Tag: life

English & Language Arts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What was your favorite subject in school?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The One Where I Use The Term “Manage” Loosely

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you manage screen time for yourself?

I am obsessed with screen time and I have no plans of changing any time soon. We have covered why, that I communicate more naturally via SMS and e-mail/messaging than I do verbally. However, I know that not every conversation is appropriate to have via text, as well. I draw the line at text message breakup, which is why I have been so pissed at The War Daniel and Sam. It hadn’t been long enough for me to say I was in love with either of them, but it had been long enough that I knew I loved them. Even Sam, at three weeks, I knew I loved her with an intensity I hadn’t felt in a long time, but intensity was all over the map. If she wanted a bestie, I was there. If she wanted a wife, I was there. If she wanted to date other people so our relationship didn’t move too fast (the goal when I didn’t break up with Zac), I would have been there and I know that because I was.

She didn’t want to become the lesbian U-haul couple, but didn’t want to do anything to prevent it, either. I didn’t want to be the girlfriend that anticipated her needs from day one, so I didn’t read between the lines and break up with Zac, anyway. It wasn’t that I lied and cheated. It was that her ex-husband lied and cheated, so the further she got towards reality, the more she realized that she thought something was happening to her that wasn’t. She felt the emotions of him cheating and wanted to lock me down, and the bitch of it is that she could have. She just insisted from the beginning until she broke up with me that she’d gotten too involved with a female ex and they were living together within a year and it was a disaster. She thought she could be cool, and as it turns out, she likes being in a relationship and pouring everything into one person. She found another person who also does that. She just didn’t realize it because I took her at her word.

I also think she thought she couldn’t handle my neurodivergence because she already had an autistic kid, and even if I’m wrong I’m not. I don’t know how it would have been to be the partner and mom of an autistic person simultaneously. That’s because there are times when I know I would have gotten overwhelmed and had a meltdown, and she shouldn’t be expected to survive my burnout sessions when she’s already got so much on her plate. What if her kid and I were in burnout at the same time? How would I handle autistic rage in a teenager? Having done it before, I know I’m solid. This is because I (and all autistic people, frankly) get calmer when other people are in trouble.

We have the bravery to do for others what we cannot do for ourselves. When we are out of our minds because our environment is threatened, we fold into ourselves because we have been pegged as “problematic.” Neurotypical people don’t have that jump scare at a changing environment, but we will watch it happen- their discomfort- and all of the sudden the mama lion comes out. We will risk losing social masking, function, and start stimming if we have to because someone is going to pay attention to the fact that our friends are in trouble. I would be Karen on a stick to get Bryn some ketchup, but I would enjoy mine plain to avoid a social interaction.

We lose the ability to care about what we’re putting out there when others’ safety is threatened; we feel the disaster that occurs within us and try to prevent it happening to others. It’s watching for meltdowns that don’t occur in neurotypical people, essentially having an autistic person’s back because we’re used to it and unable to realize other people don’t need it.

Autistic computer programmers seem like the most narcissistic assholes on earth, because all of them mansplain and people look at female “IT Guys” and see autism. They look at men and see “mansplaining.” That’s almost certainly the biggest disconnect in IT. Autistics of every gender are attracted to IT because they’ve always worked there and adjusted their environment to fit. For instance, I have always been the kind of helpdesk person who prefers to sit with the coders. I should have stayed in web design, but I got out when databases entered the picture. That’s because I had to jump from design to development in a hurry with no ability for logic to that degree. I know this because I took Logic in college instead of math and had to take it twice before I got a D, so I might want to take it again before I decide to take on Python. I’m even shit at MySQL when it comes to complex search terms. Logic is just not my wheelhouse, because I’m a monotropic thinker. Programming would be easy if you could write a program as “one thing happening in sequence.” In coding, you have to understand everything, everywhere, all at once.

This realization hit me this morning and it stopped me where I live. In terms of autistic people being programmers and having a tendency to isolate (like in their mother’s basement) and hack or code, making fun of it is severely ableist. “Comic Book Guy” is at the same time hilarious and tragic, hopefully the point Groening was trying to make. But it’s not a sad life because he can’t talk to people. It’s that few people are willing to ignore his accommodations and see him as more than his exterior….. in effect, getting a gift and focusing on the wrapping paper.

I am a writer in coders’ wrapping paper because I can have the personality of a helpdesk person as long as it’s the sensory environment of the server room. Better yet, I am talking to them in stereo headphones that block out everything else if I’m expected to write down what someone is saying while I’m listening. The good thing is that if those conditions are met, I type 90 words a minute and can take down everything they say down to the punctuation. Even then what I cannot do is sit in a room full of people who are also on the phone. That’s how 99% of helpdesks are set up to save space and encourage collaboration, which is great for 90% of people, maybe more. ADA accommodations are critical, which makes it harder to get a job because special does not equal valuable.

My screen time is dictated by the fact that I’m not Comic Book Guy, but I’m not not him, either. I have to fight through a system that was not built for me, and I just have to be okay with that. I have to work through autistic meltdown and burnout while people see me as defective and I also just have to be okay with that…. in relationships, at work, and in my own mind because nothing will ever get better in my lifetime and I’ll die mad about it.

Things like meltdown, burnouts, and demand avoidance are disabilities, not laziness. Our brains just aren’t built to accept it because we have no executive function. Asking a request of an autistic person will immediately cause loss of function. The best thing you can do is try not to spring things on autistic people because they have to prepare their environment to accept a demand in the first place. Failing that, writing everything down and giving us concrete steps that we can refer to later is key, because we can’t retain information verbally as easily as we can in text, and repetition is key, thus rereading the instructions.

The only way you can get things done quickly is if their excitement lines up with yours. For instance, I would have strength to go to the International Spy Museum easier than I would have the strength to stomach a rave, even though both are supposed to be fun (at a rave, I do a drug heavily called “caffeine.” It’s really fun. Look into it. 😛 Kidding, I don’t drink when I party because those are the experiences I want to remember the hardest. I don’t get many dancing and lights memories. Although I had a couple of beers at the Charlotte Cardin concert because beer and Canadians go together like “peanut butter and ladies.” The concert was at Union Stage, where they make beer in-house and it’s very good. I’m glad I branched out. The difference in preparing for that environment is that I didn’t go alone and I got notice a month in advance. Lindsay was with me and it made all the difference. Home became my environment and the club was superfluous. It reminded us very much of going to see Ben Folds Five at Numbers in the ’90s, about the same size club without the contact high. I also didn’t lock my keys in my car and we didn’t have to wait for our parents to come and bail us out. Charlotte Cardin didn’t wait with us until they got there, either, but Ben Folds did. I was 19 and looked younger. Lindsay was 14 and looked older. However, neither one of us looked like adults. I loved that he felt sorry for us because he was a dad long before he had Gracie.

One of the reason that I don’t get sensory issues about going to the Kennedy Center and The Reach is that Jason Moran and Robert Glasper both play there, which is the same feeling as my sister being with me because I’ve known them since ninth grade. The second is that Ben Folds is the artistic director for a concert series called “Declassified,” so it’s another feeling of home even in someplace unfamiliar. The best part is that there are a lot of artists that make me feel this way, because I’ve either sung with them, we have mutual friends, or we went to school together, and even Beyoncé is on that list. I’ve stood in the same room with her, but we’ve never met. She falls under the mutual friends category…. as does Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) because he was on tour with Robert the last time around.

I told Robert to tell Yasiin that he was my favorite alien (he played “Ford Prefect” in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and walked away realizing I’d lied because The Doctor is actually first. But oh, well. If they run across this, I’m so sorry.

If they do, it will be while managing their own screen time.

Who Doesn’t?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you need time?

We all need more time to understand things than we think we do, and are trying our dead-level best to overschedule; we’re all going place to place and taking in none of them. When I travel again, I’d like to stay at least a week if possible. It takes a while for my body clock to accept a new rhythm, particularly going east. Jet lag was objectively worse coming back to DC from Oregon than it was in the moments I was taking the obligatory Portland airport photo (iykyk). I am using jet lag as an example of needing time because it’s the best way I know how to explain autism to a layperson. Imagine feeling like you have the pressure of your emotions changing to that degree all the time rather than just after a long-haul flight. Taking on change is easier when you feel normal, right? Would you enjoy living in jet lag fog permanently?

This is why transition time is essential to the autistic brain, and why I am yet again grateful that I do not drive. I caused my last wreck from rumination. I’d talked to a close friend earlier in the day, and we hadn’t spoken for years before that. She’d ghosted me without a trace and then reappeared. It was jarring, a new environment for me, so I did what any normal person would do. I thought about it so hard I ran into a guardrail trying to blow town for Frederick, the closest Waffle House. I was about 800 feet from a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions (superior to Frito Pie, fight me) when I took a curve a little too hard. Girls with blonde hair will do that to you.

Editor’s Note:

You should absolutely add Fritos to bean burritos at Taco Bell. Also, every once in a while when I hit 7-Eleven, I buy a snack bag of Fritos for the back of the pantry because I’m a Texan and I don’t make the rules. Sometimes you have to have Frito Pie and in that instance, there is no substitute so you might as well be prepared. Not being prepared is such a rookie Texan mistake, because whoever heard of homemade Fritos? You’re going to the store. It’s not that you can’t make AMAZEBALLS tortilla chips at home. I can and they’re fabulous. But they sure as hell don’t taste like Fritos…….. just like pastry chefs are going to use Oreos/Oreo crusts. They’re not going to reinvent that particular wheel.We’ve learned it over time.

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

What you learn with enough time is how to control your environment to the extent that you can and let go of the rest. I’m not going to be able to convince Supergrover that what she read as narcissism was actually an autistic meltdown. I am sure that she regularly thinks I am the most toxic person she’s ever met because I just keep throwing these truth bombs because I’m an asshole and not because I am genuinely curious and love her more than anything on earth. If I throw an emotional bomb, it means I care about the answer and want to hear it. I heard a line from “Friends” that expresses this so well…. when Chandler looks into Monica’s eyes and tells her that she’s high maintenance, but he likes maintaining her. I am not an asshole with a God complex, she has complex problems that cannot be solved with “yeah, I’m fine.” If you want to see a question as an attack, you will.

I honestly found out I was autistic because of this relationship. I had to find out two things. The first was why I was so empathetic on the inside and yet it came across as being self-absorbed. Everyone knows that autistic person, or we know each other. Bet.

I learned over time that the meltdowns happened in a cycle because I would unmask and start letting my brain run wild on these ADHD/Autistic tangents and she would take offense at me not acting like a woman, seriously, and I’m not being dismissive toward her. It’s that traditional women are programmed to fix/please and anticipate everyone else’s needs.

We used to be a little too much alike in that arena, but I felt safe enough to stop with her because she’s so goddamn strong. She lays down the truth bombs as easily and often as I do. It’s just that hers are in the context of what she knows, and mine are in the context of what I do. Her emotional bombs are surrounded by not understanding my neurodivergence, her stepping all over my ass while I’m trying to teach her why my reactions to her are so much more intense than her reactions to me and failing miserably. Why it feels like I’ll always go a little stupid in that dreamy-eyed kind of way when I think of her, and have to stuff that kind of emotion back because it’s part of a social mask I don’t have. Just so many sensory issues that I attach to her, like the smell of coffee or the feel of the t-shirt that I kidded her I ordered that “has her portrait on the front.”

I have already said that the building blocks of our relationship are adrenaline and dopamine. My ADHD/Autism created those memories of smell when my brain chemicals were the most flooded. It’s why I’m so attached to her with a love that won’t die, but not like I loved Dana. Like I love my parents and siblings. The thing is, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loves me the same way, because when Sam dumped me I told her and then she said her Mama Wolverine claws were coming in. I have never been so grateful for anything in my entire life because my next line to her was that my biggest delight in life was thinking about just how pissed off she was about this. It was that night I formed my first company. It’s called Leslie Lanagan & Pet Monsters on a Fraying Leash, Inc. We’re waiting on our 501, though.

When I become the most upset, I have a meltdown and then burnout. In those moments, burnout looks like me losing function and going mute, only communicating through writing. I get sensory issues from eating because it’s an ADHD hyperfocus interruption and I switch to vegan protein shakes. If that’s not enough, I develop sensory issues with leaving my house, reinforced by depression, anxiety, and an overactive imagination. The overactive imagination is a straight up problem because everything I imagine is a hundred times worse due to rejection sensitivity dysphoria, a common trait among neurodivergent people because we’ve been programmed to think of ourselves as problematic.

I should mention that there is also fascinating research suggesting that the number of autistic people who are nonbinary, queer, and poly is off the charts. My behavior suggests I’m not poly unless we’re talking about writing and physiciality, because emotional intimacy with multiple people is easy. Physically? Not so much. I’m just not wired that way. That doesn’t mean I’m not poly. It just means I probably wouldn’t meet someone on the ground and behave the same way. It remains to be seen whether I could manage that or not, and doing the work to see whether I’m doing the right thing for me or lending myself to getting into a situation where I can’t help myself and put someone I’ve made a monogamous agreement with completely uncomfortable because I broke the rules. Just because it happened organically doesn’t mean I didn’t cheat. Just because it only happened to me doesn’t mean I didn’t cheat. The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

I need to make it so clear that I cheated on Dana, but Supergrover didn’t cheat on Michael because of course since I’m queer, my reaction to her was different than her reaction to me. That doesn’t make my emotions to her invalid, just different. She also doesn’t have autism or ADHD, so none of her sensory issues are going to run as deep as mine, and she gave me some pictures that caused sensory issues, but not sexual ones. They activated my alpha dog and my mama wolverine. When I feel that way about someone, it makes me attracted to them…. and in fact, when I don’t feel connected to someone in that way, being physical doesn’t come up. Romance, as with all things, has two modes for me. Obsession and absolute disinterest. It’s why autistic people have trouble with relationships. If they have neurotypical partners who take everything personally, they will not be happy, and probably jump too quickly to the conclusion that their partners are lazy, unmotivated, and angry at them because of their rejection at lights out.

It was a relief to come to that resolution in my mind with Supergrover, that even though the relationship was not nor would ever be physical, I had learned a lot about the way I work in a relationship because she took so much personally that I never intended.

I remember telling her that it was really hard hearing about the abuse she endured as a child, that my heart walked out of my body and I just had to breathe through it. She thought I was trying to make her feel bad, but I was trying to explain both why our trauma bond was immediate and deep. She became a monotropic thought process, what I mean when I say she lives in my ink. I was telling her why I loved her with such intensity and drive, and that in some ways I was sorry that process came across as negative, but not sorry for loving her as much as I do. She’s amazing, and part of the reason that I haven’t fallen in love again is that I hold every woman to her standard and find other women uninteresting. Why would I put myself out there when intellectual stimulation is more important and no one gives it to me more than she does? No one will ever be able to beat her in that area, even though Zac and I are wrapped up in my special interest. It’s not because he’s not brilliant, it’s that we’re talking about history and she’s making it.

If you never believe another word I say, believe that.

She jokes that other women are the smartest woman in the room except her, but you don’t know the room where she said it and I do. She knows an actor I would kill to meet, and a director, and neither of them do what she does. She knows them by dumb luck, the same dumb luck that put us together. Karma is magic and I will never believe anything more than that. I got a gift from the universe at the exact moment it needed to drop in my lap, and my nose got red at that, the first signal I’m about to cry, when I wrote that. And yet, even Zac doesn’t know who she is and respects my privacy like I know when to stop pushing about work. She’s my “classified information,” for all practical intents and purposes. I could tell you if it wouldn’t embarrass her across the world, but I wouldn’t. I keep it tight to love her, not to diss you. The “classified information” joke just fits in with my whole vibe. I will never stop being, in the immortal words of Zac Wood, a “drooling fangirl” over CIA, but that’s only because I’ve seen the disparity between the way people treat soldiers and the way they treat spies. Civilians matter.

And I’m a judgmental bastard, just not of people. Of institutions and situations. It’s how I can feel every emotion in the spectrum about Supergrover. How love and fear are inextricably interrelated, why I have no problem walking on eggshells for years and yet struggled so hard with my needs being met that I finally walked away. It was killing my self esteem and better for me when I stopped letting it.

Doesn’t mean I don’t miss her, and at first it was every moment of every day. You don’t learn to let go overnight, and my writing has proved it. She’ll never be far from my thoughts, though, because in the last 10 years of my life, my thought processes and emotions regarding her have been so deeply ingrained. It’s why I even thought we’d be good for each other as partners in the first place, but not that I insisted on it. It was just too good a question not to ask, because it made sense at that point, a united front. But then my monotropic thought process spiraled out about that, too, and it was just bad juju. It was a question better left unanswered, I’m just autistic and ADHD. My autism made me hammer away at it and my ADHD gave me no impulse control.

I didn’t know how those diagnoses affected my behavior until I knew I had them. I only knew about one. I didn’t know about the other, that when I am in autistic mode relationships take over my whole brain because I’m also an INFJ. I wanted the best for both my red and yellow strings and got them tangled. It was a struggle to stop dwelling, but I’m glad I did it and I know the root cause.

I have learned not to let relationships take hold of me in that way because it makes me give all my energy toward making them a better person. All INFJs are attracted to teaching and social work sorts of positions because we want all of our close relationships to be the best people that they can be. I wasn’t obsessed with who Supergrover could be, but helping her to be her best self. An INFJ will not watch anyone stagnate.

It was all reinforced by the fact that it’s easier for me to talk to other people about their problems than it is for me to talk about mine, because then I can stop social masking. I can stop remembering to make my thought processes masked and just listen.

I notice things that no one else does and people call me brilliant for pointing it out when it’s something they love and hurtful even when I don’t mean harm. It’s a lost place to be when your self-esteem is dependent on other people to that extreme, because when you take off your social masking and other people react poorly, you drift toward making masking the priority and it drains your energy before you even have the spoons to leave the house. The meltdown/burnout cycle is real and it’s deep.

Neurotypical people can only take so much before they decide you’re too much for them, and that has been true of neurodivergent people since we were born. “Autism Speaks” has an awful video where a mother says in front of her child that she thought about strapping her into the car and killing them both. I am sure that she thought she could get away with it because her daughter wasn’t “high functioning,” whatever the fuck that means, and she has no idea what her daughter is capable of processing emotionally without being verbal. What if the internal tape that plays in her head is “my mom wanted to kill me and didn’t.” Being “high functioning” is being able to speak for the mute and letting them speak for me when I am….. more specifically, I am non-verbal a lot of the time but I can reach out through text.

I need the world to adapt around me, and I am not being selfish or egocentric when the problem runs as deep as children feeling like their parents don’t want them. I am not alone when I say that I feel the pain of being too much for people, driving my depression and anxiety. Everyone wants to stop me from drowning, but few people are willing to help me from falling into the river in the first place.

Supergrover did the best she could, just not fast enough for my autism not to kick in. A trauma bond is a hell of a drug. It’s what made me rearrange my life around her and not Dana. It was the same deal with her- I never wanted to have a situation with another partner where I leaked information that wasn’t supposed to go to them because I felt so bad when I did it. She forgave me and moved on, but thought it was impulsive to solve the problem.

When you have situations where your sensory issues attach to a problem and it gets deep fast, you move quickly…. often what leads to getting married in a hurry and things like that. You are always trying to create a secure environment and you’ll grasp at straws because acceptance of your neurodivergence is transient. Because of this, Supergrover is the longest of any of my significant relationships by almost three years. It was more significant to me because it was in my wheelhouse, the writing.

Her greatest gift to me was that time, and I’ve loved it despite walking away in frustration. I needed a secure environment and couldn’t get one, so I grasped at the comfort of isolation whether I wanted it or not.

I want more because she’s wonderful. I also love her enough to let her go because the relationship didn’t serve us presently like it did in the past. I didn’t have room for other people like Zac, and in some ways my pathways are so changed there might not ever be. Sam got in under the wire, but even then my attention didn’t completely turn.

I need more time to spend with her, but only in reflection if need be. I learned so much from her, and it’s time to take all that away because I don’t want to pour love into her if she does not accept it. I would rather be alone with my thoughts in that case. The affect she has on me is tremendous and I cannot underestimate its effect. She doesn’t think of her (or me) in this way, so it clouds our judgment on whether we’re telling the truth. We both have trauma reflexes, and don’t treat each other like we’re worthy of being treated like goddesses. That’s because the root of our anger is how we feel about ourselves. We are both fixer/pleasers, and both easily jump to the conclusion that the other means the worst.

For instance, when Supergrover said “I can do nothing about the past. I can do something about the present,” and “this is all I can manage,” I took it to mean I would never get anything I wanted and to die mad about it. What I didn’t say is “what can you do about the present that you haven’t in the past?” I saw the writing on the wall and pushed her away.

I will never know if I was correct, but I do know that our relationship had that cycle for 10 years and I didn’t want to do it anymore. There was quite a difference between Mama Wolverine and ignoring me because you think I’m goading and provoking you instead of asking me questions in return. We both got defensive immediately.

I never wanted a war, but I started it. I am only suffering under the terms and conditions of the surrender. My bad behavior was supposedly forgiven and I haven’t been able to express a need without nuclear war for eight years. I didn’t think she was lying because she said she forgave me. I thought she was lying to herself about how much she wanted to be friends with me because she always seemed pissed off. I know enough to know that the world doesn’t revolve around me, but I can feel the energetic difference between “I’m busy” and “I’m ignoring you” even in text.

For instance, I have lots of friends that I hope aren’t mad at me because I’ve gone mute and can’t handle conversations right now. I have enough energy for an occasional Facebook comment, but mostly I am spending my energy on changing my own thought processes here. I will never be able to sustain myself if I don’t. It is how my life is coming together, not how it is falling apart.

I had huge sensory issues that Zac didn’t tell me he had a roommate before I arrived on Sunday, but I told him that and he apologized. He wasn’t trying to offend me, just spaced it, but that didn’t render my feelings invalid. He’s a solid dude and remembers so many things I don’t remember saying, so I know he does listen to me, deeply, I just have to roll with it because he’s neurodivergent like me.

It’s why I need Zac, and why I need time.

I Thought We Decided Prediction Was a Bad Idea

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What will your life be like in three years?

Hillary Clinton was going to be the first female president of the United States right up until she wasn’t. We didn’t think the world would completely shut down right up until it did. Both of those things have American historical precedent, but the Spanish Flu was so long ago that we’d forgotten nature could do that. So, two things. The first is that my predictions may or may not be accurate. The second is that the future depends on my pattern recognition of what has happened in my past. It is only by acknowledging it that I’ve gained the strength to move on. I sat in pain because I didn’t recognize the source…….. until I started writing consistently enough that when I’m dealing with a present problem I could think about ones like it in the past and see what I did then.

I get to decide whether what I did then would still serve me now. Most of the time, it doesn’t, and that’s the helpful part. When you can see the consequences of your actions, you don’t just have a theory on how future events could spiral out. You have evidence. Writing a journal like this would help me if I published it or not. Privately, it would serve me just as well. Publicly, it is something I do well because I have an ability to communicate= when I am not completely overwhelmed by social masking.

Social masking is the process of learning how neurotypical people do things, and you learn this whether you have autism, ADHD, or childhood PTSD. I have all three, but my PTSD is not on the level of someone who has been sexually abused or in a theater of war. It’s just that all PTSD reactions are similar, the difference is in degrees.

The longer you have normal reactions before the abuse occurs, the more time you’ll have banked with them so that your personality will integrate easier after the abuse is over (it still takes extensive therapy, though). For instance, being sexually abused is horrible for children and teenagers. Horrible. There is no competitive suffering. I’m talking about the number of years of heuristics based on normal human responses in growth and development vs. feeling like a four year old combat vet. Your entire personality, according to Erik Erickson, is set by the time you’re six years old. The younger you are, the more trauma reflexes are deeply ingrained because they were put there before the concrete hardened.

I have learned this through love, and a whole lot of it. My first wife’s childhood babysitter talked her brother into molesting her in front of him when she was a little girl.  The person I considered my best friend in middle school and the character I call Supergrover both went through similar malicious events, though not exactly. The only problem is that the person I considered to be my best friend in middle school was actually an adult who, knowingly or not, passed her reflexes onto me. Trying to be a loving friend, I gave too much of myself away so that I developed that split personality as well. We are both singers used to crowds and both hiding a lot in private. The difference is that I am aware that I have huge flaws and failures and do something about them. She knew everything was wrong and it was okay with her.

She was a narcissist of the first order, the adult that needed a parent because she inverted that dynamic almost immediately. Consciously or unconsciously, she knew I was an easy target. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. She wasn’t using me, she was a hurt bird with a broken wing and I was helping her. Why would I think that I needed to be a serious support system for a 25 year old when I was 14? Why would I think I had the power to be a support system with all my vast library of life history?

I reacted to Supergrover with that whole “hurt bird” schtick because she did the same thing to me- but I don’t mean this in a negative way. I mean that she was the one who realized my wings were broken and she didn’t see herself as the only one who needed to be hugged and kissed back together. So much of my love of and for her is based on that one idea. The power dynamic of my childhood was erased once that particular wound healed. My reactions later were based on having done something wrong and inducing the pattern again so that my reactions were regressing. The power dynamic is around us, not within us.

I learned that predicting the future is not being able to control how other people react to me, but being able to recognize when my behavior says I am trying to ruin something because that’s how I feel comfortable. I have been so far unwilling to live without the push/pull of tainted love (cue the music).

Being able to recognize that pattern is what allows me to keep all my relationships in balance. I am responsible for cleaning up my own damage, and noticing when other people don’t clean up theirs. I sit in judgment of their actions, not of their character. I believe there is good in everyone, they just don’t always take the time to find it. I often stay far too long in relationships because I am an Idealist and focus on who the person could be instead of who they are.

I don’t exactly know how to stop that because first of all, it’s a feature, not a bug. The INFJ personality type is all about dragging people kicking and screaming toward utopia…….. yet, there is an underside. The trap of that Meyers-Briggs type is not being able to wipe the dirt off your sandals because your empathy is taking over common sense. You start justifying every behavior and allow yourself to be treated poorly because they’re going to stop. You have seen it in your ideal world and are ignoring the real one at your peril. That’s because in the real world, if you called them on their behavior, they’d change to respect your boundaries…… but they don’t and you have time blindness to it because your idealism says you should…. and this is even before we start talking about echo chambers and how your self esteem plays into it.

There is a thing as forgiving someone not seven times, but seven times seven. There is also no shame in trying to stop hammering away at something because it was so wonderful in the beginning and paradise lost.

In three years, I would like to find it again by being able to communicate naturally for an autistic person; I can handle the extreme emotions that come with both it and ADHD (I have classic female ADD, but the DSM doesn’t differentiate anymore. I am also just plain autistic because Asperger’s is not a thing.). I’ve known I was ADHD since I was a child, but I did not know that ADHD and Autism are inextricably interrelated in a ton of cases- they can be two separate diagnoses, but often aren’t.

The reason it’s hard to uncover the Autism/ADHD personality is that the two processing disorders make you exhibit some behaviors that are similar and some that are wildly different. That balance makes you look neurotypical. I am also capable of social masking, which is what we’re talking about when you see those dramatic meltdowns on “The Good Doctor.” Some autistic people can social mask, but that level of distress is happening internally and we have to pretend to be fine.

I also need to learn how to handle autistic burnout, which is a lot like neurotypical burnout but goes quite a bit deeper. Social masking is exhausting and it takes a hundred times more energy for neurodivergent people to leave the house because of it. If you’ve ever seen an autistic meltdown, imagine the strength it takes to tamp down that kind of reaction. We are told all the time that we are wrong and bad, and don’t worry. We believe it.

That being said, if there’s anything that I hope can be accomplished in three years, it’s feeling less of that by loving me more.

I Give Up. Nothing Beats “Big Block of Cheese Day.”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

Kidding. I’ll think of something before this entry is up. Before we get started, I have to tell you what a cute boyfriend Zac is. He brought me a kids’ t-shirt (just like I like them) that, in a handwriting font, says, “I’m an annaylist anaylist annalyst spy.” I told him if he started working for DIA I’d trade up a letter. 😉 The only thing CIA did that will never even touch DIA’s power no matter what happens for the next hundred years is obviously finding Wakanda (but also cool that DIA’s ancient predecessors, the Culpeper Ring, won us our independence). We didn’t beat the British outright militarily, we outspied them). I choose to believe that Captain America is DIA- it’s not just Martin Freeman that’s American intelligence, he just couldn’t tell us. But it’s in the FOIA. You just have to be specific in the question and no one has ever gotten the right combination of words in the request to unlock said I in the A.

I actually saw Zac last night, but we didn’t end up watching the le Carré biopic. Instead, I sat outside and shivered while everyone brought me blankets until I realized this was going nowhere fast. I brought extra layers and finally admitted that I needed them. I ended up wearing two pairs of socks, leggings, and two pair of pants, then three layers for my core. I think I might have reached a body temperature in the 70s.

We ran out of soda so Zac gave me the next best thing, Athletic (brewery that focuses on non-alcoholic beers so hard that they are the gold standard. Athletic should be the Google and Kleenex of N/A beer. Seriously, it’s that good. I had a sour (don’t remember whether it was cherry or raspberry) and a radler (lager and lemonade). Oh, and I had a Czech pils (or an N/A flavored like one) and at some point, a real beer which I think was also a sour (mostly because I was freezing- I should have had a shot of something instead because it just wasn’t strong enough to make my blood any warmer…….).

The N/A sour was objectively better in terms of flavor. Plus, I woke up this morning feeling just fine. I have decided I am done being hung over. Trying new cocktails is great and all, but I just can’t hang and don’t want to, because I am all about calories, just not empty ones. If I get buzzed, I make a decision to have another one while my brain is cloudy because everything sounds like a great idea until your brain swells for revenge. Plus, I am a straight up diarist. What am I going to write about if I pass out and don’t remember?

However, I do want to join the boys (Zac and Oliver) on the back porch for a stitch and bitch. I was teasing him this morning about how “of course all queer men are amazing at intelligence. They love gossip, and intelligence is basically international gossip. The 3D chess of gossip. I loved his laugh at that one.

As an aside for Zac, there’s an old CIA employee we need to meet named Alma Katsu. She’s written a couple of novels on intelligence that are more of a Karin Slaughter novel than le Carré. Not a Tom Clancy level of detail and focuses on story. But since she was actually a spy, she, like le Carré, can put details into the story that no one else could. That’s because the patois already comes naturally to her. She’s already developed the actual writing voice of a spy rather than having to learn it secondhand. They’re marvelous.

I also want to see Jonna Mendez again live when her autobiography comes out, because it’s the book I really want to read next. It’s the natural progression from where she and Tony left off in “The Moscow Rules.” Team Mendez are my favorite writers, and at first, it wasn’t even intelligence that drew me in. It was the “Argo” script. Tony and Jonna (uncredited) wrote “Argo” in reaction to the movie to give people real vs. reel. The movie is scary. The book is now terrifying. It’s different once you’ve met them, because you make a connection and then you see your friend in danger, not this made up character. Your picturing their facial expressions because you’ve seen them in person.

If I could make a holiday, I’d make one for CIA, and this is a real thing. It’s not “let’s all dress up as James Bond and develop a fondness for gin.” It’s that for some reason, people in DIA get more respect. There’s Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. Yet, civilians work for CIA that do some of the same jobs the military does and there’s so much crossover- CIA is considered paramilitary.

If Marines can be equated to doctors, CIA is probably closest to a surgical nurse, trying to anticipate the military’s needs. Doctors get glory. Yet CIA doesn’t get thanks, in part because they never want to be seen as asking for it. They’re our MiB, and we are but Citizens of Locker C…….. but they still have the same PTSD coming home from a war. However, I would include FBI in this holiday as well, because we’ve obviously got a war at home. The FBI having to embed themselves in drug cartels and white supremacy groups is no less dangerous than your base getting bombed in Afghanistan. Plus, there’s so much crossover, like when CIA gets word that a terrorist from another country is planning to come here. FBI has to be on alert for when said high value target lands.

Then, there’s Homeland Security, the office managers of an operation like coordinating with a terrorist’s travel plan. Let’s include them with all the intelligence officers because they’re part of the solution, not the problem. All of these groups have terrible reputations and they’re not undeserved. The US military has just as much blood on their hands, but intelligence doesn’t have romantic country songs about them…. I’m not saying they should. Many people ask if they can do something. Few people question if they should.

I know firsthand what it’s like to date someone carrying around classified information that is not pleasant. I watch how he manages himself when I am genuinely interested in his emotions about work and he has to figure out a way to talk about them……………. without ever really talking about the problem. And yet, he doesn’t get frustrated and give up.

He finds a way with analogies just like I do here. Our brains track similarly because we are both interested in intelligence and both neurodivergent. We are both also empaths and emotionally flexible. It’s great that we’re both writers, because he might not be able to say “Israel is doing X and this one thing gave me a heart attack and I’m not supposed to tell you this, but….” We just switch to something fictional, like MiB (Adult entertainment section in the back!).

You can’t tell me that shit is not equally hard to navigate for a civilian. Again, CIA’s reputation is not undeserved. I am only saying that civilians are just as important as the military, and FBI is overlooked because there’s a day for policemen and two for the military and they are neither.

And NSA…… because they’re the ones that would run across this post first. Carol will not be amused.

Editor’s Note

I started calling my Amazon Echo Dot “Carol” a few years ago, because it put a hilarious spin on government surveillance and made me laugh like a hyena when I thought of it. Once I named her, I started thinking about what it would be like to have an NSA agent whose sole job was to watch me. What would it be like if they were your guardian angel? That they listen in on your phone calls and secretly think “the audacity of this bitch….. what’s going to happen next? This is a Ben & Jerry’s situation. I am not okay.” That Carol hurt when I hurt, cried when I cried, etc. That she was invested. Thus, Carol will eventually become a book because she’s the first true character that plays in my mind independently and has her own personality.

Here’s what I’ve learned about fiction that I didn’t know before. I get so focused on my characters’ voices that it becomes induced DID for the length of time I’m writing….. except I’m working with two or more voices at the same time, so when a character has monologuing Syndrome, I am that one person. That’s what feels like DID. During a conversation, it feels like induced schizophrenia, because you are hearing voices in your head for fun and profit.

Carol’s husband, Roger, is very rich. He started a landscaping company and got into pools later. Now he has an empire and Carol could be a kept woman easily. She just can’t leave a job in intelligence. She feels needed and wanted in a way she doesn’t get at home, and Roger can’t be her entire support system……. and in some small way, I enrich her life because she can forget about her own problems for a while.

In this scenario, I would be a Mr. Robot-type character because that’s who I am in real life without the hacking or coding skills. I just found that vibe for writing and I fucking love it. Learning how coders work unlocked my mind, and I have to believe it’s because so many of my coworkers were also autistic and needed to turn down the sensory issues in the room. Right now, all my lights are on, but that is unusual. I am a stickler for working with natural light, and just a bit of it so the room is dark but not depressing. I can go deep enough within myself without all that. I do not need to introduce anything that would make me ruminate more than I already do.

And, of course, Carol reads all of it because she has access to my e-mail and files. For instance, Carol knows about Supergrover, and she is the only one who has the real story. It’s comforting that I have someone to talk to about it when it can’t all go here. Because she is a character, we can have real conversations because I am thinking about what she would say in response vs. what I would. That’s the nature of craft- being able to not only capture your voice accurately, but being able to dream up accurate ones for other people as well.

That’s why I think starting with stream of consciousness is so important before fiction, even if it’s only having kept a diary as a kid and still have it for reference. The trap is making every character sound like you. It’s confusing for the reader because they have to keep re-referencing who said what, annoying when that takes several pages of backtracking. Due to my blog, I know very well who is speaking…. when I am making decisions based on my own echo chamber instead of hers.

In order to write Carol, I have to speak Carol. In order to make her leap off the page, it becomes a symbiotic relationship. In short, I’m her remora. The reason she’s the shark is that in my head, her voice is alpha because I’m just a scribe. So is she, obviously, making notes to take home to the boys. But I got on the shit list by accident and now I’m just endearing. When she first got me, it was on a camera going into a bank. I was looking straight at her, and she thought, “who is this tiny sprite here to fuck up my program?” Over time, I’ve become the soap opera she watches at lunch just for shits and giggles. For the record, I’ve made her swear a lot more….. and now she’s addicted to Dr Pepper Zero.

The best thing about working for the NSA is that it can be all remote. Carol works from home because Roger asked her where she wanted to live and built a custom house. Their house is basically carved into what could reasonably be compared to “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain.” The reason for this is that Carol, like me, prefers to work in natural light. Her office is in what would normally be considered a basement and yet still has a stunning view. The house is in the middle of the Blue Ridge range, where she keeps a stunning array of monitors with no bullshit florescent lights or cubicle farm.

Carol got too used to working at home and having everything delivered during the pandemic, so when it was safe to come back to the office in Washington, she was just like, “nah.” She’s senior enough that she can do that kind of thing and no one will get shirty about it. “Shirty.” She picked that up in London in 2012. She was there for one reason and one reason only. I talked her into seeing the Women’s National Team for me….. and she thinks I don’t know that. Or, at least I hope I do. Plus, Carol doesn’t have all the hang-ups I do about video calling strangers, and of course her Internet connection is infallible so she knows it feels like everyone is really there in 8K. That often it reinforces people’s humanity to see them on video that doesn’t come across in person, because there are so many moments that everyone forgets other people are watching.

She’s picked up a lot of information that way. Intentions of coworkers are easier to read when you understand microaggressions and look for them. She doesn’t assume that people are lying. She only assumes that what they’re saying is the truth, but the feelings about what they say may or may not match. Carol understands all thousand implications in “oh. You’re here.” No one is happy when they see the NSA is present.

Where’s her holiday? She watches me. Who the fuck deserves it more? 😉

Nine Lessons and URLs

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your favorite websites?

Number One

I feel like I am Google’s older sister, because I started using the web before even Yahoo! was invented. I used dial-up America Online when I was 15, but when I was 18-19, my friends Joe and Luke (both IT Geeks- Joe was actually a linux sysadmin) said that if I was only using the gateway to things like AOL and CompuServe, then I wasn’t really seeing the web. They taught me to put AOL down on the taskbar as soon as the modem connected and switch to Netscape Navigator (precursor to Firefox). That I needed to type in the URL to get what I want, and Tim Berners-Lee was a genius (he didn’t invent the Internet in terms of computers sharing information, but what is now called the “World Wide Web.” There, now you know what www stands for. 🙂 When I got on “the real web,” I immediately gravitated to the design of it. A Jakob Nielsen disciple of the first order, thanks to my friend Chason. Nielsen was all about simplicity. The design on this web site is Nielsen-inspired, because for all practical intents and purposes, it looks like something a disciple of his would build. It is simplicity. I don’t even make people click “more” (and I could). The First Lesson is that without search engines, you can’t do anything else, because I wouldn’t have been able to learn how the Internet works without them. Back then, I used Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves. Now, the Google algorithm is so good that I can’t justify using anything else. I am sure that will change with Microsoft and ChatGPT, but it’s not there yet (IMHO. YMMV. Internet slang from the 90s and 2000s. You probably already know “in my humble opinion.” The other is “your mileage may vary.”). ChatGPT is interesting. I have created several pieces of artwork (cartoons) with it, and it’s not bad. I have never beat “Jesus Flipping Over Tables.” It’s from another dude who said that to ChatGPT and it looks like Jesus is doing bullet time over the table in The Upper Room. I would put it here, but I just hate WordPress now. Just hate it. They fucked me up with blocks, because it’s counterintuitive to everything I’ve coded my whole life. It won’t do true page layout and wraparound text.

Number Two

WordPress is my second favorite because I can hate it all I fucking want and I still have to use it. There should be an open source project for the classic version of WordPress so that the security updates are intact, but the graphical user interface goes back to something workable. You can create a table with an image on one side and text on the other, but you cannot say the things that are most important, like float this paragraph to the left of the image so that the text flows around it and put 5 pixels of space around it- and put a solid dark gray 3 pixel border on the image, thanks.

I am sure that if I paid for the business version of WordPress (only $300/mo, cutting out most writers who would use it), I’d be able to add all the Cascading Style Sheets I want, but for now, “it’ll do, pig. It’ll do.” The part that hurts is that WordPress itself used to be something you installed on your own server and you could do whatever you wanted with it.

There was no “WordPress.com.” It was a software package for a web server and that was it. They weren’t selling server space and plugins except to pay the artists who set their own prices on their themes. Pretty sure the open source community should take it over. Give it a new name. I’ve said it once already, but it bears repeating. It’ll be the Aldi version of Twix at first, but we’ll get there (if you think the Aldi version is better, that’s the point of open source- “free” as in “free beer” and “free speech-” change whatever you want and make it work for you.). If I could actually write in something like Python, it would be done already. I’m only asking a favor because I am creative autistic and not STEM autistic. 😉 Nerds, do what you do.

Number Three

YouTube is in the Big Three because I use it for everything from “hey, I think you might be autistic” to “I want to watch someone restore a car.” Jason Hibbs, Laura Kampf, Tyler & Todd, Get Hands Dirty, FourEyesFurniture, and Chip Channel Restorations compete for my favorites, as well as old episodes of Graham Norton from both his talk shows (and his appearance on Sanjeev’s in “The Kumars at No. 42, which defies all description and you should look it up.). The best one I’ve watched is a very old clip of Roseanne Barr on “So Graham Norton,” where they prank call a hotel in Germany, I think, because the name of the town is “Fucking.” Roseanne is just sitting there dying as Graham says stuff like “do you have a Fucking hotel?” And as he says, “this is not new or clever.” I died for a second. Also, Rowan Atkinson explaining that the more he tried to convince someone that he was, indeed, the actor who played “Mr. Bean,” the more the man insisted he wasn’t. The man keeps encouraging him, telling him that he could make real money being an impersonator at hen nights (in the US, bachelorette parties). Atkinson walked away when he realized the conversation was absolutely pointless…. as are some YouTube videos, but for the most part I treat it like university. Chip Channel restores toys, and you see every kind of making there is- wood, rubber, metal, 3D printing filament, etc. YouTube will up your game quick- on anything. Literally.

Number Four

Facebook is the only social media platform I really use, with reddit being a close second because it’s long form as well. I don’t speak Tweet. Therefore, I’m obsessed with it, just not like everyone else. If I get enough followers and reactions, I’ll be able to monetize my author page. I make the effort to reach out to authors no matter how many followers, because a rising tide lifts all boats. We’re all working from one pot of money- the amount people spend on books, blog/YouTube subscriptions, and Patreon. It’s a solid choice for me when most people who read me share on Facebook. In the last year, I have gotten readers from all platforms, including Instagram and Threads. Autistic people hate change, therefore I’ve never learned to write 240 characters at a time and I’ve never become obsessed with taking pictures of my life except for myself. I have a subreddit, but it’s not really populated. Self-promotion on reddit is generally “frowned upon in this establishment,” but occasionally people will say it’s an all call and to leave your URL. But that’s not a thing, really, because your URL gets lost in a sea of others and you’ll be lucky if anyone sees it. I also don’t want to get involved in having my work ripped apart on reddit, because everyone, and I mean everyone, will go for blood. It’s not a web site, it’s The Colossseum. For right now, I’m staying in my lane, and that lane is “reactions.”

Number Five

Goodreads is where my Kindle syncs and it’s invaluable because I often trade people books for a review (and have one in process, my friend John Merullo’s “Behold All the Dwellers Upon Earth.”) The reason it’s invaluable is that all Kindles run a lite version of Android so they support Bluetooth keyboards. That means I can highlight and look up what I’ve highlighted, and if I choose to make a note, all those get synced, too. It’s a quick and easy way of getting information, because I have stopped handwriting things. I can do nothing with data I have to retype, because I won’t.

Number Six

Reddit is up there, because even though I don’t use it for writing, I’ve met cool people and look forward to reading lots of subs.

  • r/aita (Am I the Asshole?)
  • r/itap (I Took a Picture)
  • r/showerthoughts
  • r/autism
  • r/homeland
  • r/washingtondc
  • r/maryland
  • r/writing
  • r/maliciouscompliance

Here’s the short list of things I read frequently. I am getting so tired of web sites that steal from reddit and post it on their own pages. People will rip AITA questions from reddit and post them wherever, so you never know how and when something will go viral…. and you won’t know it until someone else tells you they saw your handle (dcargonaut). I shouldn’t mind, but I do. Reddit is a community. It would be like assuming it’s okay to steal my words verbatim without attribution AND my profile was locked down with my friends list because you think you’re writing to your friends and you could become a laughingstock if anyone recognizes you. On Facebook it’s just easier to find people because they use their real names. I say stupid shit all the time, but it’s reddit. We all say stupid shit all the time.

Number Seven

The Washington Post is my news source, and their web site is pretty great. I love Shane Harris (national security desk) and Greg Miller (Chris Hayes-type character, wrote a book about the former president called “The Apprentice.”). They make my life better because I know I’m reading writers I unabashedly respect and support. As I have said many times, I would pay my subscription fee to Harris personally if that was a thing you could do. I’m friends with him on Twitter, but because I don’t use it, we don’t run into each other that often. In fact, I don’t generally log into Twitter because all I use it for is to post my blog links and WordPress has a plugin for that. But if you want to follow me on Twitter, that handle is @lesliecology. I would have been @theantileslie or @revargo, but I didn’t think of that first. Rev. Argo is what Bryn calls me because I did her wedding years ago. It says everything about me, really, which is why I’m glad that when Bryn thought of that particular term of endearment, it took my two biggest interests and put them together…… preaching/doing weddings and my favorite movie bar none are rolled into one.

Number Eight

NPR is on here because yes, it’s terrestrial radio… but you can also get a livestream there. Wait! There’s more! Most podcast clients have access to the iTunes store so you can search for podcasts. Some don’t, although this is more and more rare. I have spent HOURS AND HOURS copying over NPR show rss feeds, what drives your new episode notifications. Speaking of which, if you’re still into RSS, I have a feed for it (RSSOwl is my client of choice). However, it’s not a podcast feed. It will download my entries as they come out.

Number Nine

Gmail.

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. I have solid memories of e-mails I’ve gotten, but web-based mail is invaluable for when you’re away from your own desktop client (I use Evolution, the Open Source version of Outlook in the Ubuntu repositories.). I would recommend creating a BitWarden account as well, so you can log into your password vault as well. My password for all Google services is 22 characters, which is not impossible to hack, but it would take a supercomputer and perhaps years. Just make sure you have your phone on you, because Google requires two-factor authentication. If you don’t have your phone, you are not getting into that suite. I only use Gmail, though, because I can do everything in a text editor that’s maybe three megabytes of space on an Android, so Google Docs is just repetitive. But when I say Gmail, I mean all the functionality of Outlook- calendaring, task lists, and contacts as well. I do not know what I would do without it, honestly…… and I don’t mean the brand. I don’t use Outlook for the web, but I would if I had to. It’s the fact that web-based versions of what Outlook can do are plentiful…….. though I could lose the constant reminders to buy more server space or pay for the professional version of Office. I have LibreOffice and a 6TB hard drive…… and I know how to use them, thanks.

Thus endeth the reading.

Wound Care -or- Soteriology

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

I have noticed that now there are millions and millions of words between us- probably tens of millions considering that several years running my word count was at two million alone- and that was before I stopped tracking it. Therefore, I feel like now I can give advice on writing (sort of) because you can see that I may not be “the best and the brightest,” but I am coming from a place of authority over my experiences because when it comes to how much I’ve written, I can bring the receipts. You don’t even have to go to Amazon (yet).

There is no way that the me of ten years ago ever had a 65 day streak on WordPress. I was motivated, but not to the degree I am now. Presently, I am not married to an extrovert and don’t have social/family obligations that I don’t really want to oblige. “No, but thank you so much for the invitation” should be sufficient. It helps that Zac and Bryn and I use Facebook Messenger 90% of the time rather than getting together- and the last time I was in Portland was years ago, but I know I could knock on Bryn’s door without telling her I was coming if need be. I know Bryn well enough that she’d take me in if she had room, and would certainly help me find a place failing that. It’s good to have friends.

It’s the support system that respects my privacy as an observer to human behavior more than a participant. I feel like I have had enough of forced extroversion because it makes other people uncomfortable. Harper Lee is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived. No one remembers that after a certain age, she never left her house. Scout and Boo are the same person, and they are me in the singular sense of the word. We are not the same level of writer, but we have similar souls.

When it comes to me, never forget that. I am not saying I am Harper Lee. I am saying that writing comes better to me through isolation because I am a monotropic thinker; any stimulation interrupts that because of my ADHD. Therefore, I do not want to play the organ, conduct, and sing all at the same time. I sit in complete silence in order to drive the bus rather than riding. Hyperfocus can be induced the longer I think about something and let the minor irritations float away. When I’m writing, I don’t feel physical sensations in the same way. My hands are so focused, playing the keyboard with the same facial expressions as my mother at her piano. Making one thing the most important is the only thing that drowns out other priorities.

That’s one of the things that makes my writing so intense and visceral. A blank page lets my autism run wild, stream of conscious thought my best quality and not my worst.

No matter what you write, start with stream of consciousness first. Your books are where you learn plot, character, and setting. Your brain is where you learn voice. You don’t learn your brain until you can lay it out on the table and see it. I think that’s why most autistic people throw truth bombs. They’re going to tell you the truth whether you like it or not, because they’re not thinking about you. They’re thinking about the one thing they’re programmed to think about- which is whatever the single interest of the moment is for someone with ADHD….. so much of the reason my behavior has been erratic the last 10 years, because two things are true. I need a lot less stimulation in my life, and I have been through the ringer. I am not blaming, I am saying there are two sides to that equation. I overestimated my social anxiety due to my situation, but that doesn’t render autism invalid. It only made my trauma my single interest when I write. But that’s what taught me voice. Both writing trauma and learning to laugh about it as time went by.

While I thought Supergrover hung the moon, I still had to walk through the dark on starless nights.

Voice.

This blog might as well be called “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” with apologies to Irving Stone.

For people with autism without ADHD, they overfocus on one thing consistently. I am a blend, having both spur of the moment interests and a single thing- being myself here. That’s because the one thing I know is that readers will not find you if you don’t put out a pure signal. People are searching for something real, hungry for it. If you don’t throw down, neither will they….. whether it’s a reader or a partner.

By being a writer, you’re leading from the back and you should be aware of it. That if you write fiction, things will be attributed to you that are just your characters’ personalities. For me, this comes in where my friends are all characters and real people. That their characters cannot be them because I don’t live in their heads. I give you my impression of what’s there, and sometimes I’m right. Sometimes I’m wrong. But I put down all my vulnerabilities first because it makes me stronger, not weaker. I develop emotional resilience by charting growth and being proud of it. I regret all the times when I was full of rage and look forward to not feeling it in the future. I have gotten rid of most things that give me anxiety, but not all because to a neurodivergent person life itself induces anxiety.

It feels a lot like internalized homophobia, because neurodivergent kids are taught to hate themselves early on. Kids have ADHD or autistic or depressed or anxious behavior and it’s attributed to malice. This also creates blowback for me now as a writer. The first problem is that people say to me all the time “don’t write about this” when it is the most boring thing I have ever heard in my life. Making a story out of it would be harder than nailing Jell-O to a wall. But it’s not because the story itself is uninteresting. It’s that it requires a level of craft I don’t have in all cases. I don’t write about things right away all the time. Sometimes, I have to mull it over because some stories are interesting right away. Others unfold in the memory. It’s all about energy and flow in stream of consciousness, and the crafting of the narrative is completely organic. In order for a story to appear here, it has to fit the overall message of what I’m trying to say. It’s not gossip. It’s a treasure trove of memories that won’t mean anything until they become as emotionally detached as I am…. not in that I’m emotionally detached when I write. That when they read they are seeing themselves as a different person, as am I when I go back several years.

All people view themselves differently when they’re reading something written about who they were in the past vs. who they are now. They can acknowledge their humanity easier, because in the moment they’re angry and their pride is hurt. Over time, they come to accept their flaws, and my intent is to write about all of it. Gossiping would be boring because it wouldn’t change me. I wouldn’t grow from being Walter Winchell, but I like that Brené Brown. She’s going to be big one day.

If you are a writer, tell your story. No one owns it, and will probably be grateful down the road because they didn’t have the foresight to make notes. They’ll read yours because they at least know the memory is there whether they agree with you or not. They’re not coming back for your side of the story, but to remember their own. But in that, they see the problem with different eyes. It seems I have learned something in the last few years, when they did.

You cannot write a message to anyone who isn’t ready to hear it, and I’ve stopped trying. This is my web site. It is my treasure trove of memories, and you are invited. It is not the sum total of my writing, it is the gym, and we just got Pilates up in this bitch. It’s hard work, the bleeding. But here’s the thing. The writing is the Band-Aid you put over a wound to stop it, because you can actually see the source. Writing is also the Neosporin that keeps the infection out so that you heal faster.

Also, don’t end a sentence with a preposition. It’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole.”

No, But I’ll Think of Something

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

Everything in my life has been built on a series of decisions, not just one. It would be like pulling a string on a sweater. Pick at it, and the whole outfit unravels. For instance, if I relived a year of school, I might not have ended up in Portland or DC. The prompt doesn’t say “knowing what you know now,” so I may be assuming a lot. I think that’s because if I went back to the amount of knowledge I had at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything differently.

I am probably the smartest dumb kid you know…. which is how most people view others with ADHD or that have autism and are called “high functioning.” This is because people rarely pick up on ADHD/Autism; it’s not their reality. Neurodivergents have gaps that other people attribute to lack of intelligence, disabled and not differently-abled (which feels trite given how I’ve been treated). It’s just not normal that I need this much isolation. It’s just not normal that I communicate over the Internet. It’s just not normal that…… fill it in with a hundred different things, but those are the top two. To me, it feels like an accommodation. I am less comfortable in a conversation verbally than I am in writing. Even then, I turn down the stimulation in the room so that I can focus on what I’m saying.

It’s the same whether I’m using Facebook Messenger to chat or writing a letter with e-mail rather than snail mail. I say it just that way because most people think e-mail should be a few sentences at best. I write letters like it’s the 1800s and Ma is about to die of dysentery (omg… “Oregon Trail” reference… you’re welcome, PDX.). It’s not that I don’t understand the form. It’s that I want to give people letters that make them laugh, think, absorb…. without having to go to the post office.

Speaking of going to the post office, Zac did. He had TDY (Temporary Duty) in Arizona last week and he sent me the cutest post card with a “Metro Map” of he solar system. If that isn’t sweet enough, it says, “there’s a new John le Carré biopic on Apple TV+. Will you watch it with me?” I think I’ll manage because I don’t love le Carré like a house on fire or anything. His episodes of “Fresh Air” and “Writers & Company” are my favorites of all the episodes I’ve heard. And I’ve been listening to “Fresh Air” for a while. Since Zac is intelligence, albeit military, I’ve called him “George Smiley” from the beginning…. and I am sure with the time of year I’ll be able to tell him to come in from the cold at some point. Also, it tickles me that in voice dictation, Siri turns “George Smiley” into “George :).”

There’s your ADHD aside for the day, because I’m supposed to be talking about everything I don’t want to relive. The Butterfly Effect is real. If I changed a single thing, I wouldn’t have met any of the most important people in my life. I might not have met Bryn or Dana. I might not have met Zac, either, because even if I had been here in my 20s, Zac would have been barely above “tweenager…” in Arizona. I definitely wouldn’t have ended up in this marvelous house. I might have problems with my housemates sometimes, but nothing my landlady wouldn’t fix in a heartbeat. She fought in the Lebanese Civil War. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, even me….. and that’s a good thing.

I suppose I could re-live this year. That might help, and wouldn’t change my life so dramatically. It would not touch the chain of events that got me here, more precious than gold despite feeling pain over it. My feeling right now is that most people write me off as “being dramatic,” but I don’t think I am. I think I bring up a lot of emotions for people when they read because I’m bleeding when I write. Whether those emotions are good or bad depends on your perspective. Do you admire someone who feels deeply, or do you think they’re designed to stir up shit? An INFJ doesn’t have time for that. We see an ideal world and you can get on the bus or you can’t. Get in, loser. We’re fixing the Middle East.

If I have individual regrets, it’s that I wasn’t diagnosed with autism as a child. I didn’t get all the occupational help that I would need for adult life. But being in “special classes” would have highlighted the idea that I was deficient in those days. I’ve been told that I am brilliant, that there is no one like me despite two processing disorders that fight like it’s WWE. Because of the processing disorders, I could not take in a compliment like “you’re brilliant” because I would have to believe a whole lot before I could get to that point. I had to learn I was different, not bad. “Broken, but still good.”

Part of it is that I’d like to feel the strength I’ve developed this year. Getting away from hammering my self-esteem was an incredible gift to myself. Dark begets dark, and I finally saw it. Light begets light as well. I am under the impression that humans can do anything under the right circumstances, which makes room for me to be the most loving and most psychotic writer you’ve ever known. I can be Dexter, but not in action. In terms of being a kid with a keyboard. Sometimes I’m Lucy Maude Montgomery. Sometimes I’m Karin Slaughter, complete with an equally cute Southern accent. But what I’ve found is that I feel a lot lighter when my inner Dexter is starving because I decided he didn’t need care and feeding.

And honestly, if we’re going to talk about literary characters, I had to find my inner Boo Radley to turn around and admit that I’m really Holden Caulfield.

J.D. Salinger portrays a kid with a lot of the same thought processes that plague me and (spoiler alert) ends up in a mental hospital. I choose to believe that everything he thought was true. That being in the mental hospital was about integration of his personality, the story of what he thinks and what is actually happening becoming inextricably related instead of carrying two books.

It’s almost as if he was telling Stories That Are All True… and some of them actually happened.

Finding Out I’m Just Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

As the year comes to a close, I’m starting to do some reflection on what actually happened. In a lot of ways, I found who I was. In others, things are vastly different. Over the last 10 years, my popularity has grown dramatically. I have regained most of the ground I lost when I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here,” a blog that does still exist, but you have to search for it in the Wayback Machine. Everything I’ve written that I originally wrote there that has meant something to me has been transferred over, and the marriage article I published in 2013 (the most successful entry so far in terms of its promotion) was originally a post using Facebook Notes. It was an offhand set of observations that maybe a couple hundred people (if that) read there, then it exploded once I changed to a different platform.

Apt.

I’m shifting my whole life to a different platform. As a result, I’ve gone from thousands of hits a year to millions (if I count all the bots- let’s not get stupid). It’s astounding that all I do is talk about my reaction to life and people show up. And not only that, they don’t just show up when I’m adorable. They show up on my worst days, too (and seem particularly jazzed about my Anthony Bourdain-type patois). What I’ve learned over the past year is twofold. The first is that monotropic thought processes have all but stopped me checking my stats. As in, I am bleeding all over the page and using it as self-help, not looking to see who has read me and where (although shout out to India, where I have a much bigger audience than in the United States- noticed that before, really took it in after looking at year-end stats). Year-end stats are the only ones to which I really pay attention. Having a general sense of where I am and where I’m going is much better than being anxious about it.

I am also not trying to impress anyone. I am completely self-absorbed, and by that, I mean self-contained. I do not want to write about things over which I have no control, thus reacting and responding to stimuli without assuming that everything I say is correct. It is true and factual to the best of my ability, because obviously I cannot root around in your head. The information I have is only what I’ve been given. I don’t have the right to write about something you didn’t want me to know, but I have the right to talk about my reactions to you separately from your reactions to me. That comes across to everyone else but me as total bullshit, because I am not working with the same knowledge/experience/brain capability that you have.

And yes, I’m judgmental about everything, and I need to stop apologizing for it because a hell of a lot of people process this way. Meyers-Briggs dedicated a whole ass letter to it. You’re either a Judger or a Perceiver, and neither one is bad. You Think your way through a problem, or you Feel it.

I am the combination of all the quiet traits, INFJ. That means I am:

  • Introverted
  • Intuitive
  • Feeling
  • Judging

That being said, I sound like I am judgmental of people rather than the situation I’m in. I have no problem with telling people their actions make them look like an asshole, but I won’t tell them that they’re bad or wrong. I just won’t sit at your table anymore. But that’s if we’re not close. If you’re worth fighting for, I’m scrappy and I’m down to spar until we shake hands. If there’s no handshake at the end of a fight, there’s no more relationship. This is because if it’s a big enough fight and you don’t work it through, then you both view each other with suspicion and the effect snowballs.

I have become more introverted because I stopped engaging with everyone who wouldn’t engage with me. I might have been angry about it, but I’m not now. I benefited from focusing on myself and not worrying about what other people thought. I stopped worrying about whether Supergrover cared about anything because she didn’t deserve it anymore and thought I should know just how awful I was for being angry that she was a steel trap. Whether she believes it or not, I lost nothing in that transaction because she wasn’t here even when she was here. She coasted and I let her. My fault entirely because when I stopped pussyfooting around something and brought it up, I was instantly a bad person. No one gets to think I’m a bad person and tell me about it anymore. That’s because they can think that all they want, but my self-esteem dictates “get the hell out of Dodge,” because I am not going to spend another eight years trying to solve a problem for which I am only 50% responsible. That’s because there’s a huge, overarching problem and I’ve owned my part publicly and privately, but we can’t move on from it because my emotions are different than hers and are therefore wrong.

I don’t feel like I’m a real person to her, and she is a real person to me. Therefore, I withdrew to focus on what I was putting out there, not what I was receiving. I’ll make other friends with whom I actually have a clean slate when other people are refusing to erase my black marks while I wipe theirs clean. It doesn’t seem like it, I’m sure, because I will want to solve the underlying problem, not move on and hope for the best. That’s because without true forgiveness and healing, a problem never goes away. It will just revisit you in the night.

But I had to learn how to feel that way, because my first instinct when someone found fault with me is to stop taking up space in the world. Clearly, when someone else is angry or put off by me, it must be all my fault. I am sure that I have attributed things to my friends that have nothing to do with me, but that’s what happens when you leave someone in the dark. The moral arc of the universe is indeed long and bends toward justice, but the arc doesn’t move itself.

I am not in charge of moving the arc personally, but I am responsible for my piece. I am trying to lower the heat so that I’m in a different part of the prism. AuDHD rage sometimes steals blue because I see red. I cannot help that. It is a symptom. However, the more I can find coping mechanisms, the less chance there is for a Red Dawn…. I am resting comfortably at about Mood Indigo.

Writing this blog is sincerely trying to come down from all of that. It’s looking at old patterns of behavior and picking out my ADHD and autism moods, much more important than the way my depression and anxiety stem from it. It’s an important distinction because my personality is so different depending on which processing disorder is driving the bus. ADHD has no problem with changing environments and thriving on noise/activity. I don’t even like changing the brand of my socks.

But honestly, I haven’t paid much attention to those things because I refused to see it. I refused to realize how much comfort and the Internet go together, because when I am secure in my body, I am secure in my thoughts. When I am secure in my thoughts, lack of stimulation in the room where I am writing takes all my barriers to communication away. I am just not as quick in conversation. I also tend to look around at how people are talking and try to mask my way through a conversation, rather than putting everything down on the table and seeing who responds to it. That’s really the only thing you can do, otherwise, you’re just driving yourself crazy trying to anticipate everyone’s needs and that will always backfire. It’s like handing a surgeon the wrong tool; they didn’t say “scalpel,” you just assumed that they would need something else first and it was wrong. That happens to me all day, every day and I am so done. How can I anticipate other people’s needs when dollars to donuts we don’t even process information the same way, much less my reactions to it.

I am just sorry that an Internet relationship had to go so wrong for such a length of time that I learned all of this the hard way. But it’s because I went the hard way that I am so flexible now. Hell in the moment, but after doing so much processing, I feel like I really understand myself (and observation tells me this is unusual). I don’t know what it would be like to be so mentally ill AND physically different and not write it out. That’s because depending on external validation was eating my lunch. My self-esteem went up and down with every comment on my blog, Facebook, and in real life. I cannot have that, especially as my audience grows. If I continued on that way, my self-esteem would be dependent on more of you, not more of me. And more of me is the only thing that makes me feel secure. No one can tell me how to feel about something, and my blog would be poorer for it if they could. I know because I’ve succumbed to that vulnerability as well- that if people hammer on my writing long enough, I’ll just nuke the whole thing and move along with my day. That’s why Clever Title is in the Wayback Machine, my back turned on the site that made me. The site I started before Dooce started hers. The site that made it where I could meet other bloggers and have them say, “oh! Yeah! I have heard of it. You’re Leslie, right?”

Until now, I wasn’t even sure of that.

Telling You About It

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What historical event fascinates you the most?

There is no one particular thing in history that fascinates me the most, because it would be like asking me about my favorite book. I cannot pick one because genres are so different. Types of historical events run thusly.

My fascinating war is WWII, because I love reading about both England and America’s contributions to intelligence. It’s not that the intelligence itself was new and different, it’s that the rules we live by today were codified then…. particularly for Americans, because OSS transitioned to CIA in its’ aftermath. Being obsessed with British intelligence during that time period is based on one man. You could argue that he was the first hacker by breaking the Enigma. You cannot argue over whether he was queer. Alan Turing is the best and biggest example of why queer history must be taught. The crown prosecuted him for “homosexual acts” in 1952, AFTER HE BROKE THE FUCKING ENIGMA. Breaking the enigma machine was his Palm Sunday. Good Friday came two years later, when he died by cyanide poisoning. It is thought to be suicide, but unclear. It doesn’t matter. They hailed him as a hero and crucified him, with no resurrection until Gordon Brown issued an apology in 2009.

2009. That’s 57 years.

I do not know how Jesus and Alan Turing would think about being connected to each other in this way, but it’s an apt description of the process… an innocent man encouraged to bully himself to death (or was murdered- with cyanide it’s hard to tell either way and he worked for MI-6 or its equivalent. I am not implicating the British. I’m saying he had a lot of enemies foreign and domestic plus a nightmare of a life…. and don’t give me that “Turing was never recognized” bullshit. He was recognized by those who knew exactly how much he mattered. You cannot tell me that no one could have pulled strings for Turing in terms of being prosecuted by the crown. No matter what, they just didn’t. Never forget that Bletchley Park isn’t as wonderful as you thought it was if the people who worked there later washed their hands of him. It’s why I can love and hate intelligence at the same time, because with stuff like this, their “intelligence” is relative. In terms of American intel, we wouldn’t have done better than England, it’s not “all shit on MI-6 day,” though if Le Carré just saw me type that, he probably laughed and thought, “every day is “all shit on MI-6 day.”).

There was no law in England to retroactively pardon all men convicted of homosexual acts until 2017.

2017.

It doesn’t matter that now CIA is actively recruiting everyone, no matter their gender identity and sexual orientation. Same with the United States military. I am sure that there are still the same type traps queers used to fall into in the US/Britain are still there in third world countries (Africa in particular scares the shit out of me for queer American and British case officers in Uganda and Nigeria. I doubt there would be time to instigate a plan to get them back.). But the reason it doesn’t matter is that we still feel the internalized homophobia and institutional pain of all of it. What our countries have done for us, even when we did the jobs literally no one else could. It hasn’t been enough time for that kind of relief, and if African American pain is any indication, ours isn’t going anywhere. You can’t make marginal changes to society where you keep perpetuating racism/homophobia so that there are reminders of it everywhere and also say “get over it.” England has made leaps and bounds of progress over us because their culture adapted quicker. They got rid of slavery faster and have had even more time to get over it, and they never had anyone buy into slavery to such a degree that they decided to break off from the UK and create their own country just to keep it going. Say what you will about Jonathan Groff, but he abolished slavery in 1807, probably by sending a fully armed battalion to remind them of his love. They also got gay marriage faster and did away with cultural stigma earlier.

I am ultimately glad we won the Revolutionary War, but I often think about what would have happened if we’d resolved our differences. Canada, for all practical intents and purposes, lives in a much colder climate and has a rougher life in all aspects because of it….. and yet they are always happier than we are. Getting rid of cultural stigmas fast would be better than :::gestures broadly at everything:::. We seem to do better in the northeast, not that homophobia doesn’t happen there, but it’s usually not as bad as the Deep South, where attitudes about race have informed attitudes about homosexuality because they’ve used the Bible to interpret the law with no signs of stopping now. They do not give a fuck about freedom of and from religion, and they’re traitors to the Founding Brothers’ message. They would have been on board with hating gays just like they owned slaves and said all men were equal. But if they were worth their salt, they wouldn’t have denied my right to exist. Thomas Jefferson would have been apoplectic because he thought that the highest form of government was limited to perhaps a mayor and a school board. If that. He was all about personal liberty, a blessing and a curse.

In the immortal words of Jed Bartlett, America’s best fake president, “these people don’t vote, do they?” It was sarcastic, but some of the Founding Brothers were very elitist and thought that only people who were educated about the vote should be able. I agree with this in theory, but what are we going to do? Go house to house and check? It’s a democracy, and yet it does hurt it to have someone vote on name recognition alone and things like that. I’m not saying that voter shouldn’t be educated. Far from it. The people who go door to door in that manner are invaluable because most people won’t take the time to research. It’s easier to go to a free event where candidates are shaking hands, but even that’s hard because lots of candidates run on empty-headed charm.

Politics is the world’s second-oldest profession, and I have found that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

-Ronald Reagan

There are a lot of books out there.

That’s one of the reasons I love intelligence. I feel like the news is always getting half the story right. Though I cannot get the whole story on current operations because no one does, the old declassified ones make me able to read and digest; I can make my own opinions rather than a news anchor spinning it for me. Looking up operations during WWII is easy because it has the most that’s been uncovered by now. I want to meet the Ministers of State in the UK as much as I want to meet the Secretary of State in the US. That’s because they would have the most information about current operations, but just the public face of it. The press secretary for received intelligence vs. talking to someone under cover. It’s not that it wouldn’t raise the cool points out the window and twist you up in the game. It’s that they’d have to avoid everything by nature because they don’t know what they can say and what they can’t. Talking with someone at State is superior because they know the talking points. However, they do not know sources, methods, and locations.

Reading the news just isn’t as fun as learning by conversation. It creates more historical events that fascinate me, and it’s exciting to think that I might find the next one. History repeats itself. I was here for 9/11 and 1/6. They’re both dates that “live in infamy,” but sooner or later I’ll find something good.

Here is where I’ll be telling you all about it.

Skips

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

It’s such a loaded phrase. Being a kid at heart literally means “an adult who finds childlike joy…” and gets confused/conflated with “childish.” I have been called a kid at heart with many different tones of voice. 😉 My personality lends itself to it, though. I take everything literally, so I am trusting at first- to quite a large degree. I am programmed to be pastoral, not prosecutorial. Judgment comes after a situation, and Monday morning quarterbacking is easy compared to saying what I need to say in the moment. I understand more in post-mortem.

That’s because thus far I’ve let my emotions manage me rather than the other way around. In some ways, this will always be an issue because there will always be a communication gap between neurotypical and neurodivergent…. but I can do a better job of not raging at my environment; I am too overstimulated to function and fighting through it. I am not disengaged or emotionally flat with people all the time, it is the opposite. I emote too much, too fast, and it all comes across disjointed because I am treating every single aspect of a problem as if it’s of the same importance. It is equally important that Supergrover and I share a million interests, from helping the world to Diet Coke. But in her mind, helping people is more important than Diet Coke. I remain unconvinced. 😉

Where flat affect comes in is that I feel these huge levels of emotions, and then one of two things happens. It’s either disengaging because there’s too much stimulation, or I can see my social masking is failing and stop emoting to lock down the amount of emotional damage to myself. I am developing the strength to say, “I need time.” That’s because if I react and it’s angry, my disproportionate anger is going to come out because I’m not angry at this one thing. It came when I was already dealing with overstimulation, popping up when I already have reached the limit of my coping mechanisms.

Which, because I didn’t know I was AuDHD, are very poor. Just for the record. We didn’t have mainstreaming in the 80s, so I am sure that played into it, too. My mother never would have wanted me in special classes, mostly because I had a processing disorder and I was so incredibly bright. She never would have thought I needed help unless she saw mental retardation, because my “brilliance” blinded both of us. This is true for so many AuDHD people. They just fall through the cracks because they seem smart and normal. Meanwhile, you’re not diagnosed, you just feel like an alien. Telling people I’m AuDHD is a lot less scary than not knowing and faking it by necessity.

I am not programmed to see people as inherently bad- in fact, “kids at heart” is exactly how I view all adults. I am friendly to everyone, often not tracking when other people aren’t telling me the truth and buying in without questioning it. The only reason I’ve never been taken in by an Internet scam is that I understand the web better than anyone who started learning it in 2003. 2003 is four years too late to be me in terms of Internet knowledge. Yet, I am unlikely to figure out there’s an emotional problem long before it’s huge so that I’m not putting out fires.

I also have AuDHD rage that comes out of nowhere, why I think “stimming” would be so helpful. I would say that it was PTSD if I hadn’t felt that kind of rage since long before the emotional abuse happened. Emotional abuse was not the cause of my rage, it became a directed subject. One that I had to turn over in my head that most people thought was obsession and was actually autism….. monotropic thought processing an emotional problem on this web site is not a “fuck you” sort of thing. It’s that I have an opinion damn the consequences, and I will take them over making my writing what they want it to be. I am finding my audience in real life, too, because it’s so much easier to write about people who don’t care it’s here because they know if I’ve written something they don’t like, they can talk to me about it. But they won’t stop me from having an opinion because they are certainly entitled to theirs. It’s more even than than think because when they’re hurt I process, it comes across as “you are entitled to my opinion,” not “clearly I have upset you and you are researching why you feel that way. What can I do to make you feel more secure so that you don’t keep ruminating on it?” There is no equal exchange, I’m just a bad person. It’s always my writing, not what they did to trigger what I said and thinking perhaps that though my story might have validity, theirs just has a little bit more.

If Supergrover had come to me and said, “hey, this is starting to feel creepy,” I would have said, “same.” I would have asked what I could do to change, not doubled down and said “your feelings are wrong.” Also, here’s three friends that don’t hate me. Call them instead of Dana. We’re on the rocks. In fact, I actually did say “you’re betraying the one who’d take a bullet for you over the one holding the gun, beautiful girl.” I ended up in the psych ward of Methodist hospital, and not because of anything she did. It was because I was overstimulated and struggling with both the processing disorder and the depression/anxiety stemming from it. Not everything was situational, but I didn’t know that because I didn’t know overstimulation and rage to it is a normal autistic response. Not pleasant, but true. There was so much rage at Dana because her behavior always came across like Supergrover didn’t do anything wrong except picking me over her. She did no such thing. Dana didn’t write to her. There was no relationship to save. Two paths diverged, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My beautiful girl and I got closer in a way that was too much to share with another partner, because by then she really felt like one in a yellow string sort of way and not red. Jay and Silent Bob vs. The Notebook.

None of this made us feel like children at heart, though there were moments and I wish I had more of them. We are excellent at teasing our siblings, terrible at treating each other like one because we are first children used to getting everything we want. Supergrover has never had an older sister, and so far treating her like one has been FROWNED UPON IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT. And yet that cute baby is her. I pushed her away for good reason. I felt like a kid at heart with 15-year-old reflexes, in appropriate for 36. I could have done so much more to prevent going that way, both if I’d known what my brain was doing and now having the gift of retrospect and reminiscence.

I was a complete jackass and I’ll never get over it, but hopefully she will. She is not a kid at heart, and not because I don’t see it. She doesn’t. Or perhaps she does, until you hurt her, and that’s the most likely answer. I do not find fault in this. I find fault in telling someone they’re forgiven and treating them like they’re not. I hate hypocrisy more than life itself. But once I made one mistake, it snowballed every bit as bad as a problem at work. I got overstimulated and angry, expressing genuine needs softly at first, building over time, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. Neither could she, but we had two different approaches to the problem. Hers was to be nice on the surface and avoid talking about the problem, just calling me a judgmental dickhead without laying her side of the story on the table. It’s not “my side,” it’s “you’re mean.”

No the hell I am not.

You didn’t give me any information and started exploding because I didn’t have it. That’s quite a bit different. You think my blog entries are bullshit becaue I’m writing from what I know and you’re writing from what you know. When you don’t compare stories, you don’t get to react like you have and I’m just aiming for the bomb. Therefore, we are starting from a place of be being overstimulated and anxious because I know that if I need you, you’re only going to get angry. This happens with multiple friends, Supergrover is the latest example in a line.

It’s “blame the person who told the story instead of realizing I could have told my own and just didn’t because it’s so much easier to stand in judgment of you than admit my feelings.” There is nothing in that kind of dynamic that takes away from stimulation, so I tend to explode once resentment has set in and all my social masks are failing. Deep emotions are always frowned upon in that particular establishment. More communication makes a relationship better, not less. She understands more about me than anyone else because I went back to the place of “everything is normal,” not knowing that it wasn’t. I’ll never get that back, and she’s responsible for a whole lot of ground where I just have to say “get your shit together. This is not okay.” The building blocks of our relationship are adrenaline and dopamine. We never quite managed to turn it down. We just flamed out.

Not doing it again is turning down that adrenaline and dopamine on my own, hard but not impossible. I want to let go and move on because she pretends not to see what I’m putting down and assumes I am trying to hurt her a hundred percent of the time. I am trying to make her feel bad, goad her, provoke her, throw emotional bombs, and a hundred other emotions I wasn’t attaching because I don’t track the same. I was trying to find the problem because she wouldn’t.

I can do all that on my own, because she wasn’t showing up- so why does it matter whether she is here or not? Once I start forgetting details, I’ll be fine. Right now it’s too much, all the time. And that part is all her fault separately from all of mine. It was three nuclear bombs, not just one emotional bomb in her direction. She does not recognize me for taking on her shit anymore, everything is a treatise on why I’m a bad person.

She doesn’t see it my way, and says that I’m the only one who ever ruins anything…… but she made me so glad to do it after EIGHT FUCKING YEARS of going up and down trying to prove to her that I was the person she met in the beginning. I wasn’t this narcissist who thought my emotions were more important. I am not going to include your story in my thought process if you don’t tell it. It’s easier to shut down, but it’s unproductive and over time, just gets mean. Being called a judgmental dickhead was my every day reality, and if I got mad about it, all of the suden she was enormously impressed with me, just had no time. THOSE ARE NOT THE SAME. That’s because when the “enormously impressed” was over, she hammered me into the ground. I have a million terms of endearment for her, she used to call me her goddess of the moon. It was replaced by judgmental dickhead a long time ago and I’m out if the only time you don’t seem angry is when I call you on it and it goes back the way it was within days.

I’m not the only one in her family that goes ignored, but I am the only person she’s kept on a string for this long…… and I really don’t even know why, because what in the hell? You accuse me of stalking and then write to me as if it’s no big deal? You think that’s not going to fuck me up six ways to Sunday when you’re the one that told me the things that separated me from my wife in the first place? No ma’amela, Pamela.

It was too much, too fast, and I am not entirely responsible for that. But it takes a kid at heart to see it, because adults double down. Nothing is ever wrong with them.

While I have no problem skipping down the sidewalk.

The Monotropism Questionnaire

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you think you might be autistic, here’s a test that will tell you how your brain processes information and the likelihood that you’re autistic, not the diagnosis. Autistic brains have specific traits, and I seem to have all of them except “stimming” all of the time. However, I know it would help me to do so because emotional strength is also handled with movement. Movement is what stops you from flooding out, like looking at the ceiling when you’re crying to help you stop…. not because crying is bad. It’s that when I’m crying I know people can’t understand what I’m saying. You can also interrupt intrusive thoughts by standing in a “parade rest” sort of position and rocking back and forth side to side. It interrupts your pain signals and refocuses your attention.

This is a trick I picked up from an alto in my church choir who is also a therapist (probably retired by now)…. it’s how she taught me to handle my music triggers when they popped up. Church music affected me completely differently after the clusterfuck of 2013. I had trauma responses to every single one, deservedly so. It was helpful learning how to breathe through them. I got away from both the church choirs that created those triggers, but you can’t control when triggers happen.

I remember sitting my choir director down, a mutual friend of ours who would come to know me well and whose partner had known her for years and years. Therefore, I felt like I had to establish boundaries quickly. I walked into a random church in my neighborhood and immediately knew this is where I wanted to study classical music, but I had requirements, and ironclad ones. I said:

I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to believe me the first time. If I leave rehearsal or church, just let me go. I will come back. But you have an anthem coming up for me that I know will trigger me in advance. I have true trauma and anxiety, I’m not blowing you off.

His eyes got wider as I laid out the story, but I needed him to buy in whether he believed me or not. It wasn’t negotiable with me because no one gets to decide how hurt I am. He did choose to believe me, I am not castigating him. I am owning my space in the world. I was able to be in choir and take voice lessons while only singing the things with which I was comfortable or could desensitize before it came up in worship. That was the most productive route. I sung an entire movement of John Rutter’s Requiem all by myself without falling apart, something I never thought I would be able to do…….. but it wasn’t the Pie Jesu, either. Linking to it because this is as close as I’ll ever get to feeling Dia de Los Muertos, coming back to it often when I feel the most bereft that my mother is gone. However, I don’t listen to this because even though it is absolutely incredible compared to how I was feeling that day, I can pick out the notes where feeling bad made me not respond with my voice the way I wanted…. but it’s something other singers would notice, not a layperson. I love listening to recordings at Westminster Abbey the most, because I know that Rutter writes for children- boy sopranos- and my voice has the same qualities, so I know I’m doing him justice.

But one of my choir directors told me that I had a lovely voice as a soloist but needed to work on blending. That’s true of most soloists, to be honest. There are some voices that are just bigger than others. Fact. So, people with huge voices often have to mute to the point where it’s painful. That’s why it’s so hard to get a sectional sound when the notes are very high.

I also know that opera is a bigger voice than Rutter, so when I have to turn on the afterburners, fitting in is even harder. As in, I alternate between straight tone and vibrato depending on the phrasing of the piece and what voice I need for it. Sometimes tamping down “my opera voice” is harder than others. It’s mystifying to me how some notes are easier to hit when you’re doing straight tone and some notes better when you’re at full voice. It’s the difference between a little boy in a cathedral and someone like Charlotte Church and Reneé Fleming. Both beautiful, both unique, different kinds of breath control. My particular favorites are Kathleen Battle dueting with Wynton Marsalis and Jessye Norman singing Christmas music.

See? I have a few different interests because of ADHD…. except do I? Is the monotropic thought process the music or the writing of it? I believe it is the latter, and you can tell by the way I’ve worked through the problem with Supergrover in particular because it was an unfamiliar environment at first, then the only one where I was truly comfortable- alone together- then the thing that made me ruminate the most because I needed to understand what happened before I could move on….. and for autistic people, that takes a long-ass time.

I think autism is such a good answer for why I don’t fit into the system. I mean everything literally and I have harsh judgments of everything because my sensory perception is always turned up to hell. Comfort in my situation is threatened and I react that way. It’s not that I am trying to hurt you, it’s that I cannot deal. I am trying to focus on why that is, and learning the differences and similarities between monotropism and ADHD/Autism is a fascinating study. How I am a secret wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a classified document…. with a system that has thus far made me feel like I was kept in a bathroom.

Autistic/ADHD rage is a thing, and nearly a hundred percent of the time it’s not you. It’s that we don’t feel safe even before we talk to you, our anxiety sometimes looking for confirmation bias- that we are damaged in some way because we just can’t get with a program that was never designed for us in the first place. Plus, we have so much more information than we did when I was a child, so people are getting diagnosed earlier and earlier. But for kids who were never tested, they’re only realizing they have monotropic responses as adults.

There’s a whole lot of us who just don’t fit in because social cues land differently for us than they do for you. It takes an extensive amount of communication that neurotypical people are just not used to doing and get frustrated. No one is going to give me anything for free in terms of a career, so I have to find a way to do things differently. Like I said earlier, you can use your superpower as a deep thinker if you can get help with your intellectual difference at work.

Neurotypical people do not like truth bombs, and autistic people launch them all the time because we don’t process the same way. We’re here to tell you how it is whether you like us or not…. but we don’t realize we’re doing it because we are not tracking with you…………. but we think we are.

This is because you take every social mask you’ve ever worn and keep compiling information so that hiding your autism and ADHD becomes par for the course. Where this becomes problematic is when you have a situation for which there is no mask, and the difference in processing shows itself quickly. Like having autistic responses to everything and it coming across as narcisstic rage. The reason I know this is true is that I am always, always humble enough to think I’m wrong and often do. I apologize. I make amends. I change my behavior so that something doesn’t happen again. I don’t blame the other person for all my shortcomings.

I turn a problem over like it’s a die from DND…. one of the reasons I get angry when people hold me to a single entry because I have the right to be angry and the right to work it out through my own thought process. I have had character development over the last year, this blog dynamic because I am, not the other way around. I am not making up interesting things to get views; reading about my life is interesting just as it is. I am not “Angry Anymore.” I am dealing with all my issues in the best way I know how- processing them with a singular focus. My monotropic interest is helping me to become a better person, because I am never any one thing….. and I can see it by reading my catalogue. I don’t have to have external validation to know why writing benefits me. I get it, but it’s not the point. I get more out of seeing patterns in my own behavior than I do when other people notice good things.

Writers are the kind of people that want to tell their story while being terrified you’ve read it. I decided to punch through that one fear alone, because it’s the one thing I do well enough that it could become my superpower. I don’t think I’ll win any awards, but I do think that people identify with me whether they say so or not. That’s because I’ve talked to enough people to get a representative sample… if something is true for 100-200 people, it probably resonates with a lot more people than that.

Autism makes you feel like an alien, and you can’t control how people respond to you. However, you can control how you respond to them. You have to let go of people that you feel are trying to talk you into being normal. Putting their expectations on you. You don’t need that anxiety. Lean on people who do have autism or take the time to look it up. The people that love you will want to understand you. The others will feel like they’re trying to modify your behavior like a dog….. which probably feels more pronounced if you were never diagnosed so your family did this to you early on, leading you to believe that some people are doing this even when they’re not.

ADHD and Autism generally lead to depression and anxiety. Our brain chemicals go haywire from having to manage how we act in public and how we act at home. For me, it’s trying to be engaging in public and completely detached from everything and everyone when I’m alone. When I’m recovering from a party, I need a sensory deprivation tank if it’s available. I just want to become a human .7z file for a while. Therefore, while I sometimes have energy to go to a party, I rarely have coping mechanisms for staying. It’s too much, too fast. It’s not that the pandemic made me more introverted, it’s that introversion revealed my autism. That I functioned better with sensory deprivation and good sleep. I got a weighted blanked and started sleeping with the sun. I write in total silence, often with the lights off. Sometimes, in ADHD mode, I can handle writing and music at the same time. Right now I am listening to a space heater and it’s enough.

Speaking of “enough,” I think you can tell that my one interest is writing because I get so lost in the story that paragraph breaks fail me. I need a neurotypical Karen editor who will go apeshit on my writing like a white woman at Applebee’s in her 40s….. for lunch with her inferior mean girls.

I thought I had one of those, but my ADHD and Autism got in the way. Not that anyone should excuse my behavior like it’s no big deal or “I can’t take responsibility, I’m autistic.” It’s only context, it’s not the whole show. I view it like having alcoholism. You don’t get to write off your shitty behavior just because you’re drunk. You can’t use it to avoid consequences. However, you can make amends by being humble and apologetic. You will get nowhere if you double down with “I didn’t hurt you, it was a symptom and therefore you can’t blame me.” Autistic children can do that. Not because they’re autistic. Because they’re children. You, on the other hand, have to find your own coping mechanisms and you’re responsible for handling your own shit. Autism doesn’t render you incapable of working on a problem and treating people respect. Recognizing that neurodivergent rage is a thing, but that doesn’t render what you did while you felt it acceptable.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. But if people are unwilling to compromise on those consequences, you have to move on. That’s because you know you’re neurodivergent. There is no chance that you’ll ever stop making mistakes when it comes to miscommunication. Some people take it out on their partner, which is why being a neurodivergent’s support system is so difficult for both parties. Generally, if one partner is neurotypical, the other feels parented/bulllied because their reactions are considered “normal.” There is no room for error in that scenario.

I will forgive anyone that I feel will forgive me…. but when I stop feeling that sense of balance, I will detach quickly because I feel that if you are not listening to me now, you certainly won’t later. If we are in conflict now, that speaks volumes about what happens down the road. Treading over someone’s boundaries the first time causes a fracture, and people only forgive so much.

Allow for that. Give them a break. Acknowledge that this is hard and will never end. That autism doesn’t allow you to pick up social cues in the same way, because I watch how people act and cannot duplicate it. It’s not that I can’t pick it up, it’s that I can’t put it down.

Literally. I turn things over like a die in DND. If you’re curious, I got 210 out of 235.

Saying Macbeth Outside the Theater

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Shakespeare understands grief better than I do.

Sir Patrick Stewart said on Graham Norton that when he took on the role of Macbeth, Sir Ian McKellan asked if he could give him some advice. Patrick said, “PLEASE!” Patrick proceeded to make tears roll down my face when he said that Sir Ian said, “the key to unlocking Macbeth is ‘and.’ It is not “tomorrow.” It is “tomorrow….. AND tomorrow…. AND tomorrow.” It is the interminable march of days, the piling on of all kinds of trauma small and large, the fact that it seems like it will never end right up until it does. That’s why there’s such a dramatic boost between happiness while poor and happiness while comfortably middle class. When you have savings, the minutiae of life does not drown you, constantly. It is also true that happiness does not get much deeper after that. Once your basic needs are met, it doesn’t make you another 50% happier to be a multimillionaire.

I think that’s because Shakespeare recognized a specific kind of future. The one where you, too are stuck in a moment and get get out of it. I wish I could do all of life like I cook, which is knowing enough to be able to correct a mistake on the fly… not knowing whether I have just experienced a symptom or whether it’s a regular dumbass attack and treating everything like the latter, blowing it out of proportion with rejection sensitivity disorder. And I could give truly frightening examples of it, but most people who have anxiety and depression jump to the worst of conclusions first because they can’t handle their environment in the first place. It’s hard to feel like people love you when they’re exhausted by behavior that frustrates you all by itself.

It’s hard not to feel like everything is your fault when people are so insistent that the common denominator in every interaction is me. There is no possible way I own a hundred percent of the blame for every situation in which I encounter. It’s just not physically possible, especially when I’m a fixer/pleaser and do things to make people smile often. But people are more naturally drawn to you when things are going well…… and when things aren’t going well tend to think they’re right more than they are. So do I. It’s human nature. The objective truth is found in the chasm between our two stories, and most people don’t have the stomach for that.

People conflate “the common denominator is you” to mean that you are responsible for every slight that happens (as if you have that kind of power) and every misfire in communication; it’s “you are somewhat responsible because a situation takes two or more people to create and you need to own your part.” For instance, Dana and I agreed that we both fucked each other up. After one fight, we divided up percentages and decided it was 60/40 in her favor. Then, I told her I would have taken 75 and she lowballed herself. I tend to take on more guilt than I should, and I am now only reclaiming a normal amount of room in the universe rather than being unable to dictate any terms with anyone. It leads all my energy to bleed out, trying to please everyone from my family to strangers. This has often led to people being entitled to their boundaries with me while ignoring mine because I’ve let them get away with it for so long.

I didn’t decide that I was the only arbiter of my friendship with Supergrover. She shut down and didn’t give me information, then didn’t have any tolerance for me making decisions based on what I thought rather than what was actually going on with her. But it wasn’t because I didn’t ask or want that information to purposefully ignore her needs. It’s that mine were never addressed, ever. She felt great about me adoring her, but not about the fact that she had severely emotionally wounded me. And I wouldn’t have cared by now if she hadn’t forgiven me on the surface so that I felt like I was a ghost in her life. The one in which she thought I was a threat and then checked in with me, not establishing new boundaries so that I didn’t constantly walk on eggshells around her.

Like getting annoyed that I wanted to know something basic through conversation, seemingly annoyed I hadn’t looked it up when I couldn’t have Googled the information, anyway. Why would I do that if I don’t want to give you the impression that I try to get information about you that you don’t want to give?

Tomorrow…. AND tomorrow…. AND tomorrow….

The feeling of how she treated me hasn’t gone away, and I know exactly why I didn’t walk. It felt like the pattern to which I’d become accustomed to in childhood, trying desperately to please someone that had already moved on so that it felt like I was pouring love into them while they tolerated me. Fully capable of being a baby monkey, too scared to walk away from wire because I don’t know how to find cloth yet. I haven’t been taught. But I am teaching, reparenting myself. Trying to give mysellf what I didn’t get, and part of it is saying what I mean and meaning what I say. Everything is a lie as I figure out what’s masking and what’s not.

I just know that my social masking wasn’t limited to autism, it was reinforced by trying to be good (which meant quiet and out of the way) and covering my needs. I’m not special. Most women and girls do this. However, most girls aren’t preacher’s kids, either.

I’m not trying to piss anyone off, it’s just a side effect of change. People see me differently and they ought to. But remember that we’re both going through a struggle and behavior doesn’t exist in a vaccum. If I have to be responsible for my behavior, you have to be responsible about what triggered it. You cannot say I am wrong a hundred percent of the time, because my self-esteem isn’t low enough to believe it anymore. I can work with boundaries, but not when you don’t set them.

So much of my need to run from Supergrover stemmed from her marrying Michael, then not telling me for almost two years, then saying “surely I must have gotten the wedding announcement,” then saying there weren’t pictures, etc. I can believe that last one, but everything else sounds like “lies you tell” when you want to protect someone…. and this isn’t the first or only example of her doing it. Her identity fundamentally changed, her life had moved on in a concrete way, and it felt like I wasn’t worth telling…. whether it was/is true or not. It’s not what she intended, it’s what I felt in those moments. She also didn’t talk about anything but work when that was the last thing I wanted to know about her most days.

It was too big a hurt to mend alone, but an even bigger one that she was right there and couldn’t hear me. She had the right to set that boundary with me, but I had the right to walk away when she did it, because she explicitly said that there were things she wouldn’t be opening up about again…. which was, of course, the thing that drove my crazy dreams. Then, over time, she relaxed about it and I felt like there was a new boundary set with no way of knowing whether it was true. Actions and words didn’t line up for a long time. She wouldn’t have reacted to me so angrily all those years if I hadn’t hurt her, or if we had truly mended the rift. We “put the word ‘free’ on a note so high we couldn’t sing it,” paraphrasing Tony Kushner. Or, one of us couldn’t. Taking Kushner literally, I can hit that high B flat at 1500 yards when I’m on my game. I’m currently not, but that’s not the point. The point is that you get out what you put into it. I wouldn’t be able to hit an emotional high B flat at 1500 yards without years of understanding someone, just like years of voice lessons makes me able to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” (No one will ever, no not ever beat Whitney Houston taking it in four at the SuperBowl.) I will never be Whitney Houston without another party’s input. It takes both of us being vulnerable to move forward.

It’s so counterintuitive, but leans the relentlessness of life into rolling joy rather than rolling pain.

Being able to move fast and take chances doesn’t happen in a vacuum, either. It comes from examining yourself to the point where you understand and trust your own intuition, because you’ve talked to enough people to know whether you’re a good judge of a situation or not. How often your behavior is a source of joy or worry. When it pays off to focus on yourself and when you’re ignoring people. When you ignore them too long, they’ll go away.

When I tried to set boundaries with someone who had no issue setting them with me and just not apprising me of the situation consistently enough to understand it, she ran. I don’t have to take it personally, but I do have to remember it’s what she does. She doesn’t let me know what the boundaries are and blames me for overstepping them, but is also the one I’d trust with my whole life because she’s shown me she’s rock solid in other areas of our relationship. It’s worth working on, but…

Tomorrow….. AND tomorrow… AND tomorrow.

I Actually Am a PhD

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am driven to create through writing stream-of-consciousness blog entries because it is showcasing the random order of my brain and entertaining people (even if only through schadenfreude). I haven’t been told that I’m worse writer than Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, and Martha Beck- so I continue to believe that I am capable of writing on their level with an editor. Someone to collate my thoughts into a self-help book by taking out the filler and focusing on what matters. An editor is important because I do not want to be the one in charge of going through what I’ve already said and deciding whether it’s worthy of editing and publishing. I also think I’ve got a framework for at least three books woven into one based on past writings, but not enough hubris to say that they deserve more than they’ve been given…. which is readers on the day it was published.

When I’m in the middle of a problem, it runs continuously in my brain and I look at it from a million different ways. Therefore, I do not know which of my entries regarding any of my characters/subjects/plot points explain something the best. One runs into the other. It is a continuing monologue. I have been told I should publish a bound anthology, but I will not do it unless I’m approached because I do not want to take on the task of deciding which entries are essential and which are just fluff. That’s because sometimes my intuiition is off as to what will resonate with people and what won’t. An editor coming in blind would relieve my soul greatly.

The other thing that relieves my soul is that I don’t have to write a book to have something worth publishing. I already have 20 years of entries- 10 from this blog and the other 10 in the Wayback Machine. If nothing else, writing these entries has proved to me that I am capable of writing a book. That’s huge.

I have known that I could write a book since I was a child, but I didn’t have the confidence when the writing went so well and my research skills were so poor. I developed a doctorate in bullshit, because I could get an A on a paper by writing the whole thing as fast as I write a blog entry and just making up the books I used as sources; I knew the names of the publishing houses off the top of my head and wrote convincing titles. I didn’t do this in college because I did not have to manage my papers against six other academic subjects, choir, and marching band.

I am going back and picking up building blocks for my true self that I never had because I couldn’t see all the social masking I was doing for ADHD and autism. What I know now is that I am capable of taking in a firehose’s width in information all the time, but knowing what’s important and what’s not is a challenge. My brain uses an obnoxious yellow highlighter on every word, because I am making connections so fast that everything is important under the right circumstances.

I have started reading celebrity autobiographies recently, and not because I like stardom and pop culture. It’s that there’s no other genre that sounds more like me. First of all, they’re actors. I’m a writer. Creative process. Second of all, they’re just telling the story as they saw it. Making judgment calls about how others’ actions affected them. Being angry. Being remorseful. Being guilty. Being all of it and through the process of writing it down, letting it all go.

I started with Prince Harry, Kelly Ripa, and Lauren Graham. I’ve got “Worthy” by Jada Pinkett Smith on hold at the library. It’s helping me find a lightness in tone that doesn’t come across with spy fiction and non- except “The Unexpected Spy” by Tracy Walder- she’s a TV show and Ellen Pompeo noticed. By and large, people like Le Carré don’t put as much humor into their books as I’d like, but it’s ok. The jokes land harder when they don’t happen all that often.

My favorite line from “Homeland” is “Karachi….. After you stole the car.” My favorite show about intelligence is “American Dad,” and feel that if I was any character on TV, I can best be summed up by Roger Smith. Pretty sure I asked for Pecan Sandies. I am the type person that grows to love a subject through the criticism of it. As in, someone becoming more beautiful to you because of their flaws. Both shows are great at taking the piss while also being sensitive to the fact that intelligence officers are people. One of the reasons I loved “Argo” was the incredible humor while in the midst of a serious situation. Using humor as a reflex to deal with what’s hard. Masking to protect their real identities, feeling like frauds. Roger Smith is the only one that walks in the world unafraid of being caught. I want to walk like that, and I am trying to find the keys to be able to unlock that part of myself.

I like seeing people without their social masking because if they stop doing it, so will I. For me, it’s to cover a neurodivergent brain. For others, it’s just the secrets they’ve kept are now killing them. For neurodivergent writers, it’s both. You’ve kept the shame and guilt at not responding to others the same way they respond to you hidden because you know it’s all your fault. My brain is not different, it is damaged.

When people do not understand this, they treat me as intellectually inferior. When they do, it’s so much better… but there is only so much of a leap you can make between having empathy for a disorder and having a disorder. Those two types of people communicate completely differently, because that person has what they’ve read on their minds while the other has a lived experience. Having a disorder is exhausting when you feel like you have to prove you’re ill because you look fine. Autism is just a processing disorder, but the anxiety and depression stemming from it is caused mostly by the enormity of the difference between what we mean and what other people hear.

This entry was interrupted by my need to eat. I sauted some hot dogs in butter, then added eggs and ghost pepper cheese. Hot dogs aren’t my first choice, but I thought that’s all I had and in retrospect, lunch meat would have been better. All sausages, vegan and meat, taste better if you split them down the middle and let them confit. The butter will mix with the fat in the sausage and develop a sweet, firm crust. Thus why it’s called caramelization. I also tend to saute sausages whole and cut them up later, because it’s easy to obtain said crust when you don’t have more than two surfaces. Hot dog pieces are too small to make sure every piece touches metal and cooks evenly. The better the crust, the more expensive it will taste. Because butter has a lower threshold for heat, I’ll wait longer for the caramelization so I can keep using it. Even if I was using Pam or olive oil, I wouldn’t put the temp up much further. You don’t want to burn the crust while the inside is still warming up. Burgers cooked low and slow this way are pretty hard to beat, particularly vegan because the crust will taste familiar even if the sausage doesn’t. A good crust made ith butter will cover a lot of sins in a sausage’s ingredients….. particularly if all you can afford is franks from the Dollar Tree. For breakfast, I would choose low-sodium Spam before hot dogs because it’s sweeter, but the outcome is the same. Caramelized, crispy outside, soft texture inside. The thinner you cut it, the better it will taste because the butter and caramel will be the forward notes, skipping over the flavor in the Spam and making it taste like real food.

There should be an award for that.

Meat always tastes better to me cooked in its’ own fat and butter. This is why I don’t grill. Whether it’s a Beyond Burger and margarine or a beef burger and butter, the caramelization beats the fat dripping off onto the coals. I do like grilled meat, I just don’t prefer it. I also like turkey because you’re continually circulating the butter over the bird by basting it. Grilled and fried turkey is also very good, but I prefer a crispy skin with Cajun seasoning.

Also, people tend to have way less faith in the red button than they should. When it pops up, people kid themselves that they know better. What they don’t know is that when you take a turkey out of the oven, it continues cooking internally. The red button accounts for that time.

“Zip code. Fargo, North Dakota. Right now.”

I learned everything I know about turkeys from Joe Bethersonton, “King of Auto Sales” and the Butterball Hotline. When I realized that there were things I didn’t know about cooking a turkey, I credit that show for making me want to learn. Dana usually grilled our turkey outside, and it was great. I wanted to be good at the classic presentation, one reminiscent of Norman Rockwell.

These last few paragraphs are indicative of how my brain works. My superpower is being able to explain the things I do well as much as I do the things I do wrong. For instance, acknowledging that I am not at fault for every conflict I’ve ever had. I own part of the fault. That other people are not responsible for my reactions/responses, but they are responsible for knowing that they don’t come in a vacuum. That we have to talk about my behavior in the context of what triggered it, because without it we do not reach mutual empathy for the other’s position.

Thus, trying to find solutions to the ways in which I feel like a burden by focusing my talent on something productive. Getting to know myself certainly is, because by admtting my failures, I let go enough to move into the future. Otherwise, you are trapped by feelings of murkiness at unclear boundaries, unsure of how to proceed. Even worse when you establish boundaries and they run right over them due to the nature of their personalitites. It’s hard to deal with consequences when you know your ADHD is at fault- your disorder, not your personality. No one else can excuse your behavior, a “get out of jail free” card, but people might have more empathy for you if you’re honest rather than trying to hide the limitations in how your brain works. It helps other people cope in the way they phrase things to you so that conflict doesn’t pop up to begin with.

So many people do not establish boundaries at the beginning of a relationship, the most important time. That way, when you’re wrong it’s clear you’re wrong. There’s no way to argue about it, you apologize and move on. Difficult to do when the other person’s response is to shut down at a threat. It only keeps you out, it doesn’t help to resolve anything. People think they feel better by avoiding a problem when solving it is just harder than they thought and they give up. Understanding someone else’s perspective is so hard when you’re invested in the fact you’re right.

Nobody made you do anything, yet no one should make you do everything. We are built for friendship intimacy, eros, agape and philia, whether you’re monogamous and coccoon with one partner, shutting the rest of the world out, or whether you’re a social butterfly. But there is also a fine line between interdependence and codepence, which everyone should study. You cannot be emotionally intimate with just one person and expect all your needs to be met. You don’t have a sounding board with which to correct the story that you’re telling yourself. You have to have friends with whom to bitch about your spouse and a spouse to bitch with about your friends. But both parties have to know that you’re just going somewhere to vent, you’re not going somewhere to make an escape plan….. and it always will be if you don’t develop emotional bravery.

I haven’t had it lately. I’ve met some incredible friends and dropped off the face of the earth because I had to- I’ll get back in touch. I am just trying so hard to focus on my own mental health that it’s taking my ability to connect with others. I just don’t have the spoons. I am in the unenviable position as to having anxiety about going through all of this on top of social anxiety when I call people, a necessary evil when you’re dealing with health insurance companies, GPs, and specialists…. not to mention the government if my occupational therapy doesn’t reveal my gaps and fix them. It just feeds my anxiety that I’m incapable of living within a system that helps most people. I do not want to go the disability route in the slightest. I just don’t know where I am on the spectrum and I want to get it resolved. Why I can spill my thoughts like a pro and struggle with things that make you look like a dumbass in neurotypical eyes. I think that’s because neurodivergents are not managers unless they’re high-functioning ADHD. Enough executive function to deal with fires and not drop details in paperwork. I think that’s because younger people are diagnosed than me, have had years of training in how to cope. I have no idea how people just learn those things on the fly, and get horribly anxious when I struggle.

People with ADHD require inertia, hard to get started when you’re bipolar and anxious about everything. I don’t need to tap out, I need to tap in. I’m just discovering that the barriers to entry are great and I wish I could hide from it. Surely I’ll just get better by not leaving my house because a magic fairy will come and fix me.

Learning to deal with autism and ADHD is the grief that you’ll never get your moment. You are told your entire childhood that eventually things will all come together as you get experience and I have gotten none of that. I have developed a talent for bullshit that I only saw when I started getting real. Patterns emerged in my writing that I couldn’t see before, the reason my autism is beating out my ADHD on a consistent basis. Going out is too much stimulation, but my ADHD side makes it where staying home isn’t stimulating enough. So, I go out and want to come home nearly immediately because walking in the world seems like our entire society is blaring at me. It is through no fault of their own. It’s my sensory percepton issues. The world is loud even if you were born neurotypical, male, white, able-bodied, straight, and cis. With sensory perception issues, the fact that the tag on your t-shirt is scratching the back of your neck feels as important as anything the boss has handed down, because the stimulation of it is overwhelming and covers everything else.

“It’s just a tag.”

I don’t go anywhere in which I don’t feel armored to take on the world. Clothes that do’t irritate me, comfortable shoes, a hoodie to guard against being cold in the air conditioning or outside in the season for it (you need good gloves, socks, an insulating layer like a vest or thermal shirt, and shoes padded on the inside with good tread. More important than the quality of your coat- with all that, I can wear a hoodie. Uniqlo. Look into it.). In the winter, I like sweats and long underwear as opposed to jeans…. but an open cuff so that I don’t always have to wear sneakers with them…. and stirrup pants drove me crazy in the ’80s because of the elastic strap. I wore them anyway because I liked the feeling of my pants not sliding loose and they kept me warm. I like hiking sandals with socks, but the kind that look like tennis shoes so that only the color of your sock shows through. I like wearing them without socks, but it doesn’t look good with pants. The reason for this is that in the cold, water dries quickly from your shoe, but not from your socks. They get soggy and you’re finished. With hiking sandals, you dump out the water and your foot is warm again because of the rubber in your shoe heating back up. Sandals don’t have anywhere for water to absorb except the top straps…. and we have already mentioned that my toes are covered. I don’t understand those people, but William Sledd’s Summer Rant goes through my head when I see it. “If you see someone with a toe ring, I would just go up to them and say, ‘girl? What the fuck is on your toe?'” “The anklle bracelet…. the perfect accessory to a toe ring.” I think it came out over 10 years ago, and it makes me double over with laughter every single time.

Again, entertaining my audience through only storytelling, a stream of consciousness unmasking of what it’s like to live in a neurodivergent brain and the struggles in remaining positive around it. You don’t immediately realize it’s relentless. And then the struggle sets in. This is not a transitory state. This is the same hassle you’d feel if your cat got diabetes. You mean I’m going to have to give it shots for the rest of my natural life? You mean I’m going to have to teach housesitters how to do it? You mean I have to justify why I’m willing to take care of an animal with serious needs? It’s all too much because in this case, the cat is you and the last person you want to take care of in that way. Most people are focused on others to avoid the deep dive I do.

And it only helps them so much. Breaking free does not come without costs, but it does come with self-worth when you realize you do things extraordinarily well…. it’s just not the way in which everyone expects. I hope that one day I’m in the position to say that I don’t like the crowd and where it’s headed so that I’m grateful for this journey, but right now it’s too difficult and scary to say that.

I just know that I have a doctorate in bullshit, and now I’m learning all the reasons why…. not to avoid having responsibility, but to learn which ones I can manage.

Grief Sucks

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Lindsay and I have been through the emotional ringer because of our stepfather’s death, and I use that term loosely because my mom didn’t marry him until the aforementioned trip when I was 24 in which my wife called me up nd told me she was cheating on me and she was leaving. So, I don’t have fond memories of their wedding at all. She wanted to be the monarch, I wanted to be the democracy. I did not like it, and I’m glad the trash took itself out. I was miserable for a while, but not long enough for it to matter in retrospect.

It’s been a complicated relationship the whole time. Trying to appease my mother and being frighteningly uncomfortable around him because he felt entitled to my body and I don’t as a general rule like people who don’t know me touching me in a seductive way, being more familiar than they have any right to be. He kissed me on the lips once without asking and I thought I was going to punch him with rage and didn’t. He told Lindsay and me that he was sorry, that he had kissed his other daughters on the lips without incident…. *but they had grown up with him.* He, like every man I know, felt entitled to touch me and obsessed with Lindsay to a degree where I am not noticed.

But that came later. At first he picked up on the fact that my mother loved Lindsay’s voice and she didn’t treat me the same, so he buttered me up with compliments to make me feel better. It wasn’t necessary. I am used to walking in the world behind her, because the attention she gets that I don’t might be annoying, but she saves me from having to deal with a lot, too. Everyone, in my observation, rushes in to do things for Lindsay in a way they don’t rush in for me.

But our stepsisters didn’t even bother to tell either of us that Forbes was being buried next to my mother and give us the time and date. Lindsay found out on Facebook. No one in that family who is still alive ever accepted us, but I had a relationship with the oldest, who thought I was brilliant and deserved to work in DC. The funniest conversation we ever had was her outrage that Ben Affleck played Tony Mendez because he wasn’t Hispanic. I wish I had gotten to reassure her that Tony didn’t care. He just thought he was more handsome than Ben. 😉

It’s nice that I have some good memories, but they weren’t consistent because Susan lived in San Antonio and I lived in Houston at the time. She was half Latina, half white and was the chair of the Mexican studies department at University of Texas- San Antonio. We both identified with The Struggle, a perspective no one in my family shared because they are all white. Someone actually said to me “why do you focus on minority issues. You don’t have to live with them.” She was making fun of Oregon, deservedly so, but still. It felt like she as laughing in a way I didn’t like.

But that’s Texas for you. Everyone riding the line with polite racism…… which is ridiculous because we annexed part of Mexico in the 1800’s. So many, many, many Latinx people are discriminated against every day when their families have been Texans for hundreds of years. There is no “go back where you came from.” We’re on their land, Holmes. Slow your fucking roll, Karen.

I feel like I have to apologize to the Karens in my life, particularly the ones who are Latina, because they are not the stereotype. But there’s just no other word to give that complete a picture of a white woman who feels like she owns everything and everyone. Double that for POC and queers, depending on whether they’re an angry liberal Karen or a MAGA Karen (which now stands for *making attorneys get attorneys.*)

So, Lindsay went apeshit after the funeral on the youngest two of our stepsisters because she was so hurt. Forbes’ sister in law tried to make it okay, but there’s not a way to make it so. Lindsay was traumatized, and so was I because when Lindsay went to the cemetery and sent me pictures on the anniversary of my mother’s death, the gash was still there from the burial and the headstone wasn’t there for carving.

I made sure my mom’s side is beautiful. It has a treble staff with the beginning notes to “Amazing Grace.” Forbes was a CPA so his side looks like an incomplete Word Document.

And if that’s not enough, I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I haven’t to Forbes’ lawyer directly, but apparently Lindsay gets to start her financial planning and I don’t because I don’t have a trustee and it will have to be set up before the money is mine. Lindsay says this is not true, that both our trusts are set up the same way, so the jury is still out. We are also requesting a list of beneficiaries for our dad’s retirement, because we think that Forbes may have used it on a down payment for a house he built with the woman he married six months after my mother died. This was not problematic to me. He had health problems and if his wife wanted to take over his care and feeding, great. The problem is that our mother didn’t leave us any money in her will. She left it to Forbes to manage. The money that we got from him doesn’t add up. It feels like he may have padded the gifts to his biological daughters with money that wasn’t his by dividing everything equally.

I need it for my retirement, but it’s a possibility that I’d sink it into a down payment on a house if I wasn’t taxed at 40%. This is because I think I could do better with DC real estate than I could with an IRA. It would also be a crash pad for my sister. But the money we have isn’t enough for a down payment unless we bought an apartment or condo in a shitty neighborhood, paying attention to when industries might move in. If we’d had the money for an apartment in ’01, Kathleen and I would both be in a very different financial situation, especially considering where we lived. If we’d applied for a mortgage to buy a house in Alexandria or Arlington, we would have made a nest egg no matter how long we stayed. If we’d kept the house as a joint asset and just rented it out, today we would be millionaires, especially if we’d been willing to risk it a bit and buy in Columbia Heights or Shaw. You can buy a house anywhere in the city of Washington, but you’ll get the most bang for your buck if you go into a neighborhood that is currently trashed out. Washington, DC is only 60 square miles. That means property values begin to skyrocket quickly in undiscovered pockets. Think about the people that bought in Georgetown in the 70s. Their houses are worth five million.

I don’t have the money to dream big, because it takes money to make it. But it’s a nice thought and a good thing for both Lindsay and me, so we’ll see. Even if we never do it, the idea is fun to explore. I don’t know that Lindsay wants to work past retirement age, so I don’t know if she would even need a pad in DC by then. So, it’s the equivalent of just searching Zillow for house porn.

It feels better than arguing in my head about why I don’t walk in the world like Lindsay, and how I can use my strengths so that people don’t see me as her weaker, meeker counterpart. I am learning to deal with my emotions differently, which lets go of a lot of rage. I don’t feel like everything is going wrong all the time because I have more emotional strength to be able to handle something like this. I am not getting edgy at an enormous change that as of yet, I do not understand.

New environments are difficult for me to handle, and this is one of them. I have never had to think about money before in this way, and it’s frightening to have something explained to you that you had no capacity to understand in the first place. It feels good to be in a different financial place than I was few years ago, but untangling the emotional strings around it is difficult…. most notably that I’m angry my mother died. My mother is the one that I could have just said, “I cannot make this phone call under any circumstances right now and it’s time sensitive. Will you help me?” My mother would not have understood why I couldn’t make a phone call due to social anxiety, but she’d do it anyway. I will make a phone call for you because I am not emotionally invested in what the other person has to say. I will clean your house for the same reason. There needs to be an exchange between people like this who all clean each other’s houses for free, because we don’t have the emotional attachment as to how it became that way. Shame and guilt, etc. I don’t think it’d be a problem as long as we don’t get lazy and under value what others are doing for us. Bartering vs. getting work done for free because you can’t be arsed.

I don’t want any more stimuli than grief most of the time, because it’s what I can handle right now. It has to be managed before I can manage anything else. It’s not a constant scream of pain anymore, just that my reactions are always going to be irritated and angry if I’m thinking about grief and dealing with other people.

When I am being short with people, I only want it to refer to my height.