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.
Stories That Are All True 