Tag: life

The Smell of Failure

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

Anthony Bourdain hit rock bottom, and afterward he got a gig as a brunch cook. Therefore, in “Kitchen Confidential,” one of my favorite lines was that “hollandaise was the smell of failure.”

I believe that for entirely different reasons.

I had to clean the egg pans with lemon dish soap for a while at my own brunch gig. It ruined the taste of Hollandaise for me permanently. Not enough Old Bay in the world. Jesus could come back, bless it himself and I’d still be all like, “nahhhhh, fam….. you go ahead.” But I would have made him the best Hollandaise he’d ever had even if it was just the first. I can cook the things I don’t like, too. I’ve never done liver and onions in my own house, though my dad and stepmom have served me fois gras at theirs. It’s not that I can’t put up with the taste so much as the smell of it while it’s cooking. Smell is primal with me. Bad ones make me throw up at their memory. I know that I would have eventually learn to cope if I’d been a doctor, but I would have thrown up at a lot of things first and second year.

I will try something even if I don’t like it, so the fois gras had its excellent points, especially the raspberry jam against the perfect crispness of the liver. I just can’t get over the taste and smell of iron no matter whether it’s Luby’s or Le Pigeon.

It would be great if my greatest epic fail was throwing up into a stock pot and having to start something over because of the smell. It’d really tie the room together. But no. I was talking about how cooking informs the rest of your life before I get down to the nitty gritty. Plus, I’m ADHD, and every thought comes with bonus content.

I want you to know that I know what I’m talking about even when I’ve come across as a dumbass to chefs. I can describe it better than I can do it, just like Bourdain. He was a journeyman in the kitchen, a chef in the New York Times. His logical mind was in the kitchen while his heart poured onto the page, just like me….. unique on the page and mundane in my technique. But my creativity in writing comes across in new ideas rather than how many covers I cook for that night. I read recipe books like novels because I am not going to follow them. I’m going to look at spice combinations and see if it works in some dishes, or reference how to braise something because I can look at what part of a recipe matters and what doesn’t. What concepts will translate and what has to be specific. For instance, the instructions in how to get a medium rare on a steak with a cast iron skillet is useful in braising, period. You cannot take a Japanese palate and mix it with a Russian’s without studying its components and adjusting. For instance, I think Russians/Finns/Ukrainians et al would love salted licorice mixed with fruit, but at what ratio? I would imagine it would be a lot of fruit and a tiny bit of Aquavit and a whole lot of fruit.

In cooking, you have to know which flavor is going to be dominant ahead of time to save it when you’re cooking. I already know that peach works with licorice because I had a frozen drink called a Greekarita that fulfilled my life’s dream, the apex of mixology. And for the Russians, it was vodka. I do it because I love you despite your dickhead of a ruler. I am sure that during the Trump years, you thought the same about us. That’s how cooks dressed as spies can change the world. People telling others to stories who can actually do something if they’ll open up vs. the fear of getting caught and tortured. Very few people in Russia are that courageous, and those Russians absolutely saved our lives. I think about that a lot. I have the same relationship with the Russian people that I do with my chef. I’m friends with the other people on the brigade because even my worst enemies wouldn’t let me fail on purpose. We are not united in brotherhood all the time, but we’re united in trying to be the best at our jobs. It’s good we compete. You get better food.

The thing about “even your worst enemy won’t let you fail” is bullshit when someone actively wants to get rid of you. The bond comes from how you treat each other outside work. If someone fucks up and you can’t get over it to the point we can all have a beer later, it takes a lot to get that trust back. Getting on another cook’s shit list isn’t good because it spirals. They take a negative inventory and it affects how  they talk to the people who actually can hire and fire you. They prove your incompetence out of revenge, because the kitchen is a meritocracy and you let someoone fail. It’s not out of malice. It’s that you let them down. In some cases, you’ll never be able to save their ass in a way they can see it. That shit happens, and it’s not personal. It’s how people survive chefs like Ramsey. Even when he’s as angry as he pretends to be on TV, I have no doubt that he’s beloved because he’s not angry when he’s not  under pressure.

This is what leads to my most epic fail. We were busy and I had to work with the person that sexually harassed me and the owner of the restaurant, who had no cooking experience at all. She didn’t pick up that I was nervous because of the sexual harassment, and criticized me at every chance she got because she didn’t know shit about timing and would blame me for being slow on a ticket that came in 30 seconds ago and needed 10 minutes to cook. The sexual harassment guy and I got into a rhythm where he’d drop things into the fryer and I’d pick them up. Because the owner thought I was lazy anyway, the one time he didn’t was the last straw for her, even though she was the least experienced at being a cook and the most at being a horrible boss. She couldn’t keep a chef more than 15 minutes, contracted out the food, and still managed to tank that before closing the food side altogether. She didn’t know me, didn’t see me when I was on my game. She judged me on the one night she had to pitch in after not firing the person who sexually harassed me because we didn’t communicate something we’d been doing like clockwork and dropped the ball once.

No one made allowances for me on dish, either. I was called slow because I couldn’t lug 80 pounds of water up three flights of stairs without it taking longer because all of my muscles aren’t as strong as everyone else’s.

But that wasn’t my most epic cooking fail, and it’s a miracle no one got hurt. The person who sexually harassed me left a hotel pan of raw chicken on top of the freezer, and when asked, told management it was me. This is after telling me I’d be running my own kitchen within six months and how I could always be counted on and I’d do great things.

I didn’t realize the lovebomb/discard pattern because I didn’t realize that he was slowly moving all our shits together so that when we were both closing, he’d leave early and I’d be stuck cleaning for both of us. He thought he had that right even though he wasn’t my boss. The only way you get respect in the kitchen is to earn it, and he had no authority. I just took it because the lovebombing was complete. By the time he sexually harassed me, the betrayal hurt me the most.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but never once have I put people’s safety in danger……. even when people say I did.

While it is true that I do not have the physical strength to be in a kitchen, it is also true that I have come into my own and wouldn’t think twice about ripping another cook a new asshole for focusing on me and not the mission. It’s not that women can’t be the best chefs in the world. We’ve been the chefs for all of history, yet unrecognized until men did it. Escoffier didn’t make anything at The Plaza that his mother didn’t teach him first. Le Guide Culinaire is based on personal experience. Your mother generally teachers you how to cook because your father’s not interested. This is slowly changing as society has made it cool to cook. We all love dad favorites like steak and French fries, we just do it in a cast iron skillet rather than grilling because steak tastes better from the crust that develops from confit, which means cooked in its own fat. When you grill, the fat drops into the coals. Steak tastes even better when you put a little bit of butter on that crust right before you serve it. Make sure the butter is melted because once the steak has had time to rest, it probably won’t make the butter melt naturally. I also like to add fresh herbs to the butter, like rosemary. If I only have dry, I don’t make it fancy. Salt, pepper, and garlic is all a steak really needs. Just make sure the salt and pepper are of good quality. I prefer Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper to the table version of either, though ground pepper is okay if it’s fresh.

If you accidentally oversalt the meat, you can fix it one of three ways. If it’s steak intended for fajitas, throw a margarita on it using fresh lime juice. The acid will neutralize the salt. With American, increase the herbs without more salt and add lemon juice. If lemon juice is not part of the palate, make a balsamic reduction by putting vinegar in a pan and letting it sit on low heat for like a year. No, seriously. Until it gets to “coat a spoon” stage. I put dried cherries and (also dried) mushrooms in mine and let them plump up. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour depending on volume. This is a sauce you can double and triple to save the syrup for later. Leaving out the mushrooms and making it really thick would be good on vanilla ice cream.

The day I reached for a spoon out of an egg pan and didn’t realize it was boiling hot wasn’t all that great, either. It fused to my hand and I had to just put some burn cream on it and keep going. My worst enemy wouldn’t have let me fail, and I didn’t have them in the kitchen. I had my wife. She could have empathy without coddling me and I knew we were both doing what we needed to cope. It led to some of my successes, including the biggest. I got my name on the menu for my chili.

Despite all my fails, if you like food you’re missing out on being my friend. It is your epic fail, not mine. 😉

This is the Thursday of Our Discontent

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how I did it.

But I have a guess.

Somehow I did not post yesterday’s entry before the clock flipped over on the server. So, I did today’s writing prompt yesterday and now I have no idea what to do. I still have food prompt pieces to finish, but it’s not a “finishing” mood. It requires an editorial brain I do not have today. This is the winter of our discontent, the long, dark Bloguary of the soul, the long day’s journey into white (live, laugh, love).

I am being so dramatic for someone who just has to come up with a damn writing prompt on her own. Leslie, you do this every day. Every. Day. Buck up, buttercup.

Pack a lunch, son.

When I’m sitting in my room writing, I remember that scene from the 50th Anniversary Special for “Doctor Who.” Ten, Eleven, and The War Doctor are arguing, and for those who don’t watch the show, that’s three actors playing the same person at different points in their lives. Matt Smith (Eleven) starts laughing when they’re arguing and says, “I just realized this is what it must be like when I’m alone.” “What it’s like when I’m alone” is very much John Hurt, Matt Smith, and David Tennant arguing in my head, because that’s how it’s the easiest to tell what issues are working on which processor.

For instance, the heartbreak of losing Supergrover at my own hand eight years ago is nothing compared to the pain of trying to make it work and repelling each other so that neither of us were happy. But the threads processing on that core are alongside the other core, which is joy that goes all the way back to “you like to rap to Eminem? Explain to me exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS..” She said “you’ll fall in love with truth an honesty, as adorable as I might be.”

She’s right. I confused them and then got my head on straight. Trying to prove that my head is on straight has been enormous, because I was jumping up and down for attention in my own way, just not the ways in which she thought I was. She was getting mad at me by focusing on the wrong things. For instance, I wrote her something that meant “there’s nothing that you could tell me that would scare me away and I love you.” She took it as “who you are as a person is bad.” Those messages are drastically different.

Thus, trying to write it all out and it seems repetitive because I’m aware of the fact that not everyone reads every day. I have become the Ann M. Martin of bloggers. There’s a story here, but you have to make it through explaining club rules and characters for the people that would be confused if they read a book as a standalone. It also gives me room to stretch out because I’m not working on all cores every day. I see thoughts from the day before and something jumps out at me.

Blogging seems self-aggrandizing when you’re processing because it’s necessarily all about you. You can’t think about anyone else’s behavior as good or bad, you have to say what happened and how you reacted. You are not an authority on how the other person acted and reacted, because you’re not their combination of experiences or family history. Where it gets problematic is other people thinking I’m being a dick when I’m trying to say “I don’t live in your head, but you certainly live in mine.” Everything I wish I could tell them, but can’t because neither of us have time. I reflect on my problems in the third person when I do.

They’re free to read it, but when they do, they often think that I’m writing the way something went down to hurt them, when I’m trying to understand me. This is not limited to Supergrover, because I talked about her yesterday. This is every single person in my life who is threatened by the fact that I write. She told me at last interaction that I was entitled to all my stories, and I hope to God that’s true. I would never say anything to negatively affect her on purpose, and I’ll leave it at that.

Not just Supergrover, everyone in my life so far has thought about the negative things I’ve said more than the positive. If they can’t give me hell, they take it out on Lindsay because she’s local. I’m not Walter Winchell. I’m Brene Brown in real life. How her stories of “the story you’re telling yourself” play out in an anxious/avoidant trauma bond and how most people have them with their parents even when they haven’t been emotionally or sexually abused. Just as often the child has one style before and one style after. The style after is a mask, a myth we made in the middle of the mess to cope. The relationship with an abuser is always an anxious/avoidant attachment because the kid is so keyed up about accidentally giving someone away, and the adult is a monster, shearing a sheep many times because you can only skin it once.

Just so Supergrover doesn’t get wires crossed and think I’m saying my abuse repeated and she’s the monster, let me take a second and reassure her that’s not what happened at all. We’re just two different attachment styles because of who we are as people, and it’s the two adult attachment styles that have the most compatible wounds because our emotional blind spots are completely different. People who have an avoidant/attachment style have it because someone withheld love from them when they didn’t act as planned, especially their abuser, the one they’ve been programmed to think of as God. Your personality goes back to the moment your reality broke, the moment you became responsible for secrets too big for you to carry…. because the way you’re covering it up is counter to how you used to act, it’s taken as a behavioral issue and few people are smart enough to outsmart a child who’s been programmed not to trust their parents or therapist.

I ran toward Supergrover not because of anything illicit like an affair. It’s that her inner circle feels like being part of Lindsay’s, where I can’t tell people everything she’s working on, even when it affects me directly- like Lindsay’s hand in queer legislation but on different issues. I have been programmed to be a confidant from childhood, and it’s a whole other thing to choose to hear stories that are large rather than to have them put on your shoulders during years 12-14; you don’t even know enough to know that adults don’t do that to kids when they’re healthy. It’s the same dynamic as when a parent’s a drunk- the inversion of parent/child roles. With Supergrover, I get to bring my whole self to the table. I don’t forget about the past, I use it to inform my future. Supergrover and I just did that thing where fools rush in. Now she thinks I want her to tell her my stories so that I have more material, and I think that the reason I have to process so much on my own is that she’s ok with letting me twist in the wind and it is not okay. There are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the objective truth. Peace is found in knowing that I am finding my truth and reaching for the objective. But I don’t know the whole story, I know as much as I’m allowed to hear.

While that’s happening, Lindsaay told me I can write the story of us and our ugly stepsisters and to say whatever the fuck I want. My mother and her husband are both dead, and we no longer speak to their family. We just want to move on. The gist of it is that Lindsay found out about the funeral from Facebook. Our stepsisters didn’t even tell us when the graveside service was so we could be there when he was buried next to our mother. I’m going to do a saga, I’m not just mentioning it. I want to find the objective truth, the third eye looking down on both sides. I can’t know the story they told themselves, but I know the story of how it made me feell.

I will find it by writing it out, and so might they. But they’d never let me open the book.

Bold of You to Assume

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What would your life be like without music?

Bold of you to assume that I would have the life I have without music at all. I accidentally got an arranged marriage out of it because we told each other we loved, admired, and trusted each other to a level that it’s been a disaster every time we’ve tried to separate. I got this “job,” not unwanted, just problematic and have had it for 10 years. Being together and separate creates a different set of consequences, so the music I listen to varies by what I have to say and how I know it’s going to affect me. For this entry, it will be “Nobody Knows,” by The Tony Rich Project. It expresses our problems greatly, and also explains why she’s the woman I think of when I hear “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” and “Love You Madly,” and that last one is to reclaim it from another face due to pain. She’s a 3D character. 😉

Additionally, I’m sure Mel is upset that I haven’t finished my food entries, because they cut deep (due to tapping into my work history) and I want her to think they’re good. It would help if she heard Beethoven’s ninth symphony instead of the blues (not that there’s anything wrong with the blues, but if you hear it after you cook, you’ve probably fucked up).

If I can impress both of us, then I’ve impressed the rest of our clan because I’m American and she’s Indonesian (living in the UK).

However, I need to process and I’ll tell you the music I listened to at the end and how it inspired this. I’ll say it first and then I’ll say it again. Sometimes you accidentally create a right-hand ring and resent it. I want to be her Lord John Grey and I’m totally her Frank. I want to describe what that’s like in detail for myself in another 10 years. I don’t write about what I do know, I write about what it’s like for me not to get it.

My food entries get more attention than everything else because it’s more universal, but everything else explains a relationship between adults where both are traumatized in different ways and how they act toward each other as adults- when the abuse happened in childhood. My friend Donna wrote a book called “Never the Same,” about kids who lose parents and siblings. It could be a title for abused kids as well. These pages are more important than anyone will ever know, because if I could be more specific, I could reach even more people in the shit with this kind of bond in a more specialized way. It’s a different thing to love someone with a power imbalance this big, because priorities are ironclad out of necessity. You will never be number one on the call sheet, and if you have different romantic partners, you won’t be number two, either.

Even more when the person who is more powerful pretends the imbalance isn’t there until she just can’t anymore because she can’t plan a future, either. Isn’t mindful that though she has a partner, kids, parents, and siblings, our situation is unique to theirs by a wide margin except her partner. Dana and I weren’t a team on this, and neither were they when I actually needed Michael more than her, because only he would know what was up. She has entrusted me and hung me out to dry. I deserved it, and we still can’t get around the facts. The only one that can help me is the one who least wants to do it, and not even because I was an asshole. She doesn’t make me a priority because she can’t.

She’s not a fixer/pleaser in her work life, but she is at home because she feels guilty and no one can lift it. Her power imbalance with herself is the same one she has with me, so when she digs deep, there’s no one to tell her to release them and find more small joys. I need her to have solid memories of everything good about her life so that when she gets hard on herself, she can see how much people love her.

Even me, the one that gets passed over. In part I think that’s because she can’t, because I’m not part of her inner circle and she’d have to figure out a reason she’d need to be in Washington at hours she doesn’t need to be there, because she’s not very good at it…. and now she can’t joke with her husband that she has to go see her sidepiece because she wouldn’t think that was funny, because it’s been long enough for me to resolve those issues and apparently not enough for her. I used to joke that we were having an affair under everyone’s noses, because you can’t imagine how much truth there is to that.

To Michael:

I was only using a euphemism for the adrenaline and dopamine rush and I have been the whole time.

She never did anything inappropriate in case you haven’t been reading over her shoulder. If you had been, I still would have been an absolute jackass because my brain chemicals still would have been turned up to 11, but when I came down you would have realized immediately that I was no threat. I was just high, like other people in your lives except the drugs were street legal. If it didn’t happen to you, too, I can’t imagine why. Seriously. We could write a book together that we couldn’t publish. I asked her if she needed a book like it, but didn’t take in that my part’s done. If you divorce her, no you didn’t and make that clear.

Don’t ever make anything blow up in her face and let her believe that you mean it, the lecture you would have given me that I should have thought of on day one. I said it in the heat of the moment. I never want either of you to think that because I’m a blogger, that means I’m a threat. And even then, I threatened to call for help. I am not trying to be threatened or threatening, I am trying to handle/fix it in myself without hurting her, and I don’t know when I’m leaving breadcrumbs, because I only need 15 minutes to establish what’s okay and what’s not; I’ve realized that my promises to her are bigger than yours by nature of what we do, not who we are to each other. I will promise to keep her even if she doesn’t promise to keep me.

God help your soul no matter how she and I play out, because if we stay apart and I find out you guys divorce, there will be dragon fire because mine is getting stronger every day. If we reconcile and you guys support me the way I support you, then you’re really fucked because then you have to deal with both of us simultaneously. I already know we’re a handful jointly and severally. But, according to the prevailing wisdom, she’s a handful on her own and you’re capable. Good luck and God bless. But know that I’ll love you in a very concrete way until I die, because she’ll let you know what her emotional needs are when she can’t let me for reasons.

The “honeymoon phase” doesn’t last long in most relationships, and we accidentally created a habit where we needed to lean on each other like we were using each other as furniture and both felt threatened enough to run at every chance it was available. I threatened to blow up her life because she blew mine to hell and wouldn’t deal with the fact that she affected my life’s course without accepting that it had played out with an anxious attachment style trauma bonded to an avoidant attachment style. It’s how most people who are abused cope. They don’t know their own attachment styles and love languages because to dive into that means you realize that you’ve been protecting yourself by dealing with everyone else’s bullshit while ignoring your own. It’s too hard and it hurts too much.

When you completely lose who you are, your reality break will dictate how you sway. When your reality breaks as a child because you’ve been sexually or emotionally abused, the abuser and the child form an anxious/avoidant attachment style because the power imbalance is absolute. You’ll search for it all the time, wanting the push pull of being abused and not learning to accept more. I had higher emotional standards for friendship, but not time together. Quality over quantity. When Supergrover got my letters, she read them as “you’re a bad person and that’s why I don’t like you.” I wasn’t judging her, I was making a case. I felt like I had to keep making it over and over because I saw our pattern for what it was and knew it would never break on its own. If you doo what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve allready got.

She couldn’t answer without anger because forgiveness was the story she was telling me while also holding in a lot of anger because she thought she couldn’t trust me anymore & I proved to her beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most important person in my life because of what I do, and it didn’t help because her presence doesn’t help her, because she doesn’t think I think she’s wonderful despite all her flaws and failures. The failures are just where we need to resolve conflict, not where we need to beat up on each other.

I opened up about her so we could resolve everything and move on. She thought I was lecturing her on what a bad person she was. Who would want to get close to someone like that? Love has to be built when you’ve both been thoughtless.

She doesn’t take in that my anxious attachment is causing me pain, I get angry at being ignored for years on end.

Because she can’t take in that I’m a Christian and she’s not, she doesn’t take in that I’m trying to be the peace that calms her by praying for her and she thinks I’m trying to make her life hell.

She ignores the fact that I use her face when I’m praying just to put a personal spin on what God is, the place in me where I can talk about my most epic fails and rise from the ash. Therefore, I am trying to find the place where the peace inside her is also her. I dig into myself to teach her how to love me, trying to lead from the back by laying out all my worst flaws first. One of my valleys of vulnerability is where she’s the choice woven into me like the Impossible Girl on Doctor Who, while also feeding The Master.

I sent her a whole ass essay on why this was, and she thought I was saying she was a bad person. That was the day I listened to Bolero on repeat to slow my heartbeat to a manageable level. I know without a shadow of a a doubt I am more important than her family in some ways, and I’m not knocking any of them. I’m playing on a unique field, and I feel like a goalie who doesn’t know which team she’s playing this week.

I saw a meme that made me laugh for this very reason….. a little kid who was jealous of the other team getting to change colors every week and his mom had to explain to him that they were, in fact, different teams.

(If you can’t handle me at my Supergrover, you don’t deserve me at my  Bourdain. I am laughing uproariously. I don’t care what stuff of mine you read, it’s just funny because I hold myself to the same standard. Unfortunately, I’m not that great a writer and I still have to read it.)

It happens more often than any other pattern. The person who holds everything back is attracted to the one who can emote, and the dance of intimacy is fighting with someone you’re completely addicted to in a literal sense. You can’t separate because the brain chemicals when you’re together. It’s not a sweet waltz. It’s the Habanera with emotional guns blazing because the swings are extreme. Those extremes don’t settle any if the relationship is platonic. You can fight with your siblings this way, too, because generally you shut down after abuse and your reactions are that way with everyone no matter how close you are.

I have broken my streak of 60-odd days just to listen to music, sleep, and relax. My body can’t lean towards insomnia forever, so I caught up. My body has a binge/purge relationship with sleeping, so I use music to help me stay awake AND asleep. They’re just different moods.

The alarms on my phone are NI**as in Paris (Kanye and Jay-Z) and Rap God (Eminem). I love both those songs, but the rhythm gets into my head and I can’t go back to sleep, especially when Em gets into 32nd and 64th note patterns while still being able to make out what he’s saying. It’s incredible. I couldn’t do it at gunpoint. I can’t do 64th note melismas while I’m singing without oxygen in the middle, and he did so well he published it and that song is famous across the world. Eminem is the modern-day Bach in that one album, because you cannot tell me that word-based melismas are easier than the ones in Mass in B Minor. Not possible.

If you have gotten to this point, thank you for reading. Each paragraph flowed into another as I was processing out loud the enormous difference between my ideal future and the one I’ve created. INFJs always search for the ideal and generally want relationships where the other person is also interested in it………….. yet will settle for being unhappy because so few people are like us and we don’t know enough to find them. I’m an INFJ. Daniel is an INTJ. Both our realities are broken for different reasons, neither more important than the other.

Daniel said that he had been in love with me for 36 years. I know why, but this is conjecture. He knew to want love from someone who’d give it to him in the way he could hear it, even when Supergrover has needs that trump his, because he knows what it’s like to desperately need help with stories you have to hold inside you while also popping smoke. He would understand when I joked that I was having an affair with Michael’s wife. That she and I share a more important bond so it is what it is whether he likes it or not.

We’re a handful, and he’s capable.

Editor’s Note:

This entry was inspired by Jason Moran’s complicated rhythms on “Ten,” because it helps me make connections faster than Tony Rich. I also listened to Wynton Marsalis’ “From the Plantation to the Penetentiary” and “Let the Bright Seraphim” with Kathleen Battle. It was like listening to a symphony in terms of odd numbers in movements vs. even. I enjoy making the playlist, and she enjoys running to Eminem and blasting Cake. Waking up to Rap God isn’t an accident, and I’ve set it for every morning.

Michael and I are toast (in a very funny way). We know it like the backs of our hands, because one of us forgot our real books because of ADHD and his is coded because he’s a normal person….. and even if I could read from it, I’d have to transpose.

Keeping on the Lights

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

For Dana and Supergrover, because they deserve to know what happened and why, and also why they’re the loves of my life and would have been for all time if we had been a team.

I’ve learned to keep the backlight on when I type, because if I keep the RGB going, there’s less of a chance that the Bluetooth connection will drop.

It’s a metaphor for my life.

Being with Supergrover is different in every way possible depending on how she’s connected to you. I’m one of the ones inside the wire. Just like Lindsay doesn’t tell me everything, but there’s more a chance that I’ll be bored by it than anything else.Yet, I broke up with Dana because there are two examples in my past where she betrayed my confidence, so I knew that when Supergrover could trust me, I couldn’t trust Dana and I was out.

I hinted that to both. I didn’t want to lay it all on the table back then because I couldn’t tell her that I had a solid reason for moving to DC that included Supergrover, and I didn’t tell Supergrover that because she would have thought I was guilting her when I wanted to be her hero. She was already mine. Moving was only an attempt to put physical distance between Dana and me, and to give physical proximity to someone who might want it, might not. Obviously, I’m not bothered with sharing physical space because I’ve been friends for 10 years with Supergrover despite buying coffee for each other and not drinking it together… We’re still friends in my mind because we’ll always be on each other’s radar whether we talk or not and I don’t want to live in enmity.

We all would have had a much more traumatic relationship if it had gotten worse. Both would feel guilt if I expressed something I thought of as a problem to work through, not an indictment on our relationship. I sent both of them away when they wouldn’t open up anymore because I was lost in my own world without it.

I, in a very real sense, had fallen in love with the one person I couldn’t marry or divorce. When we try to stay apart long term, something will happen here that gets noticed. I’m hampered as a writer. I had to remain devoted to her for both our sakes and vice versa, impossible when you don’t talk to an empath. I had to learn not to want that, though. I am attracted to emotionally unavailable people, now more than ever because I can maintain my own boundaries and don’t truly need anyone, but I’d like them.

I left them behind because they couldn’t talk about their boundaries.

I forgave Supergrover for the things she’d done that made me angry in a concrete way. She talked around everything. Empaths don’t do that. I can detect by energy when you’re holding something back. Supergrover would wait until she was absolutely overwhelmed and pop off at me; she put me on the back burner until she was stressed out. Then, she’d blame me for being insistent when I told her that I’d do anything to stop notifications on her phone if she did want to read and didn’t have time. I wasn’t telling her to be johnny on the spot, so she thought I was a dictator when I was responding in real time. Kindness went unnoticed emotionally, but showed itself in our thoughtful gifts.

I just didn’t see we couldn’t divorce before and I went all out in being an idiot fuckboi. She was straight, but that was only one issue. She was taken and she didn’t tell me, so I was playing with fire.

I hoped she was sapiosexual because I’m a silver-penned devil. She wasn’t, but I didn’t care. She still made a great character in my life. Dana encouraged my romantic feelings by telling me Supergrover was hiding them and she’d never make the first move. I can’t think of when I’ve ever believed anything so stupid. I can’t think of a reason Dana would do that if not to just add kindling to the fire and break up faster without telling me she wanted it. She was nice and not kind.

It would have tracked to me that she wanted to see me fail. I became addicted to the drinks Supergrover was serving. Just straight up Narcotics Anonymous. Dana would understand absolutely all the way around because she knows Supergrover thanks to me and I wished she didn’t, because that was a large part of our divorce. Not trusting Dana was more of import than she realized when she betrayed my trust with multiple other friends, and anyone would’ve in this situation but not when they refuse to see it.

Because we can fly now, Supergrover told me what she drives so I figure that if coming to visit me was a priority, she’d survive the cattle call at Southwest. Virtually, she’s grown into my guard dog here, but it’s taken so much time for us both to stretch out………….. which is the perfect description of what our relationship should do rather than both of us trying desperately to move on because we’re addicted to being strangers on a train and repelling each other because of our careers.

Our notifications are every bit as addicting as crack, and that is true on both sides even when we don’t respond right away. I’m just wrapped too tight because I think she still feels threatened and she is because she doesn’t know when the other shoe is going to drop, so she doesn’t tell me anything that calms me. I ratchet up her anxiety by being me, in whom she has trusted and gotten burned. I need her in my life for very concrete, objective reasons and yet I am passed over for the subjective because the objective is not important to either of us right up until it is. The objective is something that she would only tell a partner, and she doesn’t see it that way because she’s not me and doesn’t have to filter every day. Her story is based on seeing everything about my reality while she’s thinking I’m aiming at destruction. It is not true. I am not kidding when I say she’s the love of my life and will be whether I want it that way or not because we both made the ultimate fuck up and can’t get over it.

Words matter.

She changed my life with them, and didn’t accept that the way she did it would affect my future. She’d send me everything except her heart, which makes me take my fair share of bullshit, not that I don’t create it on my own.

I’m begging for growth. We are dealing with a situation I can’t write about publicly so I write to her. If she denies that fact and doesn’t have a connection to me, I could make a mistake that hurts her and I just don’t want to do it.

I proved that I was just as paranoid as she was and not just with Dana. I gave her relief when she realized that if I got close to someone mutual, they could be dangerous to her. Neither of us wanted it to happen. She just wanted it more than I did, so I gave her that gift…………………….. but I told her why it hurt and it was a mistake. She saw me as bitter when I just wanted her to recognize that I was willing to do whatever it took to keep her. I was in it for the long haul.

I began seeing another woman that didn’t need to become a mutual friend. I didn’t know that was a possibility and got rid of her quickly. That second one was huge in a way that she took in and thanked me, but she didn’t give me any more trust capital than she did before. Instead of realizing that I was protecting her like she was protecting me, she focused on her guilt. She would lash out at me when I needed anything, so I felt like she took up much more room in the relationship by necessity, but didn’t recognize that she also became my confidant out of necessity and expected me to put up with it without saying anything. I didn’t feel bad about anything she said. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to need anything, ever, but instead of taking care of each other, we turned our fire.

It broke our triangle because Dana didn’t write to her as often as I did, so they never maintained a relationship. It caused a divide and conquer move, because I told Dana something she didn’t get to hear and I didn’t know that. Then, I did something that couldn’t be forgiven and it wasn’t, because she treated me completely differently and things never went back to normal- even after years of apologies.

I’m stepping out on a ledge, because my behavior didn’t make sense to anyone back then, and I want to lift the curtain because it was so much more reasonable than I could tell people it was. I came across as a lovesick teenager at that time in my life, when the situation was actually dire. Hopefully, this will explain a little about why I was so flipped out in other people’s heads, and so logical when no one was looking for it.

Dear Supergrover,

If you can say that I’m still goading and provoking instead of asking for information after I wrote you something that I thought you’d actually take in, then I know this relationship is completely dead. There is no two-way communication, and there never will be. We cannot do any better than this, and it’s a train wreck, all because you say you can do nothing about telling me how you feel.

How I feel is that once trust was broken, you just wanted to be a fan, and I thought you were reaching out to get closer. When I accidentally texted you, that was it for me. I was shamed beyond belief because you didn’t believe for one second that it was an accident until I wrote out what happened on my blog and you dropped in two days later. I wasn’t telling you to come back. I was explaining to my readers that I’d done something wrong.

Editor’s Note:

She thought I was trying to harass her when I absolutely wasn’t and felt threatened. Therefore I was surprised that a woman who thought I was threatening her still wanted to be friends. It didn’t seem logical, and I wanted to know why she wanted me back, in a sense. If I had to guess, it’s because it felt to me like I’d feel when someone was hate fucking me.

You’re charged up with adrenaline when you fight, and it’s the equivalent of us taking Adderrall when one of you is not ADHD. I become an addict very, very quickly because dopamine is more like Adderrall than any other drug.. You feel it immediately and it’s just as powerful as three energy drinks at once. Neurotypical people buy Adderrall and spin out, because they crave it- it’s so great in the short-term. The side affects will slowly ruin your life, which is in a very real sense exactly what happened between us. Supergrover has different needs from most people and I’m one of them. I was getting high on dopamine and she wasn’t handling a crash she caused. But we have a solid reason to keep getting high off each other. She said “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor as well.” We’re both drunk as fuck and don’t know how to talk about it. Doesn’t stop the addiction. We wouldn’t have lasted this long if we could kick it. The thing, though, is that when we’re working on all cores and threads, we are unstoppable. We make each other’s minds better, but we blew the idea of divorce out of the water like we were shooting skeet. That’s because now we’re both unhappy and connected irrevocably.

You got stuck when my mother died, because you didn’t tell me you only wanted to be a fan, but now it’s eight years later and you still act like I have no trust capital at all, berating me for all my opinions and putting words into my mouth. I do the same thing to you because you don’t say anything and I have to fill in all the gaps on my own. You seem amused until I actually want to talk about an issue and you don’t.

There’s not an issue you actually want to talk about anymore, it’s just avoidance no matter what I do or say. I didn’t have to move to DC to break up with Dana because it would have been the right move whether I’d stayed in Houston or not. because what you fail to realize and have for a long time is that telling me the secrets we share was a divide and conquer move, because when you were displeased, I didn’t want to tell Dana anything ever again. I know you had no idea what you were setting in motion, therefore there is nothing to blame except the situation, not you.

I had never kept any secrets from Dana before, therefore I had no idea how it would play out. But would I trade this relationship for that one with almost nine years of reflection? Fuck no.

I would have traded *anything* for the first two years alone. Anything.

I wish I’d managed myself better, because it wouldn’t have turned you into the wire monkey I cling to despite the lack of cloth. It’s not a slam, it’s reality.

You know how I feel about you and you’ve been okay with it unless I actually needed to tell you something and have you respond. How you can ignore the good while focusing on the bad is easy to take in, because you’re a Timeless Child just like me. The trauma bond bears little resemblance to you personally. It’s that we both trauma dumped and handfasted, then I spiraled out and you didn’t. I can respect you not having empathy for bipolar or ADHD, but I cannot respect you protecting yourself forever based on that mistake when I have gone so far and above to prove to you that you’re safe.

I’m a cook/writer. Do you think that sharing my resources with you was easy?

Of course it wasn’t, but it was the only way I knew how to put my thoughts into something you might accept as an apology because words weren’t doing it and gifts did. You could see changed behavior that you didn’t with letters in a concrete way. I didn’t do it to spend money, I did it to turn my love language into action the way I would have if you’d ever let me buy you that beer Aaron still owes you.

Now you won’t step up at all, and I know my place. So far, it is not with you. If I have to ask you to carry the bricks, you’re not the one I should be building with. And if that fills you with rage, so be it, because you haven’t changed your behavior in a way I could see it. Where are the words that mean as much to me as actions mean to you? I have told you that my love is real through both, but you only seem to count one.

I love this city and I’m glad you’re here, but DC is home. I can keep tallying up the reasons that it is good for me, and your fear of me moving here put me into a chokehold. You asked Dana if you needed a restraining order when I’d only told you 50 times that I missed DC and I needed to get out of Houston. That didn’t change just because I was spiraled out, and I did get better. We just kept fighting because I was so bitter about it.

So, when I tell you that you’re harping on me by telling me I’m a judgmental dickhead all the time, it will not stand that you just keep doing it.

So, before you entirely write me off, know that I think you probably do take care of your friends. I just think that I am no longer one of those people and you’ve just been lying to me all these years because you were lying to you and you haven’t done anything to prove me wrong. I don’t put much stock into SBUX. It’s not that it’s not great, it’s that it can’t be the thing that helps both of us move on.

You’ll listen when I’m all about the gifts and adoration, but not when there’s a problem. You think that a problem means I think less of you, when I’m just trying to say there’s a problem. It doesn’t mean anything in terms of the way I think about you, but I’m done having to listen to it.

When you start treating me like you actually forgive me instead of shutting down, you’ll be allowed back into my circle. If you don’t, I will know that I just chose the pattern I love the most…. that it was always about finding someone emotionally unavailable and trying to please them because I didn’t have the skills to do anything else.

I have acknowledged my humanity and have told you my thought process. You keep yours hidden. That’s why I think you need to get yourself together. It’s that if you’re emotionally available with your husband and your other friends, then I’m the only one you have this pattern with and therefore you think it’s completely invalid. I think that’s because you’re hiding the fact that we’re not really friends.

I stepped up and you didn’t. It’s been eight years. I do not deserve this. You can disagree with me and change your mind, but you can’t be the friend that rips me a new asshole every time you can’t talk about something due to your own protective reflexes.

I talk about every reaction as if you’ve done something because of me because I don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside influences and you won’t correct any of my assumptions.

When you give me no information, you can’t be angry I don’t have it. I wanted to correct that problem, and you bailed.

Nothing about this is my problem anymore. I just wanted to tell you yet again that my feelings/issues are valid. I deserved more than this. I deserve more than this.

Editor’s Note:

I should have told her I loved her at the end, but I didn’t. Everything in our relationship boils down to how I say things. If she focuses on my anger, it’s easier to push me away. So, to her, I do love you. More than you’ll ever know. See past e-mail for details.<3

Comfort

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 12 Comments

What are your favorite types of foods?

I want to tell you a secret.

When you become a professional cook, you stop cooking at home. You do not have the time or energy. There were nights when dinner was microwave popcorn over the sink, I was so tired. Just stuff a few handfuls in my mouth before I pass out. I also bought lots of junk food. We all do. Most cooks I know are absolutely obsessed with dino nuggets. Some of us even take the time to warm them up. 😉 My favorite is grocery store pizza, because it takes less time to put it in the oven than it does for delivery, and I can put whatever I want on it.

I want to tell you another secret.

Most, if not all professional cooks want you to invite them over for dinner just so they don’t have to cook it. We don’t care if it’s KD and ketchup. Just please, feed us without making us stand in front of the stove. We will help with dinner if you ask, but most cooks won’t go out of their way because they think it’s rude…. like we’re lording over a kitchen we don’t own. We’ve also been burned by people asking us to help out and then criticizing us as if we have no idea what we’re doing- or worse, something goes wrong and you’ll never live it down….. because professional cooks aren’t allowed to make mistakes, even among friends. We have to be arrogant on the line. There are too many people counting on us. But we cook the dishes in our restaurants over and over until they’re perfect.

You want something obscure, something that hasn’t been popular for 40 years, and we tell you that we’ll try. When it’s not impeccable, we can see the disappointment in your eyes, because you didn’t ask us to make something we’ve already made a thousand times and think it’s the same.

I liken it to handing someone a horn for the first time and asking them to play the third movement of the Hummel trumpet concerto four minutes later.

You’re expecting Carrnegie Hall when they don’t know a straight mute from a spit valve.

Let them have at least five more minutes……………..

Cooks rehearse like trumpet players, and are the same amount of obnoxious. I have been a trumpet player AND a cook, which means I have no problem being an absolute dick in the kitchen some of the time, because there are no seconds to spare. There aren’t even nanoseconds. Cooking is all about fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope….. usually black, not cute red uniforms.

But make no mistake. The Spanish Inquisition is coming for you, and they generally look like waitstaff.

The thing is, though, you don’t go from read-through to full dress. You stage- pronounced stahj– which is basically “get your ass handed to you and if you survive, you might get the job.” These are all unpaid, though in most places they’ll either comp you a drink or make you something to eat (or both). In my stage at Denizen’s, the pub I worked for in Silver Spring, we did 300 covers that night. Just tickets on top of tickets and the entire kitchen was in full-tilt panic mode.

Rehearsal is actually during the performance, and if you fuck up anything, you just have to hope someone catches it before the food goes out. It’s your third day, not theirs.

It was a complete surprise to me that I got hired, but I did notice that I had improved considerably since my last gig. It really kept the imposter syndrome to a minimum. I had my share of shitty days, but I had to get this job. I wanted it more than anything else in the entire world. That’s because I had two reasons that gave me drive and passion for it.

The first is that I was married to a chef trained at a Cordon Bleu cooking school. she actually had her stripes. She paid $20,000 for her education, then gave me all of it for free. It is a gift I will never be able to repay, but the flip side of the coin is that I had to prove to myself that I was a cook, I wasn’t just riding her coattails.

The second is that my mother had just died, and I was a shell of a person. I was flat affect for months. I could barely take care of myself. Cooking brought me back to life. I had focus and drive on something besides earth-shattering grief. My mother was dead and yet the world kept turning as if nothing had happened, because if it did, I missed it. I was out of it during my own year of magical thinking. It took time, but I got my mojo back one hamburger at a time.

It is a gift I will never be able to repay.

In terms of the types of food I like to cook in the restaurant, I’ll tell you by station instead of dish. I like saute because it’s basically throwing prepped food into a pan, flipping it a few times, and pouring it onto a plate.

Editor’s Note: I like pantry the least because plating salads and desserts to look beautiful seems to require angle of convergence and depth perception, two things I was born without that make up 3D vision.

In terms of food I like to cook at home, I don’t. Home kitchens aren’t built like professional kitchens and when you get used to that much specialized equipment that cooking at home is a drag. I want a flat top and some scrapers, not whatever the fuck this is.

I want a gas stovetop, not electric. We can’t do that because the kitchen isn’t wired for it. I learned this because I asked Hayat for a gas stove after the fire, and I really like the electric one she bought. It’s just not the same because an electric range doesn’t let you refine the heat from the jump. I need to cook on an electric range a few times to learn the difference between three and four. On a gas range, I can just tell by how hi the flame is- consistent across brands.

If I am cooking at someone’s house for the first time, I sweat bullets because I am cooking on unfamiliar equipment with unfamiliar pans. You don’t think of this, but the thickness of pans varies, so you can’t always use the same amount of heat. At a restaurant, you don’t buy equipment piecemeal. All the saute pans are the same, all the rondeaus (wide thin pots) are the same, all the storage containers are the same. You don’t want anything to affect consistency.

The hardest part of getting an A team together in a restaurant is to make sure everyone makes everything to the same standard. If you’re on the B team (generally Sunday and Monday nights), you know why. You are not fit for Saturday night. You’re not even old enough to watch the show. Go sit in the corner.

If you start out on Mondays, when you get a Friday or a Saturday night it will feel like Ed McMahon showed up at your house with a big ass check.

The reason you need comfort food once you get off work is that all the food in the restaurant is so rich that sometimes you just want a sandwich.

In fact, it’s been 15 minutes since I wrote that last paragraph because I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner and it’s 0212. I had a cup of coffee way too late today, but it’s Sunday morning. I’m pretty sure I’ll still wake up at 0500, that’s automatic. But I’ll go back to sleep easily after I realize my entry is already done for today.

Instead of writing, I’ll roll out of bed and make my ultimate comfort food, breakfast. Yesterday I had scrambled eggs with pickled jalapenos, cheddar, and a dollop of plain yogurt. Nothing fancy except the difference between having made eggs every day of your life and making a hundred in three to five hours during every single brunch shift you’ve ever had.

That’s when dino nuggets taste best.

Every Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How often do you walk or run?

I do not have a car, therefore I take the bus or the Metro everywhere. This leads to a good deal of walking, but I prefer it to driving. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but I love all the guilt-free reading and writing time. I carry my Fire tablet and my Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, and it fits perfectly in my lap without making me take up more than my fair share of room. Plus, mobility is great for creation. My ideas come faster and more furious when I’m walking, and I’m grateful.

I never take walking for granted, although I will say up front I’m bad at it. I look untrained in the ways of walking sometimes because I have a mild case of cerebral palsy that affects my movement and balance. It is still preferable to what my life might be like if my CP was worse. I have empathy for everyone who struggles with physical issues, and there is no such thing as competitive suffering. I have perspective. I suffer much less than people with walkers or in wheelchairs, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer at all.

I prefer walking when my friends are with me, because it’s ok for me to hold onto them when I need it. In fact, I think Zac prefers it. 😉 CP is not the only thing that makes me need to hold onto others. I don’t have depth perception, so sometimes I don’t lift my foot high enough for a step and trip. Sometimes I don’t judge the distance from the doorjamb to my shoulder correctly and hit it harder than one might think. I also have an alternating field of vision because my eyes don’t track together, so the worst I’ve ever been hurt is when I haven’t seen a step down. This is because my reflexes aren’t generally fast enough to save me. It is not unusual for me to have a scrape on my face because of it. I am generally covered in bruises, only some of which I can explain because it’s just too time consuming to walk back through my day and post-mortem.

When I’m exhausted, all of these issues get a hundred times worse.

My friends are helpful. Strangers are not. I have fallen and hurt myself to the point that my pants are ripped, my knee is skinned up, and there’s blood on my face…. yet no one has ever offered to help me up unless they already knew me. I do not expect strangers to help me, I’m just surprised because it’s hard for me to see other people in pain and not stop.

I would like to continue being surprised about this rather than jaded and bitter. No one is just like me, and few people are as empathetic, and I don’t mean this as “I’m all that and you’re trash.” I mean that my personality type, INFJ, is only present in 9-15% of the world’s population. We are the pastors, counselors, and social workers of the entire population. We are not all religious, but we are all spiritual. The reason we’re the empaths of the world is that we’re relentless in self discovery. We want to find us so we can find you.

People only understand each other to the level that they understand themselves, because when someone tells another their story, the listener is filtering it though all their life experiences. Whether the other person’s experience is good or bad is based on the listener’s first family, the partner they have with their family, and the way they have always operated.

I have been walking and thinking about this for 10 years now, because 10 years ago I had an experience for which very few people have filters. I didn’t know shit from Shinola™ and made a ton of mistakes. I grew from them, but I’ll never be the same person I was, either. It’s one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. We all have many lives, we just don’t change faces to do it. I never want to forget that story, nor the ones that proceeded from it. They are more beautiful to me as I age, because I never want to forget this version of me.

I am writing a story; I want it to be a good one in the end.

Right this moment, it is not good or bad. It is not time to choose. It is time to reflect, give myself distance, and pick up the pieces. My routine has changed greatly, and I am thankful for it…. most of the time. At others, the situation and people are so irreplaceable that it feels like I will never get over losing it. I set the ball in motion for all this happening, and that makes me even more prone to bouts of deep grief, because it’s harder to forgive yourself than anyone else.

If I do forgive myself, it will only be by putting one foot in front of the other, forging a new path…. without becoming so bitter and jaded that I’m unable to forgive and forget. Not only do I not want to close the door permanently, it would be incredibly unfair of me to do so considering how many times I’ve walked away and reneged. I just don’t want to go out of my way to fix things anymore. Eventually, you start noticing when a relationship has no return on investment, because we were not checking the story we were telling ourselves. It was off to an enormous degree. It hurt that my arguments were always shut down; that I was not allowed to need anything while she was allowed to ask for everything and receive it, no questions asked. The imbalance was okay for a while. Too long, actually. The last straw for me was the person who brought those circumstances into my life disagreed with me for many reasons, and wouldn’t tell me what they were.

We fought tooth and nail, when that wasn’t my goal at all. Depending on the day, we were each trying to hug a cactus. We would be able to complete each other and celebrate our differences if we were both willing to slow our roll. Our adrenaline ran too high, and we crashed. Neither one of us has it in us anymore.

But even when I’m angry, she’s still my favorite person. I call her Supergrover because even when I think she’s acting monstrous, she’s still cuddly, adorable, and blue. Ok, maybe not that last one. But she does have a double master’s in irreverence and profanity. We are so much alike that it’s easy to see how we got here. People generally hate things in other people that they hate about themselves.

We are sitting back to back, unable or unwilling to simply turn around…..

And walk back towards the other.

Absolutely, with Caveats -or- 1800 People

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you see yourself as a leader?

I am not a traditional leader, and I never will be. I have had the best examples of leadership in the entire world, and my process was stopping feeling inferior to them. My way of leading is just different because when the Internet went large scale, into personal computers when it was military-only before, I was an early adopter. I disappeared into that world because I’m a better writer than conversationalist, and other people wouldn’t say that about me at all.

It has everything to do with how comfortable I am writing alone and in front of people. Other people do not perceive this about me, it’s my own observation about myself. I feel happier writing alone because focusing on social propriety gives me nausea. I don’t feel relaxed in a crowd.

I lead by seclusion because I don’t have to organize events and ask you to be here. Everyone just drops by and takes what they need. Sometimes they talk to me. Sometimes they stay silent. It all matters.

For instance, I know I have roughly 1800 people between Facebook and WordPress that choose to receive updates every single day. My web stats, meaning people who visit the site without a notification from me, are exponentially larger than that. I have an awareness that I’m not Elvis or anything, but if I say something, i need to know people are listening. I don’t think of my words as innocuous. I don’t have that luxury. I shouldn’t even have the luxury of leaving in typos, but I do. That’s because I don’t have the courage to write and edit. If I go back to fix something before a piece is published, I will get so bogged down in my own insecurities that I won’t publish at all. Nothing is ever good enough when there are 1800 people receiving your words the *moment* you hit “Post.”

I think of it as power for good and evil that all of these essays are written in one shot, don’t even look at it. Part of it is erasing imposter syndrome. I don’t “want to be a writer someday.” I am a writer now. My audience never has to get any bigger for me to feel validated, because I know that if I had been a pastor instead of a writer, I would be an even bigger deal in my community because people would see me getting up in front of 1800 people every Sunday morning. I “preach” every morning like it’s Sunday and I am ridiculously happy about that because I like the feel of leadership without having to attend any committee meetings. The other part of it is that if I hit post before I read something, I get to be a fan, too.

I like looking at myself as if I don’t know me. I love me like I love The Bloggess. I love me like I love Wil Wheaton. I love me like I love Dooce. No one can tell me I’m less talented than they are. it would have been amazing to have us all in one room. I’ve met Wil, but not Jenny and Heather (Dooce). It destroys me that I’ll never meet Heather, because we would have had the same witty banter I had with Wil. It’s a unique crowd, because we were the first wave of bloggers…. or at least, Wil, Heather, and I were.

Jenny started a little later than we did and I’m so happy for her success, because our content deals with the same stuff. Sometimes even the same mental health issues. In fact, she was just talking about how she made a coloring book for adults and I asked her a question I thought needed asking. “Have you thought of writing a children’s book about Beyonce?” For the uninitiated, Beyonce is Jenny’s giant metal rooster, though I think Jenny would do a bang up job on a children’s book about Queen Bey. Of course I do. We’re all Texans.

Because I am comfortable with the level of notoriety I have right now, I am not focused on driving engagement. Engagement has become self-sustaining. I don’t have to constantly advertise because other people will tell their friends to read me. I hate advertising myself. I’d rather keep my head down and let others do the talking.

I am not trying to fit into another person’s reality, shoving content into their faces. I am inviting you to mine. This is my weird little world. I own it. I wrote the charter. By thinking of my web site as me and one other person- all of you boiled down to a singular “you” in my mind), I don’t have to feel the anxiety of preaching, singing, or playing an instrument in front of a crowd. I have no social anxiety when I’m writing. A ton of anxieties, to be sure, but none of them having to do with being in public. My reactions are my own, tightly controlled. By that I mean I will cry and scream and beat the wall and tear my clothes and all of those things, it’s just in the privacy of my own home.

I tell you things I can’t tell anyone else, because I don’t force conversations to go my way, either. I don’t mean my desired outcome, I mean the path the conversation takes isn’t entirely dependent on me in public…. here, it would be a disaster area if I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation while you’re not in the room…. and that’s how I think of our relationship. We are very close, even if you don’t know it.

Barbie and Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

I saw “Barbie” this morning and I ugly cried all the way through it. I wanted my mom, or at the very least, the numerous friends that have mom energy holding me up in her stead. The first thing that made me cry is that Barbie has always been the ideal woman, which means that I’ve hated her most of my life. I’m genderqueer, and people that generally love Barbies don’t love me. I didn’t become “Weird Barbie.” I was born that way. The tears flowed into the ugly cry when Barbie listens to The Indigo Girls in her car. The second is that Weird Barbie was coded as lesbian (haircut, Birkenstock, etc.) Seeing all the Barbies accept her in the end was magnificent. Weird girls are their missing demographic. That’s because my reaction to Barbie has always been that it teaches women what a woman is and is not. That has never included people who look like me. There is no genderqueer/nonbinary Barbie. There is no lesbian Barbie because I’m not sure they could do that without breaking the rules of the Barbie universe.

It teaches straight, cis, hetero women that I am not a woman as well, because I don’t have “girl interests.” I don’t think like a stereotypical woman……….. anymore. I have felt all the body shaming, queer shaming, gender expression shaming, and all that comes with it. When I was a teenager, I got called fat at 130 pounds and took the most dangerous diet pill on the market to combat it. Phen-phen didn’t do anytihng for me, but it made me feel like I was doing something about how I felt rather than sitting there and feeling sorry for myself.

I haven’t always been this small, but it’s a whole ball of wax on its own. I do not recommend my diet plan to anyone ever at all. I have to take Adderall XR sometimes. I take drug holidays from it a lot because I cannot stand the appetite suppression. I’m small because I can go two days before I remember I haven’t eaten anything, and not because I want to. When the situation is dire, food doesn’t sound good at all. Even the thought of it makes me nauseous. I have said this before, but I’ve cried in a grocery store because I had to feed myself for a week and I couldn’t find anything that actually sounded good.

Drinking isn’t a problem, so I try to load up on protein shakes because they’re easy on my stomach when I’ve developed a block against eating. The worst it’s ever gotten was that I was down to 110 pounds. I arrived in DC looking like a heroin addict and I was totally sober. That wasn’t all due to medication, though. I was under a lot of stress with the divorce, the move, the homesickness, the everything. DC is my city, but it still took a while to reestablish myself.

I’ve gained weight, and I can’t decide if I look better or worse, but I feel better so the weight is staying. I already deal with feelings of inadequacy because I’m so small that most of my clothes are from “The Children’s Place.” I wear a large in boys,’ and the reason I put up wtih tags on my clothes that advertise that fact is because I like men’s clothes better, but even the small is too large in some brands.

It harps on my self-esteem to an enormous degree because when my sister and I are walking and talking around the city, it looks like a grown ass woman and her weird little nephew (this is not far from the truth of our relationship, tbh). It’s been a process to just accept what I like. Who cares if I buy kids’ clothes? They fit better, and that’s most important. If I buy an Oxford from a men’s shop, the shoulder seam will go halfway down my arm and it looks like I’m wearing my granddad’s clothes (this is not fucking awesome). So, in order to look like the clothes were made for me, I like the expensive stuff. All the stuff your sons will grow out of in a New York minute will last the rest of my life. My favorite brands are Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger. Thanks to all your sons, I can buy a $50 Tommy H Oxford on e-bay for six bucks. At Goodwill, kids’ clothes are practically free. 😉

The Children’s Place is a new favorite because they sell basics in a ton of colors.

It comes with a price, though.

Women and men look at me like I’m an alien most of the time until we start talking. Then, they’re drawn in by my personality. I’m one of those people that can talk to anyone about anything. Two things about that. The first is that I know a little bit aboout most things, if not everything. So, I can seem brilliant long enough to fool people. 😉 The second is that like I’ve said before, I have a Southern pastor vibe, so people tend to spill things to me that they wouldn’t share with anyone else. I’ve had people tell me the worst stories of their lives on the Metro. I once talked to a bus driver in Portland that confided in me that he was five hours sober now (that was terrifying). And if you don’t want me to know something, don’t tell me because I’m bad at forgetting things. I won’t tell anyone what you said, but I will write about reverberations from it. I don’t have the right to tell other people’s stories, but I do have the right to talk about how their lives have bled into mine. So, if said bus driver runs across this, I still remember and it was 26 years ago. It was a long ride, PDX to Lewis and Clark. I honestly felt llike I had to keep him talking because I wanted to observe his speech patterns to know whether he was tellling the truth about being sober or if I needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

Being the type person that everyone wants to tell their secrets to has a cost as well.

I have unconsciously been everyone’s pastor without going to divinity school and everyone’s counselor without a license. If you’re the sort of person that is currrently writing this off as bullshit, I had to give up all of that because my secret-keeping ability was at full capacity and I was living the lives of the people I’d heard instead of my own. All my energy was pouring into them in every conversation. I was conserving approximatelly zero percent for myself. When you’ve always been that person and you learn to negotiate boundares, you get “PNG’d back to Langley” (slang for treating an officer as a persona non grata and giving them a desk job, very much like the old dude in “Slow Horses.”). This is because people who are used to getting everything they want from you all the time now think you’re an asshole because you’ve realized that they’ve expected you to be there for them, but they have their own boundaris intact and you don’t. So, they’ll dump on you as hard as they can and won’t be there to help you pick up the pieces because they’re not stupid enough to give away as much energy as I do.

This is a universal problem, and knows no boundaries. Most relationships are like this. One is the leader, one is the follower. Generally, this is because women are taught from birth to be fixer/pleasers in relationships with men, who certainly have their boundaries in place because no one calls them on it. Same sex couples have the same issues, particularly lesbians, because the role of fixer/pleaser becomes muddled there when you’ve been enculturated the same way. I wasn’t raised to be queer, therefore I have all the heteronormative bullshit internalized homophobia that most if not all queer people carry their whole lives because there is no escape.

So.

I can deal with being thought of as Weird Barbie, but I will not play the game. Zac knows he’s my equal. He would never in his lifetime tell me to do anything. He’s the one who will show up for me. I got that relationship because I knew enough to want it. Why wouldn’t I want to find someone emotionally unavailable to please when that’s how male/female relationships are set up in the first place?

Doesn’t matter if it’s a wine and yoga pants girlfriend or a U-Haul girlfriend, we’re going to have that shitty, enculturated reaction to each other if we’re not careful. We can either do everything to please each other because that’s what we’ve been taught to do, or we can have it out. My choice now is to have it out, because even if there’s a fight of thermonuclear war proportions, it’s still better than holding everything inside and feeling like there’s no room for me no matter its size. I will not stuff anything down because I know what it does to my mental health when I do. I feel absolutely worthless. If there’s no blame to be had, I’ll make it up just to torture myself a little better.

No one on earth can hurt me worse than I can. And “Barbie” showed me that my feelings aren’t unique or special.

I am, though.

Honestly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite word?

The reason “honestly” is my favorite word is that it rhymes just for me. If you ask me what I mean, I will tell you that I can’t do that. It only rhymes for me. It’s not even an inside joke. It’s music only I can hear…. a waltz, and Strauss is about to bring in the horns.

I love music honestly and completely, the most pure thing in my life because there’s nothing a choir and orchestra can’t fix. In my head, anyway. When I’m sad or angry, two things happen. The first is that I sing it out. The second is that I conduct it out.

The last time I had to conduct about a problem, it was Desplait. Alexandre Desplait wrote the score to “Argo,” and conducting anything on that album is a full body workout. I am a terrible conductor. Just terrible. I don’t do it to get better. I do it to get exhausted.

It’s the only way I really fall asleep. I have never slept much, and people kid me all the time. “Do you ever sleep?” is popular in my crowd, but it’s true I don’t need much. Most of the time I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 0500 unprompted. This week it’s a little different because I can tell that my mood is swinging upward, and I don’t know that because of mood and behavior. The only real side effect that I have consistently with hypomania is insomnia. I feel lucky that it’s not worse, but it’s like getting my period. I am tired and in pain all the time because of brain race. Why can’t I sleep if I’m so tired? My body is not running the show. If my brain says it’s an all nighter, my body will fight it tooth and nail. When that happens, I can take 75 or 100mg of Benedryl and it won’t do a damn thing.

I’ll have to see a doc about it eventually, but I’m a writer so I hardly notice. Have I been writing for three hours or three days? It is always a mystery when I’m finished writing as to the date, day, and time. Luckily, I can look it up quickly. I just notice that finishing writing is a lot like waking up in the morning- discombobulating because you don’t know where you are after writing, either. But that’s what makes writing worth it. If you are a writer, fiction or non, you get to live in three worlds instead of just waking and dreaming. The characters and research turn into plot and setting. You cannot see anything outside of it while thoughts are pouring forth. A bear could rip out the back wall on my house and if I was writing, I wouldn’t even notice. I don’t even need headphones most of the time.

I’m not saying that my process is any different because I have it wired and other authors don’t. I am explaining a universal concept. All writers are more than one person. Even with non-fiction, there’s your writing personality and your physical space personality. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they’re not. I hope Karen Slaughter is a “not.” 😉

I take responsibility for everything I write, because I know that I’m influencing culture. My platform has gotten bigger over the years, but so many people have repeated the things I’ve written/said as their own that I hear my own words out of someone else’s mouth a lot…… particularly when they’re forgetful because I have the memory of an elephant for what I read. I can remember conversations with Supergrover nearly verbatim because being friends virtually meant I had to read everything to respond. That’s the way I take in information the best. So, part of the reason that she thinks I’m judging her is that I’m actually using her words and she doesn’t remember that she said them. I don’t mean that in a “gotcha” kind of way. I remember everything she’s said, not just the words that hurt. That’s because she’s a great writer and I try to quote her as much as I can because the way she said something fits an occasion perfectly and I got nothin.’

I can’t talk about my writing without talking about my inspiration.

Honestly.

Nothing -or- Bow Before Me, for I Am Root

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are you doing this evening?
View all responses

It’s been a whirlwind of a few days, so tonight I am sitting in front of my computer. Not by choice, really. I need the quiet. I crave it. Tonight, though, I’m rescuing a computer that I hosed myself. I’ve only been working with partitions and drives for 30 years. One of these days, I’ll make some progress. Anyway, I run Ubuntu Cinnamon and Windows 10, but I don’t use Windows except when I want to play Skyrim, so a quarter to never. I’m not a big gamer. I’m interested in how computers work and I know what I’m doing all the way up until I don’t. The best thing ever is cloud storage, because I don’t spend much time on anything. I reformat the whole thing and start over.

Today I thought I wouldn’t have to. I used timeshift to back up my hard drive in case I hated what I was installing (Kubuntu, to try out KDE Plasma), which is like Time Machine on a Mac. I thought I had a complete copy of everything. Turns out I do, but the version I restored the drive from was not the same, so the files didn’t overwrite properly. That means I was trying to boot into two versions of linux at once. Guess what? It didn’t work. I said “fuck” a lot and then got back to it. Linux gonna linux, but Wes Borg was right. Every OS sucks in its own particular way. Like in relationships, you just have to decide which disk flags you’re going to ignore. That was a little partition manager humor for you there.

For 90% of you, I can’t explain the joke without you falling asleep. Just nod and laugh. I change topics a lot. Lean in.

I’m feeling punchy because I had to use DOS. That doesn’t make sense unless you’ve been a linux user for years, because I don’t know about other IT guys, but I constantly type linux commands in DOS and get way too angry at the fact that it doesn’t work. Within linux, it’s the same way. In Ubuntu, the extension for an installer is .deb, like Windows .exe. In Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, the extension is .rpm.

I was once looking at the folder that says RPMS in the command line and still typed sudo dpkg -i *.deb. But that’s nothing compared to the number of times I’ve reinstalled drivers because something didn’t work and then discovered after much tearing of hair that it was off/unplugged. This is very, very easy to do with network printers, when the printer could be on a different floor. Because SURE AS SHIT no employee will tell you correctly whether it is on or off. Ask a server administrator how many times they’ve driven three hours to press a button. Don’t wonder why we’re dicks anymore, because that number shouldn’t even have to be greater than one, but it is.

I laughed so hard I nearly died the first time I read “Bastard Operator from Hell.” My friend Donnie and I nearly had to call an ambulance for both of us when we heard “Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie” do “Welcome to the Internet Helpdesk.” The latter is really funny because it’s what users say to us. The former is what it would be like if we could get revenge. There is always so much “don’t want to” in “can’t.” That’s because it’s learned helplessness. Why be in any way knowledgable if someone always comes to bail you out? That’s our job and it’s okay, but years and years of questions like “can you install Firefox for me?” are great. Easy. The facepalm is when the user says, “do I have to turn my computer on?” I have also had people want me to walk them through how to do something in M$ Office when their computer is at home and they’re calling from the car. Even if I could explain it without you doing it while I’m talking, how would you ever retain that information? You’ll call back.

Being a woman in IT Support is very hard. I mean, it’s hard anyway because it’s soul sucking to watch people be that stupid that consistently. I wouldn’t sound like such a dickhead if the problem wasn’t so dire. But it’s worse for me because there are simply some people who refuse to believe I know something about computers. Some days they’re right. 😉 (Reminds me of an overhead voice at the Spy Museum that says “you’ll have to survive on your wits.” I turned around and said, “grrrrrrrrl, we fucked up now. I’m like Josh and Toby from The West Wing. If I miss wheels up and Donna wasn’t with me I’d have to buy a house.) Though I’m a bit spacey at times because I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know about computers, if you got a problem, yo I’ll solve it. I have managed the impossible with data recovery more than once…… as well as doing a lot of other people’s work for them because they just don’t want to do it. I understand if it’s a technical issue with the operating system. But when your entire job is putting courses online and you try to pass it off on IT because you have a technical issue every 30 minutes because you won’t learn anything about the software you’re PAID TO USE, that adds up, especially when the questions are about where buttons are laid out and you’ve helped them eight times that day. It’s the equivalent of getting frustrated and going to the bathroom at school to take a break. And you can feel guilt free about it becaue it’s not a problem with you. It’s a problem with your computer.

At other times, things spiral because people aren’t thinking. Their computer doesn’t work, and the electricity is out. Or they’ve plugged the power strip into itself instead of the wall (yes, really. I figured it out over the phone, but it took 45 minutes because I never would have assumed to check something like that. He said it was plugged in, and there weren’t camera phones back then.) It’s gotten a lot easier with remote desktop and the fact that when I ask people for pictures or screenshots, they can do that on their phones. Most people don’t know how to use screenshot programs on a PC, but they can do it on an iPhone.

Even iPhones have their issues, though. One of the professors I worked with couldn’t get her iPhone to play music in the classroom. She called IT, but the only problem was that the aux cable didn’t fit through the case.

When you get into web development, two things about that. The first is that people tell you they only want you to do the design, but they have a million changes to add in terms of copy even though I’ve set it up where they don’t have to use HTML tags at all (a content management system like WordPress). They don’t want to manage their web site, they want you to do it. They’re no good at computers. They’re making $150,000 a year to learn that kind of software, because sure as shit the person that asked me to make said web site is going to be “in charge of social media.”

The second is that web sites are like art. Everyone wants the art, no one wants to pay for it. You can design the most fabulous site in the entire world, and they’ll tell you that. Many times. You give them the bill, and it’s the shittiest web site they’ve ever seen. Plus, friends and acquaintances won’t think anything of asking you for hours and hours of coding for the “exposure.”

I would not like to work for more people that don’t want to pay me, and there’s an “Argo” quote for every occasion. I’m paraphrasing Lester, but “exposure ain’t worth the buffalo shit on a nickel.”

The other thing is that when people ask you to make a web site, you’ll give them a flat fee for the code. But they’ll call you every time they have a change for the next ten years and get angry if you say it’s $40/hr. They want you to do it for free, forever.

And now you know why I have such a hell of a time as a cook. There are no Karens there.

AITA?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

It’s not really a question. I know I’m an asshole a good bit of the time… or I seem that way, because I’m direct and don’t sugar coat anything. I live the mantra of “be kind, not nice.” The difference is that “nice” says “oh, it’s okay” no matter what the other person does or says. “Kind” says “these are my boundaries. If you want a relationship with me, here’s how.” The reason it’s kind and not nice is that it’s counterintuitive. It’s hard as hell to have conversations about emotional boundaries and no one likes them, so let’s just avoid, avoid, avoid. That’s when a problem goes from small to enormous. I talked about that this morning when the daily writing prompt hit me hard…. and then something else hit me harder.

I don’t use all my e-mail accounts all the time, because I’ve gotten lazy and don’t authenticate every e-mail account on every device. It hasn’t been a problem until today.

I missed an e-mail from “The War Daniel.”

It’s been sitting there since August 25, and I know him. He probably thinks I’m mad at him when I just didn’t see the e-mail. I mean, yes. I’m totally mad at him and he can take a right….. and then I think, “the reason I say ‘take a right’ is that I got it from him and I hear him in my head every time I say it. Might want to slow your roll there, hoss.”

For those just joining us, Daniel is my ex-fiancee. He broke off the engagement in a fit of rage, but the fight was so worth having that it was good he just left. His daughter is trans. I’m bi. He didn’t know shit about either, and thought I was trying to fight him when I was trying to reach him. He couldn’t see anything except his own pain, which I do not discount. He’s an addict. I know from addicts. Bipolar presents the same and I’ve been a line cook for years. I’ve wondered if the reason someone didn’t show up for work is that they drank themselves to death. Daniel’s alcoholism is absolutely that severe, because he’s a combat vet. It’s a long row to hoe for both of us. That being said, I have the skills to be in a relationship with someone that traumatized because for some people, that level of addiction is the worst thing they’ll ever witness. For me, it’s Tuesday.

He’s equipped to handle me because he’s the equivalent of a nurse practitioner. He knows from bipolar. I am sure that he’s seen a thousand cases over the years, because if you don’t have it and you’re an addict, please get in line. Your diagnosis will arrive shortly because alcoholism will induce it. Alcohol is the pitocin of the whole operation. Congratulations, it’s mental illness.

The e-mail only said “checking on you,” and my reply was equally innocuous.

But it doesn’t take away from the fact that he had the courage to show up. He didn’t make excuses or apologies. He checked in on me.

That’s something.

It’s something that could lead to something else, or not, and either way it’s fine. I’ve had enough distance from actually being asked to marry someone and having it blow up in my face later to forgive something like that. Here’s why it’s so easy. I know Daniel was in a lot of haze and confusion, and he won’t be completely competent to make any decisions like that until the fog clears out of his brain. I know it like the back of my hand. He is not fine. He will be fine.

As I said months ago, “what kind of partner would I be if I gave up on him right now?”

I choose to acknowledge his humanity now so that I can acknowledge his divinity later. I hope we’ll get to have that conversation, but I’m not banking on it. He’s just turning over in my head because of the e-mail. I honestly haven’t thought about our situation, because of his alcoholism. It’s not that I’m unfeeling or uncaring, but Supergrover and I discussed it and we agree that family and friends are not the people to help someone out of something like that. I had to let him go- and the hardest part was not being able to take him and drop him off at rehab. Not being able to go to family days. It would be the case no matter what, because I don’t live in the same state.

I didn’t just pick him up after he fell off a turnip truck, either. He’s been my friend since second grade. He was my first boyfriend in any official sense, a badge he wears proudly. He doesn’t care that I’ve been with women since. He’ll wear rainbows and shit as easily as I will. It’s not broad strokes he has problems with. It’s the fact that he’s not queer at all. I am not saying that to slam him or make him feel bad, it’s just that his frame of reference is completely different. He does want to learn, he was just dealing with too much at once.

Having completely spiraled out in the same situation, I have a lot of empathy. I honestly cannot hold back forgiveness because I am so sympathetic to what happens when everything conspires to make you crazy. Daniel is not as fabulous as I am, though, because he needs alcohol to be that level of crazy and I can handle it all on my own….. the badge I wear proudly.

I hope I’ll have the chance to teach him how to love me a second time…… because everyone sucks here. Placing blame will get us even closer to nowhere. We both pop off and regret. We both love hard. It remains to be seen what will happen, because I don’t put a lot of stock into three word e-mails….. except one I got from the aforementioned Supergrover that I would like to forward to Daniel because he doesn’t know how enormous it is and I do:

Also. Thank you.

Certainty

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you?

“The opposite of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.” -Anne Lamott’s priest friend, Tom

Everyone knows that guy. The one who paints their feelings as fact in a bad way. I differentiate because I often paint my feelings as fact, but that’s because I have the certainty of knowing I could be wrong, and my next responses will adapt to it. It’s what happens when you show up to an argument with the hoped outcome of reconciliation. When the only thing you have certainty about is the fact that you’re right, it’s not an argument anymore. It’s a lecture.

This particular topic hits hard because it’s exactly what Supergrover thought I was trying to do to her. To paint my feelings to get her submission, not her argument. I could not convince her otherwise no matter what happened because she didn’t know any of my other friends, had never been to any of my houses (I’ve lived in several over the last 10 years), had never looked at me while we were talking.

None of my friends think I’m a dictator except her. I have to remind myself of that constantly, because her avoidance tactic is to dismiss the whole argument outright and posit that my way of arguing must be because I’m judging her and not the situation.

She also doesn’t want to really resolve anything, so she hasn’t gotten the fun side of me in a long time- because we are not the same. She’ll sweep everything under the rug and act like nothing’s wrong for years on end. I will not. That’s because I have done it most of my life and catering to other people’s problems didn’t really help me at all. It helps her for me to need nothing, and I tried as hard as I could to be that for her… and not because she told me to do so. I know her reality, and just like I would never call Lindsay in the middle of the day and expect her to drop everything (if I was in a medical emergency, maybe), I wouldn’t call my beautiful girl, either. The difference between the two situations is if Lindsay arrived and she was mad at me, we would have it out between beeps on the heart monitor.

Supgergrover is the kind of person that keeps everything close to the vest, one with a stunning array of pockets. It has nothing to do with her professional persona, she’s always been like that. She’s always been a secret-keeper because abused kids are. I used to be exactly like her in the ways I didn’t want to be, now I’m exactly like her in ways that make me feel stronger than I’ve ever been.

I don’t protect people’s feelings, ever, because what I find is that in protecting people’s feelings, you’re actually not doing that at all. You’re avoiding feeling guilty and horrible in the moment, so you decide to sugarcoat something and then time happens. Now, that person has no idea how to respond to your new reality. When they react the old way because you weren’t clear, it just adds more kindling to the fire.

The flip side of the coin is that if you don’t tell anyone anything, you have the safety and security of your secrets not getting out, but that’s all. You aren’t creating the future of the relationship. Secrecy cuts off two-way communication because when you’re afraid of talking about one secret, you become afraid of talking about all of them. Letting another person do all the talking might make you relax in the moment, but they won’t walk away with clear boundaries and neither will you.

This is why secrets kill. They affect your ability to listen and to talk. Instead of having a conversation where two people are entirely focused on each other, it’s one person talking and one person sweating bullets about talking because they’re not really in the conversation. They’re lost in preparing to discuss something while running through the checklist of things they’re “not allowed” to say. You can take out the quotes when talking about adult issues, it’s just that so often “the thing we don’t talk about” is something a person should absolutely talk about, perhaps call the police for good measure. A person who is eight can be reliably trusted to keep a lid on what happens while their parents are away because, and I say this facetiously, kids are stupid.

That’s because to most parents, abuse happens to other kids. It’s not the the children who have done something wrong and have somehow deserved their lots in life. It’s that they’re good parents. They’re watchful. They don’t know any sexual predators.

People who have been abused have a better eye on their kids than those that haven’t, just because they understand the nature of the process. However, it doesn’t make them better at parenting if they haven’t healed themselves. They’ll have emotional blind spots for the rest of their lives, and they don’t gain sight with therapy. Your brain is permanently disfigured the way your skin would look if you’d been through a fire. You don’t get a therapist to get back the life you would have had before the abuse happened. You get a therapist to find out what you’re going to do with your new reality.

I’m outspoken because I am not the person that people have thought I was all these years. I couldn’t have been. I was holding on to emotional abuse because, and I say this facetiously, kids are stupid.

When you are certain about things, you know that there are no abusers around your child. But that’s the bad example I’m using for a lot of different things. For instance, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once said on international television that there were no gay people in Iran. You cannot tell me that this is an objective fact, but he was certain.

The American election wasn’t stolen in 2016, but some people are certain of it….. while ignoring the certainty of Russian celebration.

The only way to survive in this world is to act like you know absolutely nothing, because the moment you get locked into “the way things are,” you lose the ability to move into “the way things will be.” It is even harder for people who have dealt with childhood abuse, because they already fear change…. a secret might slip….

I’m certain of it.

There is No Such Thing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your ideal week.

There is no such thing as an ideal week for me. My life is too up and down to predict. What I do know is that an ideal week is spent balanced between my close friends/family and my writing. Enough isolation to satisfy me because my friends remind me why I don’t want it. I’ve had some incredible experiences over the last couple of days. It is a combination of things, mostly being able to say yes to things I said no to previously; it had the potential to make me avoid feeling bad about myself, and Timeless Children don’t do that. If there is blame to be had anywhere, we’ll find it. That is because we are used to being the cause of conflict because our abusers have told us that if we say anything, we will be. We don’t do it to protect us. That’s a side effect. We do it to protect you because we know you’re the adult and we’re not. You’ll be believed and we won’t.

I write to avoid a lot of that stuff because I don’t have the bandwidth to think about relationships on that level all the time, and I don’t pay as much attention to relationships in which I’m not in tune. I know when I’m not, I can sense it by the other person’s energy. Writing causes isolation and it feeds me, so I lose track of the world around me. It’s using my mental illness for fun and profit, really. I’ll never be The Bloggess, but there is a solid chance I’ll be Leslie Lanagan.

I put down my worries for a while and went to a bar that had an arcade with Zac, who then proceeded to treat me to Chinese-Peruvian fusion in a restaurant he was flabbergasted I didn’t know because it was a Jose Andres…. and I’d said that I love any excuse to throw Jose some money. Picking that restaurant in particular was part of the gift. It was eating amazing food, and supporting World Central Kitchen, which I believe is right up there with Doctors Without Borders in terms of reputation.

Today I’ve been shopping around on Amazon because I got a gift certificate. I ended up with a henley and three long-sleeved t-shirts because they’re essential in the fall. I basically spend all winter dressed like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory.”

I saw a t-shirt with a hammer and sickle that said “totally not a Russian spy” and I thought about it. I’ll have plenty of time to think it over in the future because Amazon will remind me I looked at that t-shirt once a week until I’m dead.

Tonight, Lindsay is taking me out to dinner (a bonus birthday gift because we’re going to a concert at the end of next month). She’s staying in Falls Church, Virginia, so we’re trying to work out where. I am just glad that I am getting a second night out in a row. I’m not sure that’s happened in years. I like it, because my appetite is suppressed most of the time and I eat more when other people are eating with me. Eating and drinking are very much alike that way. Not as much fun to eat or drink alone, whether it’s the glass of wine together after the kids are in bed or the coffee together before they wake up.

Those are the moments I live for with my friends, because the conversation is generally more intimate and I don’t do well with small talk. It doesn’t register, so I stop paying attention. The friends I love the most feel free to say whatever they want, when they want. That’s because they allow me the same courtesy.

It’s what makes every week an ideal week. I always have room to be me.

This Might Be Short…. Or Not

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.

Before we get started, today is my birthday and tomorrow Lindsay is taking me out for dinner because she had a meeting and was able to swing it. I love that we manage living in different cities so easily because she works here. I’m not the only reason she fits in. She knows the city better than I do. Also, I did write yesterday. It was just so bad and rambled off into nothing that I thought, “I don’t even like what I think today. This blogger sucks.” It helps to focus on elite athletes and people who think like them.

In a lot of ways, this city knows Lindsay better than I do, because I do not walk in her circles, often rarified air. She and I are perfect for each other the way Supergrover and I are in that we can be objective about what’s going on in the other’s life because it doesn’t affect our friendships at all. I have no official Washington power and wouldn’t use it if I did. Therefore, either one of them could say anything to me and it wouldn’t be boring. Lindsay drills down into policy all the time, and I’m neurodivergent and a paralegal in the state of Texas. I can hang, and I can nerd out just as far as she can. I just don’t get paid to do it. I can advise without being involved. I would be very happy working for Lindsay’s organization in DC, but I wouldn’t have the relationship that I have with her if I took the job. Same with Supergrover. Better to listen to her than to think I can do a thing. Since they both suit up to play, it’s fun being the opposite side of them. That reminds them taking a minute to enjoy a nice meal and an expertly made cocktail is a good thing.

Lindsay and I have this great relationship where her interests and mine line up, so we get along like we’d just met yesterday. At the same time, when I look at her I see every iteration. I see her inner child and try to remind her of it when she’s stressed out from all the things it takes to be her. We have a very West Wing relationship in that she used to be Charlie, the body man, for Annise Parker and I would be great at being hers…… or I think I would. I would probably end up getting fired. I’m good at being the Charlie she only talks to over the phone. 😛

Explaining how I feel about Lindsay explains how I feel about Supergrover in a nutshell, and not because I mean my loving words less toward Lindsay. It’s that Lindsay and I don’t have a hard out, so I can use Lindsay’s concepts for feelings that are very much the same with both women. I already have three sisters, so it’s no hard leap to feel love that intense for Supergrover as well. I honestly don’t remember how my mind worked before she unlocked all my doors. It was like a scene from The Matrix. If I’m Neo, she’s The Oracle.

Those who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do, which seems to be a mantra for all three of us depending on the situation. We are all in agreement that this applies to the orange gelatinous shitbag. We could all out-think and out-maneuver him easily.

I don’t really know anything about sports, and they do. They’d be better at answering this question than I am, but I do look to them for inspiration. I just don’t watch games that much. I absolutely love two things. The first is looking them up on YouTube to see what makes them great. I don’t want to be a bandwagon fan, I want to see them defy physics and decide on my own. The reason I have to look them up on YouTube is that I love the story of what it takes to be an elite athlete, so I’ll watch a documentary on ESPN about them and fall in love with their public character rather than their play. I can tell you about David Beckham’s early life and family ties better than I can tell you how he played.

I can tell you why it’s exciting and induces tears for me to watch Trinity Rodman play because since I’ve seen what a powerhouse her dad is, I imagine what a proud father he must be and it’s like a long distance commercial up in here.

Everyone loves Michael Jordan, but the “character” that resonated with me most in “The Last Dance” was Scottie Pippen. He was truly the unsung hero of the operation, its Ginger Rogers to Jordan’s Fred Astaire. They both made each other better, and I don’t think Jordan is appreciative. He comes off like a narcissist whether other people agree with me or not. Scottie has the heart of a journeyman cook who will occasionally blow your mind. Experimental, brave, crazy, also knows and copes with the fact that he’ll never be chef. So he’ll be the best damn sous this restaurant has ever seen.

We don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it. Scottie should have gotten loud in salary negotiations, and I’m not berating him. I’m just agreeing with him. His relationship with Michael was very much Aaron Rogers and Jordy Nelson. I’ll pick ’em up if you put ’em down. Shake……. and BAKE!

The trick is learning to be respected instead of famous. If you focus on the attention the star is getting instead of you, then you miss out on the best part of getting to be an elite athlete. The people who know the game will see you differently. It’s not the same as having millions of bandwagon fans.

It resonates with me because I’m a Scottie. I’d rather be a speechwriter on a campaign than a candidate. I’m Leo in that if I worked for a candidate, I would hope for the friendships that Lindsay got with Annise Parker, Nick Lampson, and Peter Brown (the Houston candidates Lindsay worked for before she started lobbying).

It takes an elite athlete’s courage to be Lindsay and Supergrover. Supergrover actually is an elite athlete, which I’m sure goes a lot into what she does because she’s been mentally preparing to the level she does now since she was all-State three years running in high school. Six letters and she even stopped to wonder why I wanted to wear that jacket. 😉 Now, our relationship feels the same as mine with Lindsay because I only want to drill down into policy.

I had to grow into that role with both women because I didn’t want to seem like a dumbass when they talked about their lives, because to them the things they say are completely normal and mundane. I stand there and feel like I didn’t get the assigned reading.

I do everything I can to combat that. I know for sure Lindsay is going to be in the newspaper no matter what job she has from here on out. She’s responsible for introducing a lot of legislation that makes people mad af and they pay her the big bucks not to back down. The Texas legislature is going insane regarding trans healthcare and its lack of support for it. And Supergrover would never be in the news on purpose. She’s the most private person I know, which is why it’s so unfortunate that our careers rub up against each other. It’s a constant source of ire to the point that she is the only person that could get me to tear it down and almost did to take care of the problem because she was worth it in a way no one else was. If she reamed me out for saying something sensitive, I wasn’t going to be the blogger that didn’t hear her. It was too important.

What was too important on my end was being able to use this space to process our relationship when I felt I couldn’t go directly to her…… but I could. It wouldn’t take long for her to get over what I said that she thought was negative because she loved the lines that were specifically crafted to adore her in public. To let her see how I talk about her behind her back. How every story is true to my limited knowledge and ability as a writer, but it is my superpower the way her work is to her. I just don’t think she realized that she was setting herself up to be a character when she befriended me and how her world would bleed over into mine.

In these pages is a magnificent story of two people who met by chance, one much more powerful than the other, which attracted us in a stranger on a train sort of way because nothing we said would get back to any of her friends or colleagues. This became the lie we told ourselves very quickly, because I could be honest with both her and Dana and say “this is a lot to manage and I need to work it out on my own.” The hard out made my decision for me in all kinds of ways, ranging from her not thinking about the consequences to me actively trying to destroy what we had built because she flipped me out mentally with her story and hasn’t really taken responsibility for hearing what it’s like to be me and adjusting to it, because she created a new reality for me. The disconnect between my real life and the one I present here is enormous, but it’s because I’m good at using small things to represent the big things. It’s just too much to handle for me if I slip up. I could accidentally ruin her life by accident, and the consequences would be dire no matter what happened as a result.

I don’t want to be that writer for her. I feel like I’ve done what Tony Mendez calls “falling in love with your asset” in “The Moscow Rules.” It’s an emotional shorthand for being so close to the subject that it takes away any impartiality, something we crafted by not normalizing everything by picking up the phone. Two sides to that coin. The first is that we would have stopped being as emotionally intimate with each other and that was the drug that kept us taking hits all those years. The second is that it really would have taken talking in real time, because I don’t know about her, but a few voicemails doesn’t convey everything that could have been avoided by hearing each other’s tones of voice.

Platonic love hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit in my life, and I’m sapiosexual and bipolar. One line bled into the other, and the butterflies in my stomach hit harder as well. Getting rid of them was enormous and had to be done to save our friendship, because I didn’t want to live without her unless I absolutely had to…. it just mixed me up so much inside because I’d lay out all these thoughts and feelings thinking she’s sitting there thinking I’m a judgmental dickhead when she’s just busy and needs more time. Then, at others, she really does treat me like a judgmental dickhead so there’s no way to know which person is going to show up. Is our situation dire enough to stay together at all costs, or do I only know random factoids about your life today? The highs and lows were too big because of the medium, and yet they were exciting. It was a thrill ride.

Because she’s Michael Jordan. She needs a Scottie Pippen. So, she got into my head and made me believe I could be that for her. If nothing else, because she was in my head, she taught me to think like an elite athlete as well. That if I was going to be Scottie Pippen, I was more than capable. I grew to be wildly impressed with me. To love me like I love her. It’s wild and wonderful because I am.

Six letters, though.

SMDH.

Filler

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?

I write exactly like I talk, so I tend to ramble the way I would in person without the need to feel aware of how long I’ve been talking because you’ll stop reading when you get bored or you’ll stay til I’m finished and either way it’s cool. No hard feelings. I know I’m a lot. 😉

But I hate filler, so if there’s one word I wish I could take out in conversation, it’s “um,” and preferably all the other nonsense that comes with thinking before you speak because you cannot see implications and speak simultaneously without tripping over your words….. or at least, I can’t. I’ve tried to be slower about responding so that I can work through the complications of what I’m feeling on my own and decide what to say. The closer you are to me, the longer it takes for me to speak. That’s because I care about what some people think because I don’t want my words to make a problem worse. I am trying hard to keep our relationship healthy by not reverting to who I was when I was younger. When I was younger, I was programmed to be a preacher’s kid, so I have that Southern pastor vibe. I also have a crippling need to take care of everyone else first. If I had money, I’d go broke, so I go for broke emotionally. I love taking care of my friends that way, being the one they call to discuss issues because they know they’ll get an opinion that’s genuine.

I wanted to learn to be an eloquent speaker, and I think in these pages I am- in person I do not have a delete key to go back and take out anything. It is frustrating to an enormous degree. Conversation is like cooking at home and writing is cooking in a professional kitchen made to help me move faster.

This is entirely due to my generation. We’re the ones that didn’t have much technology in our lives as children and became obsessed with it when we were older. That means our first Internet relationships started in high school and we’ve been doing it a long time. We all have friends we’ve never met and are comfortable with it. Sometimes it crosses over and sometimes it doesn’t, because what people write isn’t all of them.

I isolate in person, but not online because it’s the medium with which I have the most dexterity in conversation. I can pull information and make connections at an alarming rate in this medium that doesn’t come through in the physical space. I have shown myself the best and ugliest parts of my personality, and because it is in writing, I have a very good idea of how not to go wrong again. You don’t get that with conversation, because your memories bend and blend. You can’t do that when you can go back and just look at what happened. You don’t have to rely on what you understand happened, because it may not be accurate at all.

People fight over memories too much because they don’t go back and read them. Everyone has a text history to a certain degree or another and it helps you to keep perspective, but not when you don’t have the energy to scroll up once in a while.

In a sense, now everything in life depends on knowing which people in your life will scroll up for you and who won’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s the extent to which someone wants to know the objective truth of what happened and who wants to live in the story they told themselves even when it’s false information.

It’s a lot easier to be humble in any relationship when you can go back and say, “I’m sorry. Dick move on my part.” You get stuck in a relationship faster when you think your memory is more accurate than someone else’s while also refusing to look it up. We made the choice to put more of ourselves into this medium, not being published but texting to our families and friends more and more. We need to act like it. There’s proof of everything you do, and you are not the main character in every story. It helps me to think of it this way. In every situation I encounter, I ask myself whether I am speaking Spanish in front of Karen or whether I am Karen. The revolution will be televised.

I hold myself accountable to my e-mails, text messages, and blog entries. It all matters. But because I am in touch with my emotions, I don’t go back and try to justify my behavior at all costs. I don’t have the black hole of need clawing at me that says I must be right or I’m not a good person.

I am definitely a good person, but it’s because I acknowledge that I have done bad things, but my actions weren’t the entirety of me. I just don’t want a relationship where anyone holds me to my worst mistake, and I’m not going to be the person that does it to someone else.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, is a glorious mess.

I want to be able to say that clearly, without hesitation or subtext. But in person, there would have been a lot of spaces and, um….