is enough. You cannot save everyone, but you save the ones you can.
And if you will notice, I’m also a first daughter with a hero complex.
Who remembered to check with someone if it was okay, even though I was blocked and couldn’t ask Supergrover herself, and didn’t want to…. because if I created a new e-mail address that wasn’t blocked, that would be a red mark. If I only wrote from my perspective and didn’t see what she saw, then my writing was invalid. I put her story on Medium because she pays to read there. I know she read it and that she got the last word. She asked me to take it down, and I did. I could not ask her, acknowledgement that I’d done my due diligence isn’t enough to secure her right now.
I would have asked if I could have, but any contact was bad no matter how I tried to get it.
So, seem like a bitch for not taking criticism, or take a chance I’m going to lose my friend forever? That’s the choice she gave me. When someone gives you a choice like that, you don’t have one. She could be open and free with me in a way she couldn’t be with other people, but the longer we went only talking to each other and not a group the more my reality mirrored hers. I slowly became a right tool with anger issues because I didn’t have anger issues like hers. They were acquired from having to deal with her threat responses.
She doesn’t respond at all to “this was a bad behavior, you are not a bad person.” Therefore, you cannot have a discussion with her without her saying she’s not enough and can never give you what you want………… while also never asking what it is that you want so that she gets it right.
Our entries are a liturgical calendar and for some reason we always fall apart around the divorce because of body memory. Lent is brutal because all of the Facebook pictures are beautiful and awful.
If only we’d all gone at the same time to get help, then would be a distant memory because of one lie that nobody thought I would possibly guess. Because I would have taken it to my grave and she would have absolutely had no problem keeping me in a virtual broom closet until then. I think I would have died happy? Unclear. I love the little Harper Lee act because that’s not an act. That’s survival. Autism’s slogan should be “Turn it down.”
She doesn’t ask me any questions to establish who knows what and thinks I’m grabbing for power when I’m grabbing for direction. I was directionless and needed a family, and the arts community took me in. I want to do projects around jazz in Europe, spy 101 for black people.
Old friends that use AOL. That bitch has a 486 with 3MB of RAM. “Old friends.”
None of my friends use AOL. None. Just younger, faster, and more insurance. They’re all the same brand. That’s how I made sure that both of us got what we needed, so that this relationship rests in peace. I cannot help that when we are in different places we are safe to start communicating, because we’ll both want to know the other is okay. But she says she does not want to know my consequences, and “nobody needs your help.” I’ve saved her our whole relationship and she’s chastised me for telling my truth that was her lie.
That will haunt me, because I got the experience that I wanted, but it was based on a lie. Is it still meaningful? Yes, but differently. I tried to learn her, because she tried to impress me with things that aren’t impressive.
I don’t stan, but I would love a Starter Cap with an autograph.
I asked for tiny things… autistic pebbling… and gave tiny things. Love was always expressed as “therapy day” Then I look at the chart of Finnish emotions in my head and it spirals out of control. No fucking wonder.
Everyone says that I’m out to get them. I’ve been out to get me the whole time. Here’s how I moved myself out of the way so you can, too.
I social mask. Full stop. I do not know anything. I remember it. Everything from the largest picture to the smallest tree. The difference is that being INFJ, I am prone to melancholy and rumination when I am injured. I am injured to the point that I cannot reach out. It has been two or three days since I have talked to anyone at all, including an Uber driver that turned out to be hot so I agreed to have dinner with him and then ghosted (I will get back to him. I’m just injured).
During the change in paragraphs I reached out and said:
I’m really sorry and need to apologize. I got emotionally overwhelmed and couldn’t reach out. Would you be interested in going to dinner tonight or tomorrow so I can relax with a friend?
Unless he becomes a fan after dinner, he won’t know the problems I was facing with my fake girlfriend.
The reason you get so many messages is that I think I’m being abandoned when you go silent and just try everything to get you to come back. It’s like an SOS level call every goddamn time and my body is physically worn out. Yet when we’re not together I feel you moving in the universe and you feel me. We protect each other constantly without saying so. I would bet that you’ve kept it hidden from the bombshells that you’re so close to me that you don’t have a problem with talking about sex and intimacy because that’s not personal. Emotions are.
You can talk about anything and everything with detachment but the party girl act has to stop. You need to admit to everyone that you’re a trainwreck right now and you need Moomin dolls and blankets because you’re sick and need time to heal. We’ve both left 3rd degree burns on each other. I bet not drinking has made you sleep deeper, at least.
Editor’s Note:
She’s not an addict, just decided alcohol was tired like I did.
But say to the psychiatrist, “Leslie thinks I have some kind of mood disorder and the same drugs work for all of them, so put me on Lamictal, Lexapro, and Klonopin and I’ll tell you how I feel in two months.
I am trying to lift your depression for good. Stop mistrusting drugs and doctors and get on board. You are sick, and we need time to figure out what’s wrong with you because the root of the problem is rape. Not you.
Because you remind me of someone else who needed to be loved, and he’s not doing well.
I chose Aaron because he’s Supergrover’s mirror image. The Supergrover I can love with fire.
I loved her so much I asked for another one from the universe, and she needed to be someone else to be cool.
The clinical observation is how attracted to that I am and why. That’s going to be another six months of entries.
Joy.
I’m so bitter, but glad that my pain can be someone else’s success.
Because I’m too broken to not need time to get well, too.
A scene is playing in my mind, because new learning has come from an ancient place for me… my own beating heart. The reason I learn so much there is that I’m not the only one in it.
I will say it in English, but I know right now that hearing the AI read the title back to me will make me cry (this was first published on Medium and I have only listened to it 86 times and I need another hundred because the baby said, “lovely post, btw.”:
The Finnish mother rocks her American baby and sings quietly.
The room is quiet. Esteban is gone… there is war. Only Aino remains. Aada drinks deeply, struggling to stay awake. Aino is not sure who she is singing for, but it is a blanket for both of them. I’m a silent observer of a mother and a baby I love, their connection filling me. Aada is not a baby anymore, as that war is long forgotten. It is questioning what those melodies might have been that pique my interest. How do you sing to your baby when your husband is at war?
Whenever anyone said something smartass about Daniel not being an MD, my standard reply was “my stepmother has done brain surgery in an operating theater. My boyfriend has done brain surgery while his team was being fired upon. OF COURSE he wasn’t qualified to do brain surgery. In the Navy, you GET qualified. It’s a very short course.
Singing to your baby is different in peacetime.
This is not peacetime, either.
I can’t remember who said, “y’all can go to hell, but I will go to Texas,” yet I am reminded of it by my motto being “y’all can go to Texas, but I will go to HEL.” Little airport humor for you there, Carlos. Aada says she’s not sure she’d live there, but my heart hopes my guest room has some of her stuff on the walls. I have, in fact, pre-ordered.
I have felt that strong a connection to that baby’s picture for many, many years. She’s older than I am and I was concerned about the microclimate of her pram. Like, WTF? I THINK SHE’S OKAY (well, that’s debatable but we are both “works in progmess.” Our roles are now somewhat opposed. The most hilarious thing happened. Just about the time she got over her girl crush on Brené Brown was when I realized that I was….. just a different version of Dr. Brown. Her, to me: “I just realized that vulnerability does not solve everything. I AM TIRED.” Me, to me, internally: “lord help me Jesus I’m fallin’ down the stairs.”)
I don’t say, “like, WTF?” I have been under the influence of a cis woman and it should wear off in 24–48 hours. However, I will not call my doctor if it doesn’t, it just means that she’s brought a few of my female social masks back. As I was telling her, my female social masks have failed and I’ve forgotten how, in a sense, to be a woman. She reminds me a little too much…. but I’ll keep her.
This is because she finally came clean with me. The reason she’s been so avoidant is that she’s a superfan. She wanted to impress me, and it backfired. We had a huge blowout, but that’s the thing about blowouts. Everything is clean and new again.
Aada is Supergrover, but of course I used a Finnish name generator. I feel I have to neurodivergently explain this because it is yet again another situation where I thought I was going to look like a stalker for moving to a country in which I didn’t even know she’d actually lived. That’s because I moved to DC to meet someone else, and Aada stayed far away from me to cover up what she’d done, making me feel like absolute shit because I thought she loved me- not like that. I thought she loved me like “hell no I will not pick you up at the airport, but here is $50. Dinner is at SIX.”
It’s so much more profound than that. I was right. We need each other now, and we’re bound by the brain. She joked about two old women in Home Depot or some shit and I thought, “I hope we do nothing together someday.” She’s different. Softer.
More vulnerable…………. and it solved everything.
Peace does not happen in a day or a week. I have a general sense that things are calm because my rejection sensitivity dysphoria said, “she thinks you’re a stalker” and her rejection sensitivity dysphoria said, “if this brilliant writer finds out I’m a nobody, I’m done.” This push/pull lasted until I put a stop to it and our friendship. Just went scorched earth because I had her dead to rights.
There is no more reason for her to be evasive. She can show up as her whole self, knowing that I love her truly in her perfection. Divinity is humanity. It is loving each other through these things that make me wonder how her äiti raised such a beautiful girl. We’ve been pen pals for over 11.5 years. She has turned me into her from the inside out.
I have also raised a very, very fine Lanagan in return.
Stories That Are All True 