Tag: loss

Too Many/Too Little

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What sacrifices have you made in life?

I will never have a relationship with anyone the way I have previously. I have too much information about myself not to completely change the way I interact with people, both in having words for “a list of what’s wrong with me and why,” and in listening to another person in a different way, knowing everything is in Mandarin on my side and English on theirs. We may have to go three or four rounds for both of us to get our stories straight, because in the beginning we each thought the other was saying something different. I do not have patience for those who do not also realize the same. That the translation layer is not just mine to own. Neurotypical is “standard,” not “correct.” Therefore, a neurodivergent brain does not mean that I am incapable of understanding. We are both struggling under the same communication issue. The problem is that neurotypical have an air of superiority about it, which leads to anxiety-filled neurodivergent overexplaining. Very, very few people in my life have realized I’m different, but not stupid. No one would ever say that, of course. They just don’t want to talk to me because it’s too hard. While they’re feeling sorry for themselves that I just won’t “get it together” and “not live up to my potential” as to what they need me to be, I am generally left alone. It’s a major reason why I blog. People love how my brain works unless they’re talking to me, because when I’m in front of them their air of superiority over being neurotypical takes over no matter how brilliant I seem from my writing. Neurotypicals infantilize you, full stop.

I’ll give you a for-instance. I don’t remember how it came up, but I said something like “I’m autistic and my special interest is intelligence,” or something like that. It was in context to the conversation, I just don’t remember what it was. The leader of the group was like, “aww, that’s so nice. Do you have lots of cool spy gadgets in your room?” I didn’t react to it, but the tone made me think she thought I was nine.

As for “do I have spy gadgets,” the answer is no. I have autographed hardbacks from spies that became writers after they left CIA. They don’t make “cool spy gadgets” for people like me unless I had Keith Melton money.

Keith Melton is the largest private collector of CIA and other intelligence agencies’ UNCLASS gadgets that sell at places like Sotheby’s. You’re not going to be paying six figures until trying to buy an Enigma machine or something similar. I also like really small houses, so if I did start collecting stuff like that, it would be on loan to the spy museum just like him. But if this is what his public collection looks like, I’d give an arm and a leg to see his private collection. I don’t think he’s going to part with everything precious long-term.

I would sacrifice holding all my “cool spy gadgets” at home.

I have sacrificed friends to the natural consequences of my blog. I have freedom of speech, not power over whether people are attracted towards me because of it. I did not sacrifice friends with whom I had problems, but friends with whom I had problems about this. If you care that I blog about my life, then you cannot be my friend. It is as simple as that. I have enough on my plate without worrying about how I’m going to be criticized in advance when I was never supposed to be responsible for your reaction in the first place. And if I write something you don’t like, you’re going to be a lot better off coming and talking to me about it, rather than talking behind my back. You’ll actually get results because we have resolved our conflict. Art imitates life. I am not going to make up the past to fit your narrative of my experience, but I am going to change as we do.

There is a difference between loving a writer and supporting them. Loving a writer means praising them when they do something you like. Supporting a writer means being willing to work things through by accepting my reactions as valid. That I don’t just sit here and make things up. If I said someone had a tangle with me, they did. But I am not looking at it like retribution, because I’m getting my feelings out whether they come back or not. They are not responsible for, nor do they have to like what I am writing. But if they’re offended, it’s up to them to change the channel, because I cannot change the authenticity I show here.

There are two reasons “your side” is not represented. The first is if someone is avoidant. I can craft beautiful sentences even when someone is angry because I’m so grateful that anger is a transitive state. It was easy for Supergrover and Daniel (and all the other friends I’ve lost) to be angry about what I wrote and over the moon about it in one breath. That’s because our stories didn’t match the ones we were telling ourselves. If you give me no information, I am writing about what I think to become settled over it. I never want to come across as catering to people who will not show me their feelings as well. I have had too many lopsided relationships that way, because they hold in their feelings and get annoyed while my love grows deeper because I’m being assured nothing is wrong. They want less contact, and I want more because they save up too much anger and bust my fairy tale without a thought.

Meanwhile, everything that they’re angry about is 100% their fault, because if they don’t tell me anything, I’m just going to write about me. One of the things that Supergrover said to me that kicked me in the stomach was, “as if everything I do has to do with you…..” It’s not that at all. It’s that this is a personal diary, and I’m not going to root through your head. I’m going to say what I think is going on- the story I’m telling myself. Supergrover would have liked it even less if I tried to guess what she meant.

It’s a group project I’ve carried on my back, because I didn’t know the real story. I take everything literally, so I didn’t start getting mad at Supergrover’s avoidance until it was too clear to me what she was doing and I couldn’t ignore it anymore, because my self esteem just kept getting lower and lower as she pegged me as the only person who ever had problems with her and I was the only person who ever criticized her. I think what she means is that she has a lot of people around her who will do what she says without asking any questions. I am not one of them. I speak truth to power and she doesn’t think I have that right, or at least she doesn’t anymore. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get her to see the things that are in her blind spot in hopes of helping her, anyway. It’s not because I’m obsessed with the idea that she’ll come back, but that her story is inextricably interrelated with mine. I have no doubt that I will have to think about her until I die because of my blog, not because I have this need to own her time.

She didn’t get anything she wanted because she didn’t ask for it, except when she said “please do not contact me again.” Then, a couple of months later, I accidentally texted her due to a glitch on my phone. I knew she’d go nuclear, and she did, because she didn’t believe for a moment that I hadn’t done it on purpose. She attributed suspicion and malice to everything, then read on my blog that my dad was having surgery. After the complete nightmare that was her going nuclear over a mistaken text, it was a surprise that she sent me a note that said “hope all goes well with your dad.” We started talking and two days later, my mother died. It was a whole new ball game.

It didn’t change anything for her. In one of her letters, she said she knew she was sounding like.a dickhead and she didn’t care. You’re not special. I lost someone who was LIKE a mother to me. Why do you get a special day in which I need to cater to you?

It was the year anniversary of my Mom’s death.

I want her to read that e-mail again and choke on it when she actually has to go through the process of losing her own actual mother, when she said that her mother’s death would bring her to her knees.

WELL, IT’S A GOOD THING I’M GOING THROUGH IT INSTEAD OF YOU.

But she is NOT going to be the villain in my story.

If she wants me to be the villain in hers, have at it. I’m not going to be around to hear it, because you’re not special, either. You just won’t know it until you have to deal with what I did. Have fun picking out her coffin.

So I sacrificed her.

My Necklace

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today?

I mentioned in another piece that I wear an ichthus necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint as the pattern inside the fish. I got it in 2016, which edges out my pants by, I think, a year or two. I’m wearing the sweat pants that Zac got me at the Pentagon, a soft dark green t-shirt, my Apple Watch, and two bracelets that match ones I bought for Zac. One is a rainbow friendship bracelet, and I am an idiot because I didn’t buy them for Bryn and Dave as well. If they’re reading this, I will rectify the situation when I can. 😉 I bought them on our double date to the Spy Museum and Irish pub. The other is a gift from Zac. I got him a set of bracelets made of nautical rope, and when he opened them, he put one on me. It’s maroon with black plastic hardware and looks great up against the rainbow. Meaningful, yet not old.

I would like to say that I’m wearing these pants because I’m pining for Zac and they make me feel closer to him. I would like to say that. However, they are the most comfortable pants in the universe, Zac or no Zac. They came from the Pentagon, ergo, the government cares that I am comfortable. 😉 One of my favorite things in life is when Zac says, “I’m a middle aged white man who works for the government. I’m here to help.” He is aware of how it sounds and plays it up for comedic effect.

The fact that my man knows how to use comedic effect is one of the reasons he’s my man. Zac is on the brain because we finally made plans for tonight, “plans” being relative because the “plan” is to sit on the couch and watch TV. There may be some excitement, though, because Zac is having his car serviced. He said we could Uber or he would pick me up on his motorcycle. I said it was okay to pick me up on the motorcycle if it was a sunny day. I decided that Lindsay wasn’t going to be the only one on a motorcycle before she died.

Please know that I know riding motorcycles is dangerous, and if something happens today, know that I went out doing exactly what I wanted to do…. live a little. It’s a calculated risk because I am not going to be operating the motorcycle, I will be riding with someone who is very experienced. Also, military men are too confident to be daredevils on the road most of the time. Anything they needed to prove, they’ve already done it.

Plus, my friend Donna Schuurman has gone on these long, involved rides all over the US and Australia and I thought, “if Donna can do that, you can trust Zac from the Metro to his house.” Pretty sure he’s driven that route a time or two.

I feel like I have a different view of death than I did before my mother died, and the way she died in particular. The reason she got sick and died in 30 minutes is that the problem was originally a broken foot. She developed an embolism in the foot. It came loose and traveled, which made her faint. It blew, and she was dead. Because of the speed, I know that the best surgeon in the world could have been right next to her when she started feeling faint and there still would have been a 95% chance she’d be dead, anyway. It’s a scalpel, not a magic wand.

It is very comforting to know about medicine in a time like this. To know the limits of what medicine can do and actually be able to say “it’s no one’s fault.” Maybe if she’d moved her leg more when her foot was broken, but that has to undo the last six or seven weeks of her life, not the day she got sick.

As a result, I have a very practical, pragmatic view of death. It could happen at any time and without fanfare, so just be as honest with people as you possibly can because you really don’t know that it’s going to be the last time you talk to someone. I’ll give you a for instance. My mom’s choir had a perfectly healthy director and organist one Sunday, and a dead one the next with absolutely no warning or fanfare. That is not an easy transition. Everyone was lost and confused, not just me.

It’s one of the reasons I have become so adamant about telling my stories and getting my voice out there. I want my friends and family to know about me, and I know they’ll treasure my blog when I die. It is not about leaving a legacy once I’m famous, but leaving a legacy at all. My grandfather wrote a five volume series on the Lanagan family, and they all eat it up. Therefore, I know that the joy of a book doesn’t come from how many people have read it. The joy of a book comes from writing it.

So whether I die today or 50 years from now, I’m just going to be blunt and lay it all out there. I don’t have blinders on anymore. Death is random, and I do not have to be afraid of it because it is so random. The universe is not out to get me. It is a numbers game. What it has given me is the strength to keep asking the big questions of myself, because the smaller ones don’t matter.

Blog is My Copilot

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I decided to do a short question and answer regarding the death of my mother. I couldn’t think of anything to do with one of the prompts, but I can combine all of them. This will probably make you laugh, cry, and get angry. My mother is dead. She will not know I said these things. Keep this in mind, that I am just a child reflecting on her parent’s entire life, and that little moments do not define a lifetime. There are times when she was wonderful to me and times that she was just plain terrible. What kind of child doesn’t say that about their parents, especially after they die? I am not out to get her. I am out to illustrate her. By the end, she will be a 3D character to you, and hopefully you’ll learn more about me as you read.

I’m sorry to hear about your loss. Here are 10 thoughtful questions a friend might ask to learn more about your mother and her passing, which you can use for your personal blog prompt:

  1. Can you share some of your favorite memories with your mother?
    • I think I turned nine the year she threw me a Peter Pan birthday party with tons of activities in our backyard. There must have been a hundred people at my house for that one, because it was a tiny town. If there was something to do, people came. I was not popular in school, and I struggled against my mother being more popular than me (she was the music teacher, the fun one. I have been a 90 year old autistic man for like, 46 years. That tracks. I am 46 years old. I knew the smash hit “Get Off My Lawn” by the time I was seven.). Therefore, I was a lot more relaxed with her when we were just out in the backyard having fun. My grandparents, both sets, also lived close at that time and she was more relaxed in her comfort zone than she was when she was trying to make me into the perfect child. I didn’t get it. She could talk to me about being good because of my dad’s job all she wanted, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t just going to sit there and be weird, anyway. I found Daniel and I was fine. Neurodivergent people travel in packs. If you’re an introvert, they’re just smaller.
    • She thought I was a great singer and often gave me solos in things. She would laugh until she cried when she told the story about how I was too shy to sing with the choir, but as they were leaving the stage, I decided what the people really needed was a solo.
    • We were a team. She was my accompanist no matter whether I was singing or playing my horn. She learned monster orchestra reductions (piano accompaniments) just to take me to contests. Then, because she was already accompanying me, she accompanied all my friends as well. The only person she never played for, I don’t think, was Ryan Darlington (he’s a tuba player). It’s not that she wouldn’t have done it, we just went to different middle schools. We both ended up at PVA, but he went to Johnston and I went to Clements. Johnston was the performing arts middle school and I didn’t get it. I got into Clements and we marinaded and grilled their asses at contest. It was memorable because I was the trumpet soloist that helped get them there. I played the opening trumpet call in the “Dances With Wolves” score. I auditioned for PVA when I was at the absolute top of my game. My mother played for me at that audition, too.
    • At HSPVA, I was a trumpet player. At Clements, I was in Varsity Band and Varsity Choir at the same time, which I loved.
      • Let me take a quick break to tell you how I did it. I sang for the choir director and she put me in junior varsity. I said, “are you sure? I’ve been doing things like the Messiah for five years now.” She said, “Ok. Prove it.” She played the first four measures in front of a monster exposed lick, I believe trying to prove to me that I couldn’t handle it when I’d had in memorized since I was 12. Please. My opera voice flipped on. Case closed (link is to a humorous clip from one of my voice lessons).
    • In short, I would not be the person that I am today without the grand piano she bought to put in our apartment after my parents’ divorce. That’s because as long as it was there, she always had a way to draw me in. Draw me closer. Test out anthems she wanted to use with her choir and wanting to play for me because she could hear how it would sound at choir practice. I was part of the vetting process for the programming when she was a choir director/organist. I asked her to leave me her piano in her will, and she did. Now, it’s at my sister’s house and David’s house just isn’t big enough. But when I’m at Lindsay’s, I get really quiet and let my mom speak through the chords. It what she did when she was alive and it worked. Why stop now?
  2. How has your mother’s life influenced the person you are today?
    • A tape runs in my head that I should be the perfect person all the time because people are always watching. This was true when I was a preacher’s kid, but now I can’t turn it off and I have massive self esteem issues at making any mistakes. I have chided myself for not achieving perfection instead of taking the W at excellence. I’m the person that absolutely is driven to get an A+ on everything and a body/brain that just won’t have it. I can either accept my fate or die thinking I’m the worst person that ever lived. I choose acceptance.
    • I work with children much easier because I am social masking her, an elementary and middle school choir director for all of her career, except for the time she took off from work until Lindsay and I were old enough to fend for ourselves. I’ve picked up more, noticed more than she ever imagined. She was a saint and also tough as nails. Strict disciplinarian who hid all her feelings because she thought she wasn’t enough, either. It is the plight of women most of the time. Because I needed to break free from that pattern, I see it for what it is. However, I do not think of her as a bad parent, but an overly fearful and depressed one. Her whole life depended on what other people thought. I was basically Chelsea Clinton on a very small scale.
    • She is the person that convinced me it was better to hide my every need than to display it. It’s part of the reason Lindsay is so outgoing and free, while I hide in the shadows. She doesn’t worry about what people think of her to the extent that I do, and it’s a problem. It’s only now by convincing myself I am a good writer who has something to say that I really value myself as an asset and ally. Again, I mean to come off as confident, not arrogant. Someone has to tell me I’m pretty every day. It might as well be me. I got well when I realized that not saying anything left me angry and resentful all the time. When I began to express needs, no one liked it because I was so angry. So, so angry. I apologize for that, but I cannot apologize for the ways I’ve felt ignored by people who’ve said they loved me. It is on them to apologize to me if they feel bad about it. But if they don’t, I’m not waiting around for an apology. Sometimes you have to create your own closure, and I’m at peace with it.
    • She is the one that taught me how to treat a wife/husband, basically doing everyone’s emotional work for them and taking all their bad behavior because if I don’t, those people will leave. It took me a very long time to come to the realization that if they leave because you have emotional needs, you’re better off without that person in your life. Be careful in deciding the line where someone else is “needy” and you’re refusing to talk. A mind will only accept that of course you’re too tired to talk for so many days/weeks/years. However long it takes for someone to realize they’re unhappy. But because they’ve been unhappy for a very long time, you’re not going to like it very much. Have clear boundaries on what’s too much so that fights like these don’t come up. Work smarter, not harder.
    • She taught me that jokes were funnier when you didn’t see them coming, like her making a really sharp comment when she was normally so happy go lucky. I have a feeling that she was probably also autistic because the tapes that ran in her head were that she had to act completely normal all the time, too. It’s called social masking. Because of my family, I have both male and female sets….. as in, what a man would generally say and what a woman would. The female set is unsure and cautious. The male one walks in the world knowing that no one is better than me and no one is worse, either. It’s very important to make that distinction, because basically seeing the way I write convinced me that I had a man’s confidence online, so go with it. Be confident all the time, because it’s not all about you. It’s a survival manual for someone else.
  3. What were some of the values and lessons she instilled in you?
    • If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t say anything for 35 years.
    • Be kind to everyone, no matter what they do to you. This has had enormous positive and negative affects, because I tend to overestimate the good in people and stop standing up for myself when I feel bullied. On the flip side, everyone is more open and caring with me because I am open and caring with them. It’s a mixed bag, as parental lessons often are.
    • Be subservient to your partner. Whatever they want to do, you want to do. What you want to do/eat is not up to you, because you have to watch your weight and not seem like a pig (I wasn’t on Adderall til college and had the normal appetite of a teenager), and also his choice of restaurant is always better than yours. I wasn’t raised to be queer. Neither are other women. We’ll talk for an hour about what to do for dinner because neither of us wants to assert an opinion that might offend the other. Same for dating. Lesbians take FOREVER to admit that they like someone because God forbid someone rejects them. it’s systemic, but my personal experience is unique and universal. One of the things I like about men is that they’re direct. It’s easy to ask them out because it’s a yes or no question to them. It’s especially fun when you don’t care about the answer and neither do they, because it’s no harm, no foul. With a woman, you’ll waste years pining over her until someone finally admits feelings and then spend the first four months of dating EXCLAIMING over how much we didn’t see it. Yes we did. We were just ostriches about it. If I don’t tell you I like you, then I don’t risk abandonment. It’s intrinsic to who women are as people. If we are not perfect, our husbands will leave. Flat out. This is changing as gender roles decrease. That information was useless to me then.
    • My mother’s narrative was never how hard it was for me that I was queer. It was always how embarrassing it was to tell people I was queer. She couldn’t empathize, which is the root of why we had a sometimes terrible relationship. Later in her life, she wouldn’t let anyone get away with a homophobic comments, but she never told me that. I heard it at her funeral, because all of the sudden she was now the cool mom and not the rejected one. She could play up that card instead of being embarrassed, all the while being completely disinterested in hearing how Meagan, Kathleen, or Dana & I were doing. I am glad that she came to peace about it. I am not glad she never told me.
  4. How do you cope with the grief and keep her memory alive?
    • I have fallen in love with everything Dia de los Muertos and I actually visit cemeteries a lot for the peace and quiet, yet feeling surrounded. The most profound place I’ve ever felt peace is at a neighborhood for the dead in Paris. It’s called Pere LaChaisse (sp?), and it’s got more famous artists of every discipline that you could possibly imagine. If you cannot travel to Paris, there are the same type cemeteries in New Orleans. See them before you die, because it’s an experience in and of itself. In DC, I have now been to sit with Gore Vidal. Good talk.
    • I wear an ichthus necklace every day now, because the necklace she actually gave me came apart in a million pieces. I got it at the funeral home, and the inside of the fish is filled with her fingerprint. I don’t like how I got it, but I do like that it was possible to create and a powerful remembrance to have my mother’s fingerprint on my heart every day.
    • Lindsay and I FaceTime at my mother’s grave when I’m not in town, or visit together when I am. It makes us feel closer to her even though we know she’s not really there. The idea is fun. We sit and talk to her, sometimes eat, sometimes drink coffee. It’s a safe space to get away from it all, and we do.
    • Stories come up at random times, and I never know whether they’re going to be good or bad. Some of them are still so painful that I blank out, like seeing her in her coffin. What is really bad is that because it’s the last image I have of her, it’s the one that’s stuck. My mother got sick and died in about 30 minutes flat. I wore this look of abject shock, like I was high on Oxycodone and completely sober. It was more than a year of magical thinking, because it was so unbelievable.
    • I know for sure that she got the death she wanted, because she did not want to be in pain and she did not want Lindsay and I to end up taking care of her for years on end. She didn’t know it was coming, but she would have been pleased with the result. It gives me complete peace. I don’t have to worry that there are things she would have wanted that she didn’t get, because I know for sure that given the choice between dying quickly or it being a long, drawn out process she would have chosen to go out exactly the same way.
    • Other people keep her alive for me. She was such a public figure that people tell me all the time how much I remind them of her. It’s irritating until you realize that it’s the only way to keep your mother alive long after she’s dead.
  5. Were there any traditions or hobbies she passed down to you?
    • Make a big deal out of people’s birthdays.
    • Love people until they just can’t stand it. Make it weird. So many people are hurt in the world. See it.
    • If you are a teacher and you don’t have money, you are responsible for finding it. She taught me that people will support a valuable cause. For instance, she dated a judge after the divorce that was pretty wealthy. She worked at one of the poorest schools in Fort Bend. She never asked him for money. She talked about her life, and he responded. One year he bought the entire class winter coats. You can get things if you ask for them, but only without asking directly. This is not bad advice, because it’s not one’s responsibility to respond to your needs, you’re just asking if they will. The difference is that I don’t take rejection personally and she viewed it as a flaw in her character. However, this is a new development because I finally got tired of not being heard correctly. I don’t do well when I’m talking around something and just hoping.
  6. What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
    • I have learned many things from my mother, from the tender to the terrible. Every bit of it had to do with focusing on external validation. She was not attention-seeking in the slightest. She was just trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could, because someone, somewhere could be offended.
    • She gave really good hugs. I miss those the most.
    • Towards the end of her life, she enjoyed traveling and came to both Portland and DC. In fact, I also met her in Seattle and we went to the Experience Music Project before she and her husband left on an Alaskan cruise.
    • Giving birth is not for the faint of heart. It’s especially hard if you don’t tell your doctors that you are in pain. She said that she bit her pillow while everyone screamed and no one noticed that she needed medication. There’s no award for that, but if there had been, she’d have won it.
    • Own yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. You cannot be perfect enough to please everyone all the time, and you will die mad about it. I learned that because she never did and I watched what it did to her. She was still mad at my dad at all family functions 25 years after the divorce. I realize that relationships are complicated. Being a decent coparent is not. At some point, you have to say to yourself “this doesn’t even matter anymore,” like my friends who found out they were pregnant the morning of their wedding. All of the sudden, the wedding was literally a piece of cake because there were bigger fish to fry. Like, we’re having a good time, okay, but we’re not even going to pretend that any of this is now important.
    • I am a more compassionate person than I would be otherwise, because my mother’s insistence on being polite and friendly has led me to keep going in relationships that weren’t interesting at first, but kept growing. It was a lesson to sit back and keep listening.
    • It feels excruciating that she would have treated Zac like he walks on water, because he might be a little too much for her, but he’s still a man interested in her daughter, which was infinitely more important than a woman being interested in me. It is not surprising or lost on me that I did not find complete happiness with a man until after I realized she wasn’t there to give “advice.” Even though Zac is also queer and likes me for everything I am, she would not have believed I could tell Zac I was nonbinary and have the relationship survive. Yes, I’m sure that men who like men definitely have a problem with me………. But I only know this from watching how she treated Ryan and how she treated Meagan. Oh, and also I didn’t have any agency. It was all my emotional abuser’s idea and I had been turned somehow. Meanwhile, I’d been crying alone in my room for two years. I’m just not queer enough to exclude dating men altogether. It speaks highly of Zac’s brain that it even happened in the first place, because I do have a preference for women. It gives me a little bit of clinical separation, honestly, because not every conversation digs deep. By the time I talk to Zac, I have worn myself out on my blog.
  7. How did she inspire you in your life’s pursuits and passions?
    • She loved everything I ever did in the arts, whether it was singing, playing my horn, playing the handbells, or creative writing. She also loved asking me to help her with her room when she was decorating because she knew I was creative at that, too.
    • She wouldn’t be surprised that I turned out to be a great writer, because I was already on my way in 2016. Therefore, she was invested in my talent. She still managed to bust my balls about my behavior, though. She hated my writing at times, because she thought I was harping on a point over and over. She did not realize that autistic people are governed by monotropic thought processes. It is literally not possible for us to change gears quickly, or process emotions easily. It takes time, because nine times out of ten, it’s trouble with not being able to translate neurotypical into neurodivergent or vice versa. She thought Supergrover was bad for me, that I descended into a world of pain. She wasn’t wrong. That being said, I couldn’t find a friend of mine she did like. Neurodivergent people tend to be queer and run in packs. Therefore, if she didn’t understand me, she didn’t understand them, either. So, her interest in my blog was a mixed bag.
  8. In what ways do you see your mother’s traits or characteristics in yourself?
    • I am only strong when my back is against the wall. I only use power when I need it, not because it pleases me. Just like my mother in a classroom, I walk softly and carry a big stick. I just don’t have to be as aggressive about it now, because I have friends that respect my boundaries and I don’t feel like I’m being ignored. Your voice doesn’t have to be loud if people aren’t covering it up.
    • It is easier to be honest on the internet because when I’m in front of people, I cater to the urge to be small in front of them to gain acceptance.
    • If I’m going to be a musician, be the best musician I can be. Don’t think that you’re incapable of something. Suck until you don’t. And in fact, my voice didn’t get really exceptional until I started taking private lessons every week. It was so good to learn that I was so much more capable and confident than I thought, because I had a great voice, I’d just picked up some bad habits. She helped me work through all of them by accompanying me between lessons.
    • Take the time to get in a proper warm-up, because you’ll sound better if you’re relaxed. Start a rehearsal with your vocal cords already warm. Breathe deeply. Four measures is a long time.
  9. What do you miss the most about her?
    • I miss having someone to talk to all the time. We had long, involved conversations about her life, her career, her everything because I was happy to listen to the chatter rather than tell her I wanted to talk about my life, too. I knew she wasn’t comfortable, so I just listened. The same goes for being touched. We could say a lot without saying anything, a safe person to just walk up and hug because they’re used to it. People rarely hug me anymore, and I’m so used to it I forget I need it.
  10. How would you like people to remember her?
    • As a saint, perfectly perfect in every way, because no one gets through life without making mistakes. With your parents, it’s only a different situation because your first family installs all your triggers. I hope that by not staying silent about them, you won’t, either.

We are all a little bit broken, and that’s where the light gets in.

These questions are designed to be open-ended and reflective, allowing you to share personal stories and feelings about your mother. They can help readers understand her impact on your life and the legacy she leaves behind.

Posting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I update my blog so frequently because of how blogs work. When you update an entry, it sends a ping to search engines, the WordPress community, everyone. The more often you ping them, the more exposure you get. The reason I don’t *always* post several times a day is that Sometimes I think 10,000 words at a time. Sometimes I think 50. I am not known for being terse. Every thought comes with bonus content. When you see something flip to a completely different subject, it’s what I was writing about, then went to something else, then forgot that text was at the bottom. I am not nearly as scrambled as I seem, because most of the incoherence can be chalked up to “I forgot.”

I am detail oriented, but the details don’t come all at once. They come in as information does. I will have thoughts about every new piece of information because I’ll be collating it with what I already know to be true. Things change fast, therefore so does my web site. This is because it’s my space, the one place where I’m allowed to own it because no one asked you to be here. And I mean it. If you can’t recognize that I have agency over my own story, then your beliefs carry no inherent respect, either. That’s because if you don’t think I’m allowed to have an opinion, why should I even bother listening to yours?

I got tired of Supergrover using me as an emotional support animal, only being pleased to hear from me when it was convenient to her. She can call me the asshole for it all she wants, but that doesn’t make it untrue. She breadcrumbed me for like, eight years. Every time I tried to walk away, she got back in touch. Every single time. She was right to be angry and walk off the first time. I got tired about the 30th.

She can say I’m demanding of her time, but she opened up about how she felt and said she was enjoying writing. She also said that she was going to “offer her own psychobabble,” and she sounded JUST LIKE ME. Like, she has my patois dead to rights. Or I have hers. Chicken and egg, but I tend to say that she’s the original and I’m the copy.

It’s a lot to be told you’re a lot, and expect respect without giving it while also ignoring the fact that you’re a lot. She’s never done anything wrong, I’m a dickhead.

Yeah, that tracks. That’s what a healthy relationship looks like, that one person is always wrong no matter what they do. To add insult to injury, me telling her for years that it felt like a cat and mouse game while she continually said that she wasn’t manipulative while she manipulated me. That’s because some of her last words were “I do not want to get back into the cat and mouse game with you.” Which one of us is the cat here? Sometimes, she was full of love. Sometimes, she was full of piss and vinegar. The same could be said of me, but I was willing to talk it through so that we didn’t have these issues anymore. We could start actually enjoying each other instead of both turning into bitches on wheels every time we disagree.

It’s not her fault. It’s just as much mine. But she runs from her emotions, and I don’t. It is problematic, and the only answer was to let her go back to what she’s used to in life. if I’m the only person that ever gives her problems, which I don’t doubt because she’d never open up enough to offend any of her friends, then I am out permanently. You don’t get to walk around in my inner landscape and call me a judgmental dickhead for nearly every opinion I have.

I spent two paragraphs telling her about a situation with someone else and how I’d mishandled it. She responded that I was so judgmental and needed to back off and all this bullshit that I’d explained to her in my letter already. I did not need additional reproach. She reads so quickly that she misses a lot, and gets very angry if I say she’s missed something because she’s perfect. I called her on it, that she was reading too fast and I got these messages in quick succession:

“I read too fast. I meant that I am not angry. If you are, have at it.”

“Don’t insinuate/insult me/something like that I don’t read your stuff.”

I told her that I wasn’t basing my response on anything but timestamps, that I was not guilting her. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. She made a mistake. Obviously all my fault.

Fuck me running.

Now that I can move away from all of it and call bullshit, pings mean more than she does. That’s because I can’t count on a future with anyone but me.

Luckily, I’m turning out to be a fun person to hang out with.

Pricks on My Skin

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just thought of something and it occurred to me that I wanted to remember this feeling. I don’t write about anyone in a negative way to write about them. I write about them so I remember why reaching out is a bad idea. I have to remind myself every day that Supergrover and I aren’t talking this week…… Sigh. We’re both tired. Tired of so many things.

I don’t come absolutely unglued in these entries because I feel a need to shame people. I write to explain why I can’t go back in time. The fact that I broke my beautiful girl’s heart is a fixed point in time is so painful that I’ve been to some really dark places over the years. It doesn’t matter as much to me what she’s done as what I have, because it takes so much longer to forgive yourself than to forgive someone else.

I regret that I never got to know her in person, because she said she’s more fun and funny in person and I’ve never doubted it for a minute. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in deep grief that wouldn’t go away simply because we wouldn’t stop picking on each other and get it together. We were never fighting about the thing we were supposed to be fighting about.

She couldn’t get vulnerable enough to fight about the real issue, and I don’t think she ever will. In her last letter, she talked around it. She got very close. I realized it when she said “you’re not the only one who has triggers.” I’m the problem. It’s me.

She can’t admit that she’s scared of me. I’ve told her I’m scared of her. We both took each other to the mat. We both fucking lost, because we each had a little red button regarding my writing and her career. Something we could hold over each other’s heads for 10 years and fight about something else.

So, that’s why we fluctuate on how close we want to be. It’s not a one-sided problem. It is, as she says, “a wheel with many spokes…” Which I had to retype because at first I typed “a spoke with many wheels.” I think we are on the same page, I just call it a tapestry. I think we say the same things in different words without realizing it a lot of the time. The most interesting thing to me about her last letter was how close I was in terms of seeing what was going on. I was right. She said that my words felt like pricks on her skin, and any strength I had left went out the window. I thought, “I am not communicating effectively, because this is not what I want in the slightest.”

So, of course I would just keep explaining.

Just like according to Jim Gaffigan, “if there was a Catholic service started somewhere, it’s still going on,” I felt similarly about starting a letter to Supergrover. Because again, I call her that because she’s cute, cuddly, and works blue. She also said once that she didn’t mind being monstrous, and that was the picture that popped into my head. That’s because she’s Alduin when she wants to be, and has always been my Pet Monster on a Fraying Leash, Inc. I sent her a meme of a little girl braiding a dragon’s hair.

Why a dragon had hair that long is another matter.

But the thing is, I’ve grown into my own type of dragon over the years, but I’m always afraid I can only sneeze sparks. I believe that in English, it would be called “imposter syndrome.” I’m not sure anyone really gets over it. I know lots of people older than me that still get intimidated by things. We’re always learning that the world is bigger than we think it is, which is why the greatest acknowledgement as you age is how relatively little you know. I’ve studied political science and international affairs since college. I can assure you there’s a lot I don’t know. But I do research the news thoroughly because I don’t normally write about stories immediately, but it’s the easiest way to get illustrations for my blog. Although I’m noticing that my posts on history have gotten attention, too, like “The Personal Computer.”

I study the news to stay relevant, because I want it to be a mix of me being able to exercise my demons when I need it, but also be able to weave current events and history throughout my writing no matter what. I have gone into sensory deprivation lately, though. I have never known less about the world because right now I’m in burnout over it. It’s too much, too fast. I’ll get back to it. I just need a breather to reset.

I feel like the blogging prompts were all meant for memoirs, except on rare occasions. This is because most of the prompts were talking about recreating a scene in your mind. Depending on who you ask, I am either brilliant or terrible at it. By the time the camp was large enough to be firmly divided, the less I cared because both sides had a hot take that wasn’t necessarily true. I am neither as brilliant nor absolutely fucking evil as everyone says. I talk a lot of shit for someone who can’t reach the top shelf.

But it’s because I’m talking it out and you’re seeing my emotions go up and down that eventually “shit works out, my dear.” You see my struggle as I come to peace within myself, because in order to let people go, this is how I grieve them. Fortunately, since this is the Internet, they’ll be able to come back later and re-read my words without so many emotions attached. I have often found it surprising how much I’ve learned in five years. 😉

That’s because they’re not seeing the 3D character. They’re reading every day, when entries are actually just micro chapters of a book. In order for you to see yourself as a 3D character, you’d have to read it bound. My dragon would look so much different to herself if she went back to 2013 and read forwards. The plot moves forward, and shit works out.

I have written about emotions that cover the entire spectrum. There are some feelings I can’t describe even now. But it’s not about making her feel bad. It’s to remind me that I shouldn’t reach out, when it’s not what I want. I’m not whining about it, just trying to retrain my brain. For 10 years, my absolute first impulse has been to tell her everything. I’m autistic and this is a monotropic thought process (the hitting “compose” part). Therefore, I experience a lot of anger- also not to anger her, but to remind myself that my emotions are valid, and her opinion of me doesn’t determine my worth.

I didn’t say “right” or “wrong.” I said “valid.”

We both invalidated the other’s feelings all the time because we were so eager to run out the door. It’s been a disaster every time I’ve tried to retrain my brain before, because I’ll just crash and burn and it makes her furious whether she says anything or not. When she does, she doesn’t say it without spikes, which gets my hackles up because I’m not itching for a fight. And yet if someone tries to make it hurt first rattle out of the box, it induces red mist rage and I go blind. Unfortunately, I can type with my eyes closed and hilarity does not ensue.

Unfortunately, this is also startlingly common among autistic people because we cannot regulate our emotions.

“Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.” -Sylvia Plath

With neurodivergence, there’s a switch that flips between “obsessed” and “completely disinterested.” There is no middle ground absolutely ever. ADHD people are great at multitasking in some cases because even though they’re monotropic thinkers, they can switch channels so fast that no one notices. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve noticed in the kitchen. You’re multitasking and in hyperfocus at the same time. It’s where you’re “in the zone,” and finding the right ratio is hard as FUCK.

God forbid I have an unexpressed thought, but I gave myself a space to do that without bothering anyone else, but they came here expecting that if I portrayed them as a deity once, it would always be that way… Even those who have been reading my writing for years. They’re never allowed to change and grow over the years because they fired themselves. I describe times where my emotional needs are being met and everything is wonderful, and I describe when my emotional needs are being ignored and how it’s my problem to deal with, but that doesn’t make it easy. When someone is committed to not hearing you, then you don’t try to change them. You walk away.

But I wouldn’t let Supergrover go and not because I didn’t want to; I felt like we were trapped in a vicious cycle because of our trauma bond. Believe me when I tell you that she is one of the most beautiful, most capable, most successful people I know. Believe me when I tell you that the medium is the message. Emotions hit harder in writing. Both of us have huge emotions and a terrific amount of empathy, and we both throw it away to pick on each other. Over time, it became less and less worth it because she was Breadcrumbing me and wouldn’t admit it until she did.

I don’t write to punish her. I write so that I remember I have a reason to move on, because otherwise I never would have had the strength to let go. In the beginning, I thought she was single and I never wanted to let her go ever. But then I decided her boyfriend would take issue with that once I really took in the enormity of the situation and had a better handle on it.

But it’s not just her husband that would object to not being able to spend time with her, and I’m ok with that. There’s her parents. And her kids. And her siblings. And her friends. And her dogs. I’m just the late night crowd, literally the piano man. She’s even put bread in my jar.

But that’s because my writing didn’t make her mad because she was reading as a fan. She read it with totally different eyes once she was in it, and I couldn’t leave her out. I just can’t say everything I’d ever want to about the situation, and she doesn’t want to help me manage it. So I wing it……………………………… Poorly.

There are some life events that are too important not to record, because I don’t really have any day to day memories of Kathleen EXCEPT for what I’ve written on my blog. We were together when I was a junior in college the first time around. Therefore, the reason I write so obsessively is so that my memories don’t fade. My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. I want this fucking blog.

So, you can call it silly or stupid or whatever you want, but I bet The Bloggess is crying into her bank account over it. Maybe I’ll get there one day. Maybe I’m just a hack. However, that’s not up to me. Apparently since Jenny got a big metal chicken before I thought of it, she’s more successful than me (kidding, she’s one of my favorite writers of all time). If only I’d bought Beyonce first. Emphatic fist shake!

It doesn’t bother me when people come and go, because if it’s not worth reading, I don’t encourage people to stay. I want to be worth your time, but not because I have to bend over backwards trying to explain my life in a way you’re not angry because I botched the characterization…. And come back later and apologize, because after you’ve thought about it, I had a valid point. You were angry. Or, alternatively, I explain my thought process more fully and you understand it, when you thought I thought one thing and it was exactly the opposite, because you don’t actually know what I’m alluding to- you think you do. How well we communicate is what allows me to capture people in real life.

So, first of all, I don’t want friends who don’t believe in me as a writer, because there’s never going to be a time in which I write the way you like it consistently. It’s an impossible task. It’s setting me up to fail.

I’m not going to let anyone set me up to fail. I owe it to my beautiful girl, because it was her love and adoration that made me feel this way. That I had a right to take up space in the world.

She gave me back to myself, and I sleep deeper most nights because of it. She appears in my dreams frequently, all the conversations I would have liked to have had playing out as scripts in my head. God, I’m such an INFJ. How dare I use my dreams to go to therapy? It seems like a lot of work. That’s because it is.

It’s essentially praying, dividing my brain in half so that I’m thinking about what I’m saying and creating the responses as well. It helps me get clarity and calm down. My clarity is not someone else’s truth, and if I wasn’t a writer, you wouldn’t know any of this. I am not out to psychoanalyze anyone but me, and the way I do it is by looking at the situation with an omnipotent third eye. I am very judgmental when it comes to situations, not people. I look at problems through the lens of medicine, psychiatry, and ministry.

“Grace never leaves you where you were found.”

-Anne Lamott

I Just Didn’t Have It In Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I got demand avoidance over writing. I take a lot of heat for my opinions, but I am of the same mind as Ben Franklin…. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” So, first of all, my blog is why I stand up- to have a voice at all. Sometimes it shakes, and I speak my truth, anyway. That doesn’t mean that my truth means someone else is lying. They are not having the same experience as me. So, if we have mutual friends and they have a different story than me, please believe both. It’s not a matter of truth vs. lying, but what both people picked up in the room- and by necessity, those won’t match because we didn’t know what the other was thinking. There is room for more than one truth, and mine isn’t the only one. That’s because there’s truth, the subjective, and Truth, the objective. I do not traffic in Truth so much as truth. I cannot be omnipotent, I can only be a diarist. The problem comes in when my readers want me to be omnipotent, representing their mindsets.

I am not here to take away validity from anyone else’s story. I am here to name it and claim it, whatever it is. It really hurt me when Supergrover said that I’d painted some things as fact that I didn’t have the right. I had no idea what the hell that meant, because it’s not like she talked to me about what I was writing, or offered suggestions as to how I could make it better and more accurate. I was floundering because I had no information and my responses were feeding themselves without any input at all. So, if you leave me to my own devices and never address anything, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because you don’t have a problem with it. If you tell me there’s a problem, I can regroup.

I cannot be held to the standard of apologizing for everything I don’t know. Everything I don’t know is fucking enormous, in this situation and in others. What I can do is apologize for what I do know. I’m shattered that I hurt my beautiful girl at all, ever, but I am so incredibly human and fallible. I made mistakes. Full stop.

I just got tired of paying for them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over……… You get my drift. As I told her, “I don’t get to decide how long you hurt, but I do get to decide where the line is between justifiably angry and holding a grudge.” I didn’t get tired of her being hurt and angry. I got tired of her not wanting to resolve any of it so we didn’t have to live in hurt and anger.

As I have said before, I would have cut off any one of my limbs to read her blog entries about me (she’s not a blogger, I’m just sayin’). I would have liked to have been angered and moved by her words, too…. And I was, but only when she was mad enough to say “I’ll answer this one, but after that, fuck right off.”

I know she doesn’t want drama. I know I don’t, either. But we’re both cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It’s an unbreakable connection on both sides, because after a few months goes by, the urge to tell each other things returns in full force. Then, we get close and after a few months, we’ll blow a gasket and tell each other to fuck off again. It’s seriously like an addiction I can’t kick, because neither one of us are very good at no contact. This is because it makes me cry every single time she says “I’ve been good. I’ve followed the rules. You said you wouldn’t reach out again, and yet, you did.” The fact that she thinks she’s being good by not talking to me wrecks me every single time. We are not cut out for this.

We are both tenderheart bears, yet not without our claws.

It’s just time to put them away, and for her, that answer is distance. For me, that answer is connection and resolution. I will never be happy with a relationship in which someone intentionally keeps things from me, because it makes me afraid and untrusting. I don’t need that anxiety, and I’ve confronted her about it many times before writing about it here. It’s frustrating, because she’s mad I let the world into ours, I’m mad that she doesn’t listen to me and you do.

In the end, I basically had to choose between being a writer and being her friend, and I chose me. It was time if she was going to keep stonewalling me, and I have no doubt that she would have done it until she died or I did.

But that’s my baby girl…. And I don’t mean that in a romantic way at all. I mean literally, in my mind, she’s a child. One I was supposed to love, protect, honor, all that. I did and I didn’t. Very mixed results. I do not blame her for any of that. I was a straight up mental mess. However, once I got it together, there were no more conversations in which we could make headway because we were still so cautious and resentful in the first place.

It is seriously one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever been a part of, and yet also something I never want to live without. I can’t, because even when she’s not here, she’s here. When I write, I can feel her presence, and she’s usually teasing me.

Something to the effect of “come on, Lanagan. I know you have more in you than that.” I basically just replace the person I know now with the person I knew 10 years ago because those memories are happier. I do not like all of the unpleasantness, and I am finished with it. I am receiving the closure I need the longer I go on having sent her very healthy messages in return, because it says to me that she was only in it for a dog to kick.

Being called a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years will do that to you.

Meanwhile, I have so many terms of endearment for her that I couldn’t even write you a list at this point. She can also act like a huge jackass, but I don’t think of that as her personality.

When I think of her personality, I go a little starry-eyed. Still. After 10 years.

It’s not a game, and I resent that statement more than anything else. I promised her I’d be there for her for her whole life. I didn’t know what it would entail, I just said yes. At that point, we didn’t even really know each other, and yet I knew I was forging an unbreakable connection.

It started to feel like only her pain mattered, only her thoughts mattered, only her everything mattered. That’s because I made time for it. She did not make time for my feelings in terms of responding to them unless they were about other people. I have never managed to convince her that we need to work on our own communication. No one’s relationship with anyone is off the table except for apparently the one between us.

I haven’t been saying that this is all her fault, or using my blog to be shitty to her. That’s because I was not having the same experience as her, so I doubt she’s been tracking with me this whole time. I am positive that has led her to believe things about me that are not true, because she doesn’t respond. She takes things in and “reads between many lines.” But no actual communication regarding any of it except for “I’m furious beyond belief at some of your entries, and moved by others.” Well, what the fuck are you mad about and what moved you?

I feel like both of those things are important for me to know.

Because if I knew what moved her, I’d always write like that. I always want everything to be happy and sunny in my world, but the world doesn’t work that way. It’s complicated and sometimes it’s dark. Sometimes, it’s really dark.

But, for every storm, there’s a rainbow.

One More Sleep

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s my last night in this room, as Zac is coming over tomorrow after drill to help me move my stuff, and if we don’t have time to do it all, we’ll finish it up Sunday after 5:00. I don’t think it will take very long, but that depends on our energy levels and the stairs at both places. I’m lucky in that Zac is very handy, so he has tools already that would be helpful and yet, I wouldn’t have thought of them on my own, like a drill and a hand truck, etc.

So, as I close out this chapter in my life, I have a million thoughts in my head, pictures going by too fast to get one to stick. The people who’ve lived here with me, the things that have happened, etc. It’s a lot. But my entire DC story minus the 18 months I lived here in my early 20s has been created in this one house, mostly this one room.

I hope I’m as comfortable at the new house as I have been here, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to cohabit so long without incident. It is one of the longest stretches at an address I’ve ever had.

Everything is, big picture, going to be the same. When you get into the details, my route around town changes. I “have a dog now,” because the house I live in now has five dogs, but none of them live on my side of the house. I don’t see them for months at a time, but I’ll hear them.

Jack will have free run of the house, and may sleep with me some nights. I can walk him whenever I wish. I think it will be good for me, because I always notice I’m calmer when I’m writing and Oliver, who is a dog, is in the room. His presence is everything, so I hope Jack and I will have the same vibe.

I need to get to work, but I thought it was too important a date to go without writing just because I was busy with other things. I am very, very busy with other things and absolutely could not afford to tell you all this, but I thought, “will it matter in five years if you didn’t blog today?” That’s the moment I stopped. This is a milestone.

Nine years is a long time.

When I landed at DCA, it was midday. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go right home or to Kramerbooks, but ultimately tiredness won out; I took the Metro to Silver Spring, where Hayat picked me up.

Hayat drove me to BWI when Lindsay called and said that my mother had died and I needed to come home.

Hayat gave me a Lebanese jewelry box that is one of my favorite things, because I designed my room around the color scheme of the tiling. The curtains are teal, and are thick enough to use as blackout. I never have to worry about working a graveyard shift ever again, because she said I could take them as well. 😉 And on that note, I have to go- for some reason my Android has decided it does not like the “Enter” key today, so I cannot make new paragraphs. I’m not sure my brain is capable of new paragraphs, either.

Please Allow Me a Bit of Procrastination

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My little AuDHD brain is overwhelmed and I need to shut down, refocus. So, I’m sitting on my bed and writing an entry… soothing myself back from burnout/demand avoidance because I have so much to do. Or, I think I have so much to do because my brain is consistently arranged like “The Persistence of Memory.” Everything is clear and logical, with solid lines….. except for the dripping clock. I have no ability to estimate how long a job will take, and my room isn’t honestly that big. I do not have the ability, however, to say “I have X number of days…. how much do I need to devote to packing so that I’m absolutely ready by the time Zac gets here? I have already packed a few boxes, and I have plenty left because they’re so large. It’s helpful that they’re canvas, because they’re just as heavy as cardboard, but they have nicer handles. So far, I like the orange ones best.

It’s kind of interesting that my moving boxes are a stunning array of colors.

I’ve been moving hard, but I cannot sustain concentration and effort on packing right now. My muscles need a break and I’m desperate for some water. But even when I sit down, I’m still searching for something. My mind gets busy when my body is weak.

On the autism subreddit there are tests to get you started in terms of gauging whether you have autism or not. It’s confusing, especially when you have ADHD….. although the most insightful test for me was called “the Aspie test,” and I’m sure they mean “Asperger’s,” but apparently that is a dirty word because Asperger was a Nazi. Anyway, there are different ways of asking the questions, and it clarified something that I could not explain, but I know is true.

It asked me when I read books if I could imagine/picture the characters. The Aspie test was the only one that allowed me to choose “imagination and visualization are two different things.” I am moved by prose, I am not seeing a movie in my head. I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but I generally write quite a bit more than that. What a focus on in a novel is empathy with the characters; I like reading how they think and feel. However, when I read descriptions of people’s physical attributes, it means nothing.

I will tell you that when I got to see an actual picture of the real Supergrover recently, I thought, “I will never in my lifetime do her justice, and there’s absolutely no one they could cast that would look anything like her.” It made me sad, because I realized if I didn’t read that way, I wouldn’t write that way, either…. it’s not my wheelhouse.

I swear to God, if I publish a book and you have no idea what any of the characters look like, it’s only because I have no idea, either.

So far, I’ve taken all of the quizzes. I 100% have traits of autism according to one because they took more information from me than anyone else. It was rad. They asked my gender at birth and gender now, my age, and whether I was self-diagnosed or professionally diagnosed. Then, they asked if I was professionally or self diagnosed with ADHD. The answer is that I am self diagnosed/suspected ASD and professionally diagnosed ADHD. THEN I started the questionnaire. That means it’s a weighted score, because the test already knows that if you’re diagnosed with one, there’s an 80% chance you have the other.

The thing that really freaked me out was that they asked if I had a specific gait, if I’d been accused of staring at anyone, if I had depth perception issues…… I mean WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK?

No one had to call me out like this.

At the same time, now that I’ve taken all of these quizzes that back up my gut feeling (I’ve taken the monotropism questionnaire and got a very high score, but nothing like the ones above), I don’t have imposter syndrome anymore. I finally have answers to miscommunications lasting back decades.

The worst was “I often say things that other people think come across as mean, and I don’t understand why.”

However, it is to Supergrover’s credit that I started down this road, because of course ADHD Facebook groups often have Autistic memes as well because we’re both neurodivergent. I saw a few too many autism posts that skewered me, and I started doing the research. The reason the credit goes to her is that she may never have thought of me as a narcissist, but her words made me feel like one when I was trying to reach out to her. I had to find what was missing in me. How could I improve my communication skills so I didn’t come off that way anymore? When I figure it all out, I’ll let you know. But at the same time, I have made progress. It’s just hard to make progress when there are several differences in the way I communicate with most of the world:

  • I am a big picture person. Always. My mind is not built to handle detail. This leads to professional and personal problems, because detail at work is required and detail at home depends on your partner. Are you always forgetting details that are important to them, having the most insensitive reaction possible, having them tell you that “you knew what you were doing?” There are a million cues built into the system that lead people to the most obvious answer. So, if I was neurotypical, I have no doubt that those people would be right. I’m not. I’m autistic. Therefore, my brain processes information differently and because it’s so out of sync with the rest of the world, it is aggressively annoying. I will do everything I can to help you navigate being in a relationship with me except read your mind. I will not pick up on the fact that you’re mad about something just because we haven’t spoken.
  • I see patterns in everything, all the time, when it comes to human behavior. I am not a STEM genius that can do magic with data strings. When I was a kid, I was the one that knew everyone’s phone number off the top of my head. Now, without my iPhone, I could 100% call my dad. Everyone else I might get wrong. One out of hundreds of contacts is not that great.
    • I know this because I do know my sister’s phone number, but when I had to dial it recently I put in the wrong area code and had to start over. So, I suppose I know two numbers.
    • I remember e-mail addresses easier than I remember phone numbers because I’m driven by letters. I still have a friend on AOL. It’s adorable. I have thought many times “what if I had the money to send her a GIANT BOX of AOL disks and a copy of Windows 95?”
  • I get lost in tasks to the exclusion of all else, and this shows most adamantly in working on computers. If something is wrong with my computer, I will take it down to the studs, because I prefer doing everything the same way every time. I am also not a detail person. I am a “keep everything on a cloud drive so that I don’t have to deal with details” kind of person.
  • It doesn’t take me very long to get frustrated with a task, and my fuse is more short with Windows, because I can use Google or ChatGPT to find the snippets of code I need to fix my Linux system. I should look on a DOS subreddit, but I won’t. The only DOS command I need is wsl –install (Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and the default distribution, Ubuntu). I will not put up with any system foolishness. If a hard drive disagrees with me, they seem to STFU when I drop the partition table. Troubleshooting a problem in either operating system can take hours. When things start getting difficult, I would rather start over. Metaphor for neurodivergent life, probably because we’re all relentless perfectionists so that we don’t get labeled lazy.
  • I do not like being interrupted, and while I am not grumpy about it, I am frustrated that nothing ever goes back to the way it was. It takes me a long time to transition in and out of “the zone,” no matter the task. But I’m not the type to say “you interrupted me,” because it’s not my job to enforce strict rules on who can talk to me when. I do, however, miss the many ideas that have floated off into thin air, and thankful I’m fast enough to have another idea to replace it.
  • I don’t process things verbally very well, because I think a lot faster than I speak. I’m literally having buffer overflow issues, and trying not to stutter when I’m in conversation. That’s because I generally have one thought building on another and I have to take all those strands and braid them before I speak. And even then, I often realize that I might have said something truthful, but I had no idea of the impact, because I have no idea how my words are going to be received.

Not knowing how my words were being received was instrumental in making me wonder why Supergrover called me a judgmental dickhead all the time, when I was sending her so much love and attention…… but I didn’t change for her. I noticed that I was struggling with relationships in every area of my life and couldn’t explain why in those cases, either. It was a long journey, because I didn’t want to be flippant. I wanted to be Maude Lebowski “thorough” before I said anything, because there’s a lot of hate in the autism community for people who don’t do the homework and just decide on two Tik-Toks that this is totally them.

Therefore, not only did I seek out autistic YouTubers, I also sought out lectures by M.D.s and Ph.Ds describing the symptoms of the disorders on the spectrum overall. That lots of people are creative and not visual. Because the autism test asked if I had depth perception issues, I assume that there are lots of people who can’t see movies in their heads because they don’t have the ability to put things correctly into their environment. Someone with 2D vision cannot have immersive experiences, for the most part. For instance, trees aren’t blobs because I don’t have glasses. They’re blobs because they’re all 2D. I can’t place individual branches on their x, y, and z axes…… particularly zed. I call it the zed axis because even though I’m an American, “Zed” sounds like more of a villain name……..

Zed Axis…….. so we meet again……..

So, because I cannot place things in their environment, can’t process thoughts and emotions the same way as a neurotypical person, and look like I’m from the Ministry of Silly Walks, I am a long way from normal before I ever really start talking about “my issues.” But they all combine to give me a hilarious sense of humor if you are also neurodivergent, because one of the things that the tests point out is that neurodivergent and neurotypical humor is different, too. We generally have no sense of propriety, and are always on the “think it, say it” plan regardless of the consequences, because it’s a disability, not a personal failing (I do not mean that one can or should blame their behavior on a disability. It’s the disabled person’s job to fix it because someone’s poor impulse control, demand avoidance, etc. isn’t a partner/coworker/boss’s responsibility except to give us everything we are entitled to through our places of work….. or, in the case of a partner, taking our needs seriously. A good example is that I basically like three brands of clothes because of the way they feel on my skin. Say my partner finds socks two dollars cheaper at Costco?

They might say “what’s the difference?” And I will be absolutely devastated, both because I don’t want to disappoint the person that brought the wrong thing, so I’ll use them until they wear out, annoyed they aren’t what I want. Socks last a long time and there’s no real need to replace them except for my autism making it where I can’t concentrate on anything else because the tag is three centimeters off from where it normally is. I feel all of these things. I hear sounds other people don’t notice. I pick up on behaviors other people don’t notice.

One of the questions and answers was interesting, because it told me a lot without saying a word:

The question was “can you easily pick up social cues?” One of the choices is “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.”

Christ on a cracker.

There’s also the matter of your abilities as a conversationalist………… Because you take everything literally, there’s probably no White Elephant in the room. If there’s something that needs to be said, if you’re autistic you probably just blurted it out like it was nothing, because to you it wasn’t, and you don’t understand the emotion coming at you. It gets overwhelming fast if you’re with more than one person, which is why I try to be with only one person at a time. I cannot process two people talking while also thinking of something to say. I end up missing the jumping in point, because they’re supercomputers and I’m a raspberry pi. I am much quicker than other people in text, but it’s a different kind of comprehension. I’m the supercomputer when they’re at a disadvantage.

Because I don’t process voices well, I do like talking on the phone, but only to the people who are very, very close to me. That’s because I don’t want it to be too long in between hearing each other’s voices. With literally anyone else, I tend to talk with my hands. I talk with my hands in person, too, but that’s just because I’m a Texan.

A Texan who has just realized that procrastination time is up. Have fun with the quizzes if you decide to take them. And by “fun,” I mean “I didn’t actually know you could feel this devastated and elated simultaneously.”

Back to Normal

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Last night I got to talk on the phone with Zac for the first time in what seems like eons, because we have a date coming up on the 10th to go and see Jason Moran at The Kennedy Center. I was teasing him and said, “do you even like jazz?” He, very, very diplomatically, I might add, said, “I like you enough to buy you tickets and go with you to a jazz concert.” I fell over with laughter, but then he said that he wanted to catch up in person, so we didn’t talk long. But it was very good to hear his voice and I am glad that I don’t have to wait much longer to see Oliver, who is a dog. I have always teased Zac about this, that Oliver and I are in a relationship and he can come, too. He jokes back that Oliver is arguably one of his best features.

I don’t know whether it will happen any time soon with my move and all, but I can’t wait to have more couch time with Zac just watching Slow Horses, because it really is fun hearing the real stories behind how they do things in tradecraft (it doesn’t matter whether we’re watching CIA or MI-6, they use nearly identical techniques). I had to wait while Zac is out of town because that’s the one “couple show” I promised him, although I have gone back and watched “The Pigeon Tunnel” several times to fall asleep.

The first couple of times I watched it because it was exciting, and now it’s John le Carré seemingly rocking me to sleep. Have you heard his voice? It’s distinctive and posh, which he explains is an affectation because he grew up a trained thief whose family was always broke; his father was often working for/running from the Russian mafia.

When David’s father (Cornwell- I use it with John le Carré interchangeably) realized how successful his books were, his dad started running a game on him. Threw a shit fit because David wouldn’t give him any money, and he never heard from him again. But David wasn’t hard-nosed. His father asked him for money to invest in some pipe dream of a farm, and David said that if he wanted to work a farm, he would buy it for him outright and give him an allowance to run it. David’s father running off into the night clearly meant that David’s money was going to be used for completely legit purposes.

So, exploring old le Carré adaptations has been my jam recently. I think “The Little Drummer Girl” is actually better than “Tinker Tailor,” but perhaps I’m biased because it felt as adrenaline-fueled as Alias and Homeland.

I also found a really old adaptation of the Bourne series that was on TV in the 80s or early 90s. It’s so great, although quite dated and no one will ever be Matt Damon…. or Julia Stiles, for that matter.

I also got to talk to Bryn a little bit and we’re getting excited. May first is not all that far away. It’s going to be hard to believe she’s real, but I hope we have a blast. And I’m up for as much sightseeing as they want to do, or sitting around and catching up. Perhaps it will be really nice weather and we can sit outside. I can’t wait to see how Colin reacts to Bryn and Jack’s (also a dog) “Conversations.” Since Bryn is a dog trainer, dogs don’t move unless she allows it, and all dogs naturally do it around her because she just exudes alpha. How can you not, after working with primates all those years? And in terms of “screaming alpha,” it doesn’t have to do with anything but soft, quiet strength.

Alpha males in the human population are picking up lessons from animals that they never meant to give. Alphas lead from the back, they take care of everyone else. They’re the ones you go to in a problem. They are not parading around telling people they’re they alpha because no one has to ask. It just shows.

I think we’re both getting used to each other’s strengths, and picking up where the other feels weak. I can’t divine things over text all the time, so I would say that I talk to Bryn on the phone and Video Messenger most frequently than I do anyone else. What I’ve discovered is that having female energy around me is enough- that if I don’t meet a life partner, I’m happy as I am. It’s fine for Zac to have other partners, because I set up our relationship that way. I knew he already had partners, and I was prepared to be fairly low on the totem pole because I didn’t want to be a partner in the capital p sense of the word. I’m too busy a writer…. just because I write in volume doesn’t mean I’m not saying anything of substance…..

All of the comments I’ve gotten in the last few years have proven to me that’s not true, so that’s not a dart that can hurt. My readers have been with me through everything, the good and the bad. They don’t act like the universe has punished me for a decision because it hasn’t. I go on to a new thing depending on the options in front of me, knowing that how it worked out is how it’s supposed to be. I said something yesterday that I didn’t clarify in the moment. I have before, but not just then. When I said that it wasn’t my destiny to belong to one person, but to many, I didn’t mean my partners. I meant all of you. That this is not a joke or a hobby, it’s been a portfolio I’ve built over 20 years.

Who has peer reviewed me?

  • Martina Navratilova
  • Margaret Cho
  • Wil Wheaton
  • Eden Kennedy
  • Ernie Hsuing
  • Anil Dash
  • Jonna Mendez
  • Mary Karr

Therefore, I don’t need external validation to know that I do help people more than me. I say things of substance all the time, and there is nothing on God’s green earth that will ever convince me otherwise. That’s because not only have I looked at my own writing and thought, “I like that line.” It was one Supergrover liked, too. There’s no more substance to my writing than that. I’ve already made it. I’m done. My career will never get any better, and I swear on a stack of Bibles.

That’s because I will never in my lifetime be seen the way I am right now, the way I have been for 10 years.

If SuperGrover saw Daniel’s “I will skewer you” letter, I bet you anything her reaction was “Fuuuuuuuuck. Let me get my purse. :::::sigh::::” Even if she never reads this entry, that image made me fall over with laughter, because it was like the beginning of “The Incredibles.” “Can’t you just stay clean for one minute?! I just cleaned up!” Like, the newsreel is playing in my head and I’m cackling. I need laughter right now, and it feels good.

You know, even when you’re no longer speaking, if you don’t dissolve a company, it still exists. Therefore, I choose to believe that Leslie Lanagan & Pet Monsters on a Fraying Leash™ is still intact. In fact, I have added new members. It’s just a longer flight for Bryn….. but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do it.

We’re big enough to face our feelings head on, and it’s so hard to fool a dog trainer that I stopped trying long ago because I figured out quickly I couldn’t keep up with her. Because of this, I have an innate interest in seeing her on the floor of Congress. 😉 She wouldn’t do it, I’d just like to see what happens when I just light the firecracker and she goes.

She also doesn’t care that my blog makes me sound like a dick.

I’m so blessed that I have friends who support me no matter what, no matter when. Even Supergrover. How do I know? She told me.

So, she may be far from my heart, but not from my soul. It’s only now that I realize because our communication was so poor, I was never receiving any of the messages she was trying to send and vice versa. I don’t know that we can ever be trusted to create new patterns again. But I know us. If we knew the other was in trouble, we’d have to sit on our hands to keep from moving and even that wouldn’t last long.

She gave me the confidence to believe that I am the one who knocks, and not in a scary way. It’s just an illustration that I am old enough to have boundaries and limits. I am old enough to decide what I want to invite in and keep out of my life. I don’t have to accept the status quo, as in trying to fit in where I wasn’t wanted. What I found was that Daniel loved the idea of being married, but didn’t seem to like me much. He only had two problems with me- everything I did and everything I said…. because it was always a blame game instead of working together.

I decided that it wasn’t going to get any worse because I wasn’t playing another game. He’s still playing games, but all of his e-mails are going to Spam, because I’m not interested in reopening the discussion or reengaging. He’s right- I can’t block him from my blog. But I can limit my exposure to him. I have to trust my instincts on this one, and my instincts say he’s not the right change for me now….. when people tell you who they are, believe them. I could forgive Daniel being totally avoidant last time around, because we were both under pressure. I did not see enough change in him to warrant continuing the relationship because I’d say things like “I want to work with you,” and I never got more than “I’m tired of being yelled at every day.” First of all, I never even turned on a caps key.

Second of all, I was talking about how we could integrate both Cora and Daniel into a house with me- there wasn’t anything about which to yell. I didn’t ask for heat, but I got a lot of it.

And it’s not about him. It’s about me not wanting to take a gamble that my next ten years are going to be exactly like my last. I’d like to make new mistakes now, because I have people in my life who allow me to do that, because they know they’ll always make new mistakes, too.

I know this is all over the place, but what’s different about that? I just wanted some room to stretch out, process the last week or so, and enjoy some time with solo packing and getting ready for my new house. I really am excited. It’s time for a change all around.

The funniest thing that’s happened is that there are two Colins in my phone. I was telling one that we should overhaul a few old iPods and see how much we can get for them- Bluetooth, USB-C, etc. Colin responded that he might have an old one I could play with, and I said, “oh, that wasn’t meant for you, but I love that you just responded like this was a perfectly normal thing to ask a housemate.” He laughed. I like that we’re doing all the good witty banter so that it’s not awkward when I get there.

David has already told me that he has a girlfriend, but I haven’t met her yet, and don’t know if/when I will. But it will be cool to know her and to have Colin meet Zac and Bryn. Bryn won’t be around all the time, but it’s good that they’ll know who each other are nonetheless.

It would also be perfect if Lindsay was here that week, but I’m not going to hope too high on that one. Lindsay is a mythical figure, both here and not here. I think she is secretly a mythical creature, and no one has ever bothered to prove me wrong. You wouldn’t either if you met her. She’s pretty invincible.

So, if Lindsay’s in town, now I have two fierce dragon women saying, “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck……… let me get my purse.”

And now things are back to normal.

Pickpocketing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?

I love Skyrim. When you pickpocket someone, you get to see the inventory of their pants.

For me, pickpocketing would be about magic, not stealing. It would have been a hit at parties if I set it up in advance…. that someone will lose their wallet, and can claim it later.

I will have all the wallets in five to seven minutes, because that’s how long I’ve got. Take longer than that, the easier it is to catch you in action.

In real life, I’m not comfortable racing against the clock, even in a video game. The exception is the kitchen, because I’m not solo. This is unacceptable to my ADHD. I thrive on ironclad structure and the other half of my brain hates my fuckin’ guts. This is because when I create iron structure, I cannot maintain it. I am happy for a little while with rigidity, but the longer it goes on the more my ADHD can’t handle it. That’s why my energy levels for tasks are different all the time. My ADHD makes it its mission in life to ensure my autism is miserable.

I have demand avoidance down to taking care of myself. Yet, at other times I can be the life of a party. I’m sure depression and hypomania play a role in my energy levels, but now that I know so much about ADHD and Autism (through endless panels and lectures on YouTube), I am finding that maybe I’m not depressed. Maybe I have been mistaking depression for autism. Every one of my symptoms of depression and hypomania feel like what the psychiatrists and psychologists are trying to explain about how AuDHD works. To me, it’s a reframing, because it doesn’t feel like depression and hypomania all the time. Sometimes, I am very stable and still have demand avoidance down to taking a shower.

I am fairly certain that I have pathological demand avoidance syndrome, because it takes a Mt. Everest amount of energy for me to do anything. I’ll know once I go through the autism diagnosis process. Basically, they treat you and if it doesn’t work, then it’s pathological. “Pathological” is a scary word, but yet it’s not. It just means it can’t be treated. It’s more scary to tell someone you have something pathological because they don’t think “pathologist,” they think “serial killer.” Not a good look.

Yet, that’s still the name of the condition, and it’s already on the spectrum, just a major part of some people’s cases of autism. If you’ve met an autistic person, you have met one autistic person. For instance, I’ll talk your ear off about The Cold War, but I don’t have food issues and I don’t have too many sensory issues. I don’t have emotions like neurotypical people, but I do have them. I just process them quite a bit differently, and writing gives me an outlet to do it.

So, honestly, I don’t need some mythical power to be a “Super.” I’ve got my superpower right here.

The Calm Before the Storm

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today or tomorrow I am meeting another potential roommate that lives in my neighborhood. My landlord referred me to him via NextDoor, so hopefully I’ll be able to secure something fairly quickly. As we told each other, it’s at least worth a meeting to see if we get along, and he has a dog.

The funniest thing he said was that he was saying he lived alone, and I said, “I’m autistic and ADHD. It would probably work out better for me because of less sensory input.” He said, and it was so cute…… “I am somewhat neurodivergent.” I told him I laughed out loud at that one. We’re both introverts. He works for a government agency and his house is cute as a button, plus updated on the inside. I looked at some pictures online, but it was from the sale of the house. I have no idea what it looks like furnished yet, but I’m eager to see.

He’s a little older than me, the same age as Supergrover. It’s how I know he’s young enough to vibe with me and not too old to think of me as a constant annoyance because our age difference is too great. My worst nightmare was getting stuck in a group house with five 20 year old interns on Capitol Hill. It wouldn’t have been bad. I would have connected with a lot of Washington elite that way, but it wouldn’t have been the right vibe. If it works out that I move in with (let’s call him) Colin, I feel that I could go the distance with him, because I moved my entire childhood. The only place I have lived longer than DC is Portland, and even that was broken up into two chunks. The first was going to see my family, and at that time, I really meant it.

The second time, I had to go see about a girl. I had it bad, but I didn’t realize it until we drove from Portland to Houston together. That woman helped me move into my apartment in fucking August (I repeat….. in HOUSTON, TEXAS) and I let her get on the plane back to Oregon. What in the actual fuck was wrong with me?

If I have any regrets in life, it’s not taking Dana seriously at six weeks when she told me she had a crush on me. It took me three or three and a half years to accept that I had a crush on her, too. That’s because I don’t know what possessed her to tell me she had a crush on me, except yes, I do.

Carol, Dana’s then-wife, was not threatened by Dana having a crush……… and oh my fucking God.

Oh my God.

I did to Dana what Dana did to Carol. It just so happened that my new relationship energy was never going to go anywhere, therefore my pie in the sky ideas for a romance with a straight woman were grounded until my mental health went off the rails. That’s what I mean about the hurt being unintentional. I take responsibility for my behavior, because it happened no matter what my mental health might have been at the time. It is more about forgiving myself for not having the right tools to deal with my feelings, my medication, or my mental state while my medication was, in a few words, completely fucked up.

Again, I learned I was poly because I never lost any love for Dana, I only gained it for SG! Dana and I went down the tubes of our own accord, but not exactly. There was no preconceived plan on Supergrover’s part to institute a divide and conquer move. As she says, our relationship happened organically despite a whole bunch of things (which meant more to me than platinum, beautiful girl).

I can’t tell you how Supergrover is feeling except hurt and tired, because that is what I know for sure, and it’s probably going to make me cry.

  • Whenever I feel anxious that she’s distancing herself from me, she surprises me with all the love that comes through in black & white. Every. Single. Time. As I have said, she doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by showing up. Consistently. No matter how mad we are at each other. No matter how bad the fight is, there has been nothing in 10 years that has ever torn us apart. Somehow, we keep the yellow string going even when we’re out of pocket. When I get the most anxious is generally about the time that she swoops in and reminds me what’s up. The Mama Wolverine claws are coming out, she will go Alduin on their asses, etc. We have that part down.
  • Keeping out of each other’s lives has been a mixed bag, because having context and not creates two different sets of problems. There’s the problems we have with telling our story together, and the problems we have with telling our stories apart. Lancing the boil was getting back on the same page. Again, I don’t know what will happen, but she said that she didn’t want to get into a cat and mouse game. It’s not if she shows up. Not being honest about your true intentions is a cat and mouse game. I love her enough to struggle all the way until we’re ridiculously happy again, whether there’s a context to our relationship or not. I’m ready for a different kind of honeymoon phase because I’m tired of putting each other through the wringer for no good reason.
  • I have loved her so much for a decade, and I feel like she has returned those feelings to the best of her ability. That she couldn’t be a better friend than she is right now in terms of being the kind of person that sends birthday and Christmas presents because we have such a long history together, and it’s so intense.
  • I don’t want to put anyone above her ever again, which is why I say that I’m as settled as I want to be. I am never going to get in another fight over emotional affairs because never once when I got married did I think I was going to go blind. I thought Dana and I had enough strength in our relationship to get through it, but I underestimated the pull I felt toward SG! The wave went over my head, and I’ve never been the same. But it’s all for good- I love my life, and I wish I could convince my beautiful girl of that instead of always thinking I’m saying “this is all your fault.”
  • I’m not sure why she thinkgs this is all her fault, because she laid out all the times she’s been a dick and the times I have as well. That means “Things Fell Apart” at both our hands. It is both our faults and neither.
  • Despite not having enough context, I think this is the relationship that reflects me the most deeply because since I’m reading her, I pick up her words and phrases all the time.
    • Painting my feelings as fact
    • Pricks on my skin I just couldn’t close anymore
    • It’s not “very” anymore, it’s “to an enormous degree.”
    • “I love his takedowns of the orange gelatinous shitbag.”
    • Me: How’s your day going? Her: picture of dumpster fire…. this has been especially useful lately
    • “Pick up my toys and go home,” which she got from me and now says all the time- at least to me. I don’t know how much I affect her speech at work/home/etc. If so, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. 😉
    • When she edits me, she’s very rough. I like it. I’ll get notes like “WHO TF IS PANCHO?”
    • Her husband had a thing and I asked her if she needed help (med assistant- she travels). She said no, but how kind of me to ask. I said, “it seemed nicer than asking how you broke him.” Later that day, I got an e-mail that said, “I keep laughing at this.” I smiled at that for three weeks straight. I got her. ❤ Maybe grasshopper is not as far away from satori as I think. So, because it tickled me to get a note later in the day that I was still laughing at something she said, I send them to others.
    • It was a door I never should have opened, but I used to love flirting with her because she was so fucking quick. I got in over my head fast, and I couldn’t take it back. Again, I knew I was fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. I won’t tell you what she said, but I told her that all she needed to do was realize that my feelings were valid and real, and to be sensitive to them. That there was no reason to act, just to know they’re there. It was not to encourage, but for her to have empathy because I knew it couldn’t go anywhere and I was flipping out anyway. I can’t believe how much it meant to me when I said, “surely you spent longer than you wanted getting over someone who turned your head when it was a bad idea?” She said, “yes, surely I have.” She really saw me, and I will remember it forever. She has also never once invalidated my feelings, and been moved at the things I’ve written about her. She makes me happy without even trying, makes me proud just by breathing. The fact that she’s not my romantic partner means both jack and shit. She’s just always the one at the back of my mind, the one I quote all the time while she doesn’t know it…….. and I am sure that is a two way street even if she doesn’t say it out loud, because over ten years of writing, we have a million word associations between us……. most notably, “influencer.”
      • It was her brain that made me absolutely crazy about her (this is the part where you don’t get her reply that was so perfect it made my desk chair sag, I was laughing so hard). I joked, “besides, can I really make a decision on whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for, woman?” That was the moment *she* came in Kings full over Aces and I thought, “Christ. This needs to last my whole life, no matter what it looks like. I will never find her anywhere else in a million zillion years.” In fact, I actually told her this. That I wanted to fix us because I couldn’t go to the Supergrover store and pick out a new one. She’s the Vera Wang you can’t afford.
  • I realize by writing all of this down, it just seems like I’m begging her to come back. It’s just not true. That’s because if she does come back, it will be a great day in my life….. because she knows that I don’t want the surface level of her. I want the brain that made me crazy about her in the first place. I feel that if she lets me into that space, the way I let her into mine, what used to be a “cat and mouse game” will once again be stable, because in a lot of ways, we’ll be discovering each other again for the first time. Just because we’ve had a weird and hard road in the past 10 years doesn’t mean it always has to be as difficult as it has been. I’m just tired of covering up feelings with gifts, because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when I get them. What emotions are behind them when her e-mails say so little? No, these entries are not begging. They are the precious things I will want to read 10 and 20 and 30 years from now…… because she’s the best thing that ever happened to me and thinks she isn’t. I can’t fix that for her, but it’s not for lack of trying.
  • I will always love her with this much depth, because she gave me too much over the last 10 years to hold any bitterness or anger anymore. She has said that some of the things I’ve said are incredibly hurtful, and I’d like to talk about them. But again, I do not know whether she needs to separate from me, or whether she’ll be back after some time, space, peace, and grace. She has it coming from me in spades, because “surely grace and mercy will carry me all the days of my life” (Don’t call me Shirley!). As I have said before, it is not my job to talk now. I have talked enough. She knows how I feel, and she does not need to hear me again.

No, all of these memories are for me…. the ones that Oliver, who is a dog, has already heard.

A Whole Lot of Probably

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know what to do except get my room ready to have pictures taken for Zillow. I overheard a conversation that my landlords are selling the house. They didn’t deny it, just said they were getting it appraised. Therefore, I know that pictures are going to be taken, just not how all this will turn out. I’m not going to sit here and wait until the very last moment. I also know that they think there will be a lot of interest in the house, so they say they’re waffling, but I’m not so sure that’s true. I’m looking around for a place, and it doesn’t matter where as long as I’m close to a train station. I might stay in Maryland, or I might move out to Virginia. It really depends on my tax and health care status.

The thing about moving to Virginia is that there’s too much space. It takes longer to get everywhere. However, there are some pluses. One of them would be being closer to Zac. We wouldn’t get to see each other any more often than we do now, I don’t think, but it would be nice if I could cut that commute down…….. but then I think, “you write on the train.” So, there goes my need to look for a house in Virginia except for some very specific laws I don’t like in Maryland. But, they’re not so important to me that it’s worth gaining a shittier health care system. I have work to do in terms of where I go next, but I do think it’s time for a change. And yet I don’t. I’m miserable thinking of leaving after just starting my 10th year here.

I’d like to move into another group house, because I like having a front and back yard, plus a big kitchen, all that. I don’t want to go back to a white box alone every night. It doesn’t have to be the right fit at first. I will find the right fit. I just lucked out when I called these landlords first. It’s not coming at exactly an opportune time for me because it never would. This is a huge deal, a huge life transition.

I called Hayat from Houston pretty much the day after Dana hit me. It sped up my timeline quite a bit, honestly. I figured I could live anywhere for a month, so just stick it out and get the lay of the land. I joke now that if Hayat hadn’t picked me up from the Metro nine years ago, I’d still be there.

But now Hayat is thinking about retiring, and everything looks different. As it’s supposed to do….. nothing is certain except moving on.

What I do know is that I will not be taking off for another city unless it’s within the DMV. I even thought about Baltimore for a hot second, because I love it there. However, I know it’s so much easier to see my sister without having to get the MARC train involved. It would also be nice to stay near downtown Silver Spring, because I love the way it’s so walkable. I feel the same way about Alexandria, though, so maybe I’ll check over in my old neighborhood and see what’s available. My old neighborhood is only one Metro stop up from Zac’s, and the buses in Alexandria are just as good as the ones in Silver Spring.

I get weird vibes about my old neighborhood, though, so we’ll see. It just depends. As of right now, everything is coming together in terms of Lindsay, Matt, Bryn, and Dave all being here at the time I’m supposed to move and I have like three boxes of stuff (kidding, but not by much).

The only reason I don’t have much is that I switched to a Kindle.

I know that when one door closes, another opens. I just want to start looking for the right handle.

Well, There’s This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What activities do you lose yourself in?

For $5.00, I can get lost for years. This is because $5.00 is about how much it takes to by “Droid Edit,” a full-featured coding notepad for Android. The free version of “Koder” on iOS seems to fit the bill nicely, but I would get the pro version if it was more like Notepad++ and Microsoft Visual Studio Code (my personal favorite because now it runs bare metal on all operating systems, even Fedora and Ubuntu. It should also be able to run on Android with those specs. Get your shit together, Microsoft. Do you think I like coding without the Dracula Official Theme? Monokai is not going to cut it, my friend.).

I use the term coding loosely, because really the only things I do in my HTML files are add italics and special characters, maybe a link. For some reason, if I do more than that, WordPress will scrub out the HTML and tell me it can’t recover the block. I need a real solution that’s completely open source, but I like WordPress. I made the decision 20 years ago to stop coding and only be known as a writer…. why my setup is simple and hopefully easy to read.

I end up using the WordPress reader included in the Jetpack app because it’s in dark mode. I rarely read my own work on my blog itself. I like dark mode. My fans don’t. They’re older and they have more insurance.

And in fact, the most sweet and vulnerable moments between Supergrover and me are when I need my Jessica Tandy, and Supergrover is absolutely as beautiful as she always was. It is not lost on me that I’m a preacher’s kid and she’s a Bee Charmer. In effect, we are “Fried Green Tomatoes,” because that movie showed deep companionate love without showing romance because of the time. Because they held down the madness with the romance, it actually fits Supergrover and me better than if they had. Of course Idgie and Ruth were best friends who ran a business together and not this torrid love affair that lasted a million years, which it absolutely was in “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.” Just devoted and never stopped loving each other until they died.

But female friendship is absolutely that strong and resilient, so both the book and the movie are priceless to me. In short, I felt like Idgie when she was young, with Supergrover being every bit the power,grace, and style of a young, married Southern woman. I was absolutely just a lovesick puppy dog for a couple of years, and then I realized my place in the world. “Love her anyway. Help her anyway. She may not accept you in person, but she’ll always come back here.” I am not writing for her. I am not writing to her. These are all the memories I want to be able to read when I am 70 and nothing more. I want her with me, helping to craft the narrative, but it is not necessary. It is the process of letting go and letting God, my words for going into deep discernment. My personality divides and I argue it out with my rabbi, essentially. However, I know that it is me talking back. I do not think of a relationship with God as external, but the omnipotent third eye present in so many Eastern religions.

It’s why I don’t care about semantics, I just want the protein.

I feel like in a way, all of this has been me trying to explain to her why we need to open the Whistle Stop and move on, rather than her always feeling guilty. Just start working together and having fun rather than both of us being up shit creek all the time.

Without a paddle, obvs.

So many messages that didn’t get through. Me thinking about the future and throwing ideas out there to remind myself that this was grounded and real came across as being unwilling to accept the demands on her time. This is categorically untrue. I have dealt with the boundaries on her time since day one, and our relationship has lasted over 10 years now. If I really had problems with her priorities, I wouldn’t have stuck around this long. I also don’t think that I’m all that and a bag of chips, but 10 years is a long time to feel like this relationship is fake with her insisting that it’s not.

Now, I really believe it wasn’t. It was as real as a heart attack. But that’s because I’m not going to get that message through placation. I’m going to get that message through truth. The longer you put off telling the truth, the angrier I get. I don’t want to handle someone else’s avoidance, I want them to realize they’re being avoidant because I’m not an entitled prick who wants to tell you how to run your life until you’ve stomped on my feelings so hard that we’re going to have to have it out. Go drive someone else up the wall because I am struggling.

It’s one thing to be on the bottom of the totem pole for a year- two or three. But after 10 wouldn’t you be furious that you never got airtime? Especially when we have this strong pull towards each other that also has its limits? It’s a dramatic tension that could be solved in an afternoon. I don’t understand keeping that weirdness in place all these years. I think I could solve a lot of her problems with me in one beer….. most notably that our relationship might not translate.

We are not guaranteed to bond just because we like the same Instagram influencer. But thinking we are both sides of Fried Green tomatoes, the Idgie and Ruth and the Idgie and Evelyn is the journey we’ve taken. I don’t know what compelled her to come, but I think it was my thu’um. When a dragon hears its name, it is not bound to respond, but always will out of curiosity and competition. I should give her a word of power, but Snow Wing Hunter is better than anything I could come up with on my own, and she has definitely carried me to Skuldafn many times to meet my Alduins.

I get lost in the flight.

I only get lost in the fight when the adrenaline comes down. It’s not her responsibility to keep it up. I would like it if she’d take on the responsibility of telling me up front the timeframe with which I’m dealing so it calms my anxiety that she’s not always mad at me. It’s hard to feel secure on three words.

What I loved about her letter the other day was twofold. I fell in love with her prose about her family, the everyday life she leads while also being powerful, the dynamic that Lindsay and I have so I could relate on a spiritual level. What it takes to be superhuman at staying awake, because she’s on call a lot of the time (as is Lindsay- news breaks). What it takes to be a big sister in her family. Or, what she wants it to take and I can feel her emotions regarding it from a million miles away. I know the particular pain of losing a mother and finding yourself as the new matriarch suddenly….. especially not being prepared in any way to do so because I feel like it’s my responsibility to be providing for her. She’s the little sister that could. She’s just so sweet about giving me experiences I never would have had otherwise while totally cheering me on as a writer.

That’s been Supergrover’s role in my life as well. I think one of the pricks on my skin that won’t heal is saying that I portray her as a villain as often as I do a friend and rages about it……. while also raging that I paint her as a “Flat Stanley.” I feel that the ups and downs make her a 3D character. Everything she sends me that shows me a real feeling, I include it, because since it’s her real feeling, it’s my real feeling, too. I have said this line before, but I will remember it forever. I didn’t know who “Flat Stanley” was, but I told her that “Flat Stanley has a history of amazing topography.” She is a 3D character, but she isn’t if you take every entry individually instead of reading me like a book. Start in January of last year and read forwards and a 3D character will emerge no matter who it is in my life.

Most people trade the forest for the trees. As I have told her, I feel like my years are so much more important than my days. No one has ever loved her the way I have, and not in terms of depth. In the way that love is executed every day. I became a journalist from the day we met, tasked with telling my own story while not revealing my source. Any misstep on my part feels like a little betrayal, and Supergrover doesn’t talk to me about my writing, so I have no idea how close to the line I am or how I can protect her more in the future. She said that I mentioned something she wanted to keep quiet, but I have no idea what it was that she wanted to keep private, for instance, so I couldn’t go back and fix it.

I want to know what touches her, because everything I write about her is something I’ve gotten lost in, because it was kind of like meeting The Oracle and finding out I’m Neo. My mind went into hyperdrive, and I began to think differently, and on as big a scale as possible because all of the sudden I knew I was capable of it. I’ve realized that I would be happy in a think tank if that were a thing that could happen, mostly because I’m a “plant,” the employee who comes up with great ideas by synthesizing information in the room and building off what other people have said until there’s a consensus.

But I never would have believed that I belonged at that particular table until Supergrover told me I was too smart for my own good.

I get that a lot, but I didn’t believe it until 2013 (a typo when I said that the Argo message came in 2003, I remember). She’s not the president, nor elected to anything, nor can I tell you whether she’s private or public industry (except that she and Zac both speak “acronym.”). What I can tell you is that her compliment had a lot of power behind it. Her CV makes me constantly wonder who she’s met all over the world, especially movie stars.

I miss her pithy comments on my entries, because when she was an e-mail subscriber, instead of commenting here, she’d just forward me the e-mail and flip me shit. She can say so much in so few words, even better when they’re teasing directed at me or our favorite Instagram influencer. Speaking of which, we need to talk about that, too, beautiful girl. It’s probably nothing, but it’s a “how dead am I?” sort of question. Another thing that whether this makes her land on my desk to my thu’um is up for grabs. What is important is that I will remember exactly what this means for a hundred years because all of these feelings are burned into my brain.

The rhythm has calmed, but we still have to dance. I’m not trying to be her partner, I’m trying to be her co-author unless her husband also writes. Maybe she’d rather collaborate with him if that’s the case, and I don’t have any ill will toward that. And it’s not that I have this desperate need to write about her because she’s a powerful person. It’s not. It’s that she became a big part of my story personally, and not of her big shot mess ever mattered.

I love the absolute smallest part of her, because that’s the part I love about everyone. I like vulnerability because I can make accurate decisions on how to behave next. The only reason I spiraled out with her is that I was medically falling apart and I want to throw up every time I think of that time in my life because it cost us so much trust and time. To think that she thinks all of this is her fault is horrible because I’ve been trying to make amends for so many years and it has come across as accusation.

She did indeed throw a bomb over her shoulder and walk away. The truth hurts. But it wasn’t the bomb that hurt. It was walking away and not dealing with the fallout. It showed the ultimate disrespect to me because it was like “I get to tell you whatever I want and then not care how it makes you feel.” She says she’s not responsible for my reactions. No, she’s not, but if she wants to stay my friend she better well be willing to clean up her own mess, because I didn’t ask for it. I’m not guilting you (universal), I am holding you to the standard of being a good friend. How is it anyone’s right to leave the other person so much worse than they found them by listening so closely at first that we were breathing in the right direction……… then holding a wrong over my head for so long that we never moved back into safe space for her? She lost the ability to be a decent friend, her words, not mine.

Then she opened up and told me that my guesses about her behavior were right on target and also that it was too late while also saying “story for another day” while also writing me something so beautiful I’m still chewing on it days later. I don’t know what to think, but I know what I see, and it is a spectrum. We’re better writers as a team than we are alone.

It just depends on whether writing means as much to her as it does to me. It doesn’t have to be blog entries because I’m an audience of one, and the same goes for me- the safe space where I sandbox.

She’s not the love of my life where I get lost in her beauty, wishing like a lovesick puppy for just one hug or what the fuck ever. She’s the love of my life due to writing being the only real partner I have. And she’s the brain that comes with that package, because I feel like she whipped my ass into shape by editing me and giving me feedback on letters as well. I miss that relationship, because it exists outside of time and space. I’d be happy if it always did, but my mind sees so many futures that it’s hard to decide and I’m grateful to also have enough closure to let go. Just because she let her walls down once doesn’t mean she has the strength to do it all the time, and that’s what I need from her if she doesn’t want to meet me in person. I will never be able to pick up subtext if I don’t because I won’t be able to read it in her voice.

I take everything literally, and I’m a “get off my lawn” personality. I rarely apologize for it, but it’s an important flaw in my character in this relationship. But I’m not “get off my lawn” years old on purpose. I’m autistic and lecture as such. I become an overexplainer to avoid awkward silence, of which there has been a lot.

It’s not awkward silence anymore, because she told me she loved me in two different ways. The first was “if I hear your call, I will always come…. because I love my girl.” It was the ending of my letter to Michael writ large. I was right on the money, dear reader. I cannot believe it. Seriously. She swooped in with all the big sister badass no bullshit love I’ve come to know. She doesn’t have to say a word. She said that she was constantly overwhelmed because I was demanding, when I was dreaming. The second was letting me know she things about me all the time, the thing that would have calmed me the most.

I don’t want to be around anyone who doesn’t want to be around me, and I got my answer. Maybe. As it has been for 10 years…… and where I get lost.

Honestly, My Situation Right Now

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

When Supergrover emoted, she gave me two things. The first is closure. The second is the ability to work toward our goals now that all the cards are on the table. It has been a hard row to hoe when she’s only given me the flop, keeping the turn and the river in front of me, out of my reach. This is because all five cards had been revealed before, and they weren’t cards we could put back in the deck.

It reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies, if you’ve ever played that video game. The second time you go through the levels, Crazy Dave picks out three seed packets that are at random, but they’re locked and you can’t remove them- you have to hope that you win based on what you bring to the game.

We have nine seed packets, and three of them are locked. It’s an even better analogy, because Michaels is holding the flop, the turn, and the river because I fucked up. If there’s anything that made me fail, it was me. For Supergrover to say that this is all her fault is ridiculous. If I hadn’t been an asshole, none of this would have happened.

Full stop.

I have been saying that ad nauseam on my blog, not going after her. The constant feedback that I get from my readers is that I am way too goddamn hard on myself. I have never once heard “you’re too hard on her.”

Not once, ever in my life.

But, if people had said that, I wouldn’t have deflected, either. I would have said that they didn’t know the whole story, and that they couldn’t know what went on behind closed doors, and they never would. So, they have to put a lot of faith in me that I am not being too hard on myself, that I own 50% of the problem. Don’t treat me as innocent here, because I’m not.

Meeting Supergrover changed the course of my life for all the right reasons, and we both feel guilty about rushing into this relationship because it wasn’t a problem we thought through together. If we had, we could have avoided a lot of turmoil later on.

I said, “do you think I write about you just for shits and giggles? No, this is my very real inner monologue.” What I didn’t remind her of yet again is how much it takes to be this vulnerable. That I shake and cry through some of these entries, that it’s hard to get my feelings out and yet absolutely essential.

And then I told her what I was really writing and why I was writing it that way. I hope she’s shocked out of her mind, because I think I won this hand.

I just hope she, like me, doesn’t move the goalposts and say my response should have been happier. Because we’ve both been doing it to each other for a very long time.

When we don’t open up to each other, we are no better than we were before. It’s just going to keep being a toxic mess. When we put up walls, we don’t fulfill our purpose in each other’s lives, why it’s always been just her and me. That sometimes it’s nice to have that “stranger on a train” feeling where you can just dump anything and let the other respond to it.

That feeling is exactly why it’s not incumbent upon her to give of herself and her time. I am not asking for more than she wants to give. I think we’d be great comic foils, and have a ton of fun no matter what our relationship looks like in the future.

For instance, I don’t like the lines in this blog where I flip her shit. I’m not as funny as she is, so basically it’s “I set ’em up, you knock ’em down.” I like the response better than I’ve ever liked anything I’ve said. I have gotten a touche once in the history of our relationship, and I cannot tell you what that line was, but I came in Kings full over Aces.

We set each other up to fail. Badly.

But now I can either start moving away from her comfortably, or moving toward her with peace and grace. No matter how she feels about me, I’ll always be hers.

It’s just up to her to see which way we’ll go, because I don’t know whether she’ll understand why I’m doing what I’m doing or not. But like it or not, the important part is that she heard my thu’um instead of my whisper.

And whispered back that I wasn’t on the wrong track.

She’s just hurt and tired….. with me waiting to kiss her boo-boos exactly the way she kissed all mine 10 years ago. I have Bactine, Band-Aids, lollipops, the whole works.

Because our failure set me up for success.

Fear While Changing Trains

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

First of all, :::checks notes::: WordPress, it’s “describe a phase in life in which it was difficult to say goodbye.” Just like it’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole?” Never end a sentence with a preposition.

I do it a little bit.

Humor before I start diving deep this morning, because there have been many, many times in which it was Boyz II Men hard to say goodbye.

The first time it was a really hard transition was moving from Galveston to Naples the summer after first grade. I loved the beach (my sister did not- she used to run away from the waves saying “don’t. Don’t! Don’t!). I mean, she got over it…… she did get married in Galveston. The cultural difference between living on the island and living in small town Texas wasn’t hard because I didn’t like it. It was just a transition. I was especially close to my friends Asbury and Beulah Lennox, who kind of took over being my grandparents when my own grandparents were so far away. The bonus was moving about 12-15 miles from my biological grandparents, a complete change as well.

I do not do well with change, and I’m glad we moved in the summer so I could ease into it. Incidentally, since The War Daniel was not a member of our church, I didn’t meet him until September. I can’t remember when it was second or third grade when we made it official. 😉 I will say that it wasn’t until I met The War Daniel that I felt truly comfortable, the INFJ/INTJ people we have always been. We were the book nerds, the music nerds, and the ones who didn’t give a fuck if people thought we were weird. We both have this historical Jesus personality, we just come at it from different directions. He’s a thinker. I’m a feeler.

Editor’s Note:

Two things. The first is that “The War Daniel” is a play on words, because of John Hurt in Doctor Who- “The War Doctor.” Daniel was a Doc in the Navy, embedded with a team of Marines.

The second is that if I say that I or anyone else has a “Jesus” personality, or that “it’s as hard to be me as it was to be Jesus,” I’m talking about his day to day life, not that I or anyone else has a Savior complex. Jesus cannot be much different than any current pastor (especially those in clerical collars willing to be arrested at protests), because he was a rabbi, though they didn’t have that term back then.

Incidentally, there is also no evidence one way or the other that Jesus wasn’t married, and it’s been a debate for centuries; think Catholic vs. Protestant- Catholic priests are told they have to bear the burden of ministry alone, because they can’t love everyone if they love only one person that deeply…. takes away objectivity or something. The Protestants, like The Avatar, discovered that pastors could not do it without a support system. His partner could have been anyone from John, the Disciple marked as “whom Jesus loved,” and I have not looked at the original Greek or Hebrew to see if there’s more context, like philia or agape. But right now, I’m willing to say that there is no evidence Jesus was gay one way or the other, either, because there is also a debate on Mary Magdalene.

Supergrover actually sent me several novels about this, and it’s basically that Jesus and Mary were married and were writing their own Gospel, the Book of Love. It does make sense. After Jesus died, the story is that Joseph of Arimathia (rich merchant) helped Mary and the children escape to France. It is, of course, fiction….. but based on the little evidence we do know. It’s just been too long, there’s too many questions that will always be unanswered. So, Jesus is who you need him to be, not the other way around…… as long as you realize that Jesus did not come here only to comfort the distressed. He came here to also distress you out of your comfort. No power over. Power with. It’s why he was peaceful about it, but probably hated the Sanhedrin because they were the most vociferous Jews regarding law and very little around compassion, which has no bearing on the church today.………….

I think what The War Daniel misread as anger was actually fear. We should have video called more before he went to rehab, but we’re *both* writers, and lapsed into that personality way too easily…. which took away too much of our compassion. I also know that being in a relationship your first year out of rehab is absolutely not advisable, so when we got engaged, I kept dating Zac because it really didn’t bother him. Because Zac is poly, Daniel knew he was no threat. That if Zac and I are building a life together, it consists of exactly what is happening now. I have so much love for him because he’s a solid dude as a friend and as a boyfriend. How our relationship is supposed to go is unknown. I just know that we probably won’t get closer than we are now. Neither of us has the time.

It wasn’t that we were rushing into anything, we were just each other’s end game. Daniel didn’t offer to marry me because of anything but I needed it for the health care and benefits as a military dependent. And it was his idea not because I wanted it, but because he saw I needed it.

So, the hardest transitions I have to talk about today are the summer before I met Daniel, and the months after he left.

The reason I chose to write about this instead of the transition after my mother died is that I just can’t go there today. So, I will tell you what I was feeling in the moment, instead. It is so raw and real that if you are also in grief, it might help you as well.

The ones who have helped me through all these transitions just being kind enough to sit with me and listen.