Tag: loss

Chucks

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Tell us about your favorite pair of shoes, and where they’ve taken you.

My Chucks have taken me most places in life for the last 10 years because I discovered I could stay upright in them. Not only that, they look good with everything, as Kamala Harris has shown you for many years. However, I cannot do an entire entry on one pair, because I don’t have enough memories. However, I do remember all the days I’ve worn Chuck Taylor’s.

I always had knock-offs from Payless as a kid, which always threw me off and not because other kids made fun of me. All my friends were also obsessed with Payless, more so when they got Airwalk (I won’t wear any other brand of flip-flop).

It was that I’m a stickler for design.

The fonts weren’t right, the lines weren’t right, the rubber vamp was too large, etc.

As an adult, my first pair was brown leather. I got them at Ross when they were the last pair in another woman’s hands. She was buying them for her nephew and didn’t think they’d fit. I asked her if I could have them, very nicely even though I would have cut a bitch. She said, “sure,” and I got shoes that made me look like I was in a very famous old basketball movie…….

Eventually, I wore through the soles, and I got some brown canvas Chuck 2s. They had more padding and better tread, but they didn’t look the same as the original.

And now we’ve arrived at a moment I hadn’t thought of in a long time. It took my breath away.

I had black Chucks with black rubber so that they weren’t noticeable as sneakers. Therefore, I was wearing them at my mother’s graveside service, because it was muddy and I didn’t want to wear my good shoes. Mud got all over them.

I never washed them again. Mud sat in the cracks of my tread for months, and stained the sides. Eventually, it wore off. I’d like to believe it chose the moment it knew it could leave.

I wore my mother’s sneakers to her funeral. The only reason I changed into my own was that those were my good shoes, worthy of protection. I wore them in honor of our close connection to Oprah Winfrey.

One of the classic stories from the Oprah Winfrey show is a woman who went to some sort of rummage sale where celebrities had given things away. She bought a pair of Oprah’s shoes because as she said on the show, “I wanted to stand in your shoes until I could stand on my own.” Not a dry eye in the house. Everybody went into the ugly cry for a second, even Oprah.

When I did my mother’s eulogy, I stood in her shoes. At the graveside service, I could stand in my own. I’m sure it looked a little ridiculous because they were too big. I didn’t care. I kept them until the tread wore off because they were useful when I was wearing extra layers of socks in the winter. But you don’t wear shoes without tread in the winter. I fall on my ass enough.

For new readers, the setup is that my mother was a preacher’s wife, and after the divorce, a choir director and pianist/organist until she died. The first line of the eulogy was, “this is the first funeral Carolyn Baker’s ever been to where she wasn’t working.” The crowd broke up, and it was my intention to bring some much needed levity into the room.

I could do that because I stood in her shoes.

Besides, if she’d watched a video of the funeral, she would have laughed until she cried and thought, “accurate.” It was problematic, but luckily I got it right, that her last name was Baker. It wasn’t hard to remember that she took her husband’s name. It was hard to remember that she gave away mine, the name I’d called her since I was born.

And bought me my first pair of shoes at all.

Try Not to Panic

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

You get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?

I have problems with transitions, and even if something is good, it takes me a while to adjust. I seem like that’s not true, like getting a while hair to move to DC. I hated leaving DC from the moment I left. It was not a bad move to come back, it just took me about three years to really settle down and feel like I had roots.

Living here has been a lot longer than I ever lived anywhere as a preacher’s kid. In the Methodist church, they’re “rated.” You don’t get more money from the same church, you move on to a different one that pays more….. which generally means bigger problems, but that’s neither here nor there. I could write an entire blog entry on the way I’ve seen parishioners behave with all religious piety- the letter of the law and not the spirit.

So, I could see those things on a small scale until we got to Houston and Sugar Land. It got bigger. More people to minister to, too many people who weren’t sure about us because we were new and the last pastor, no matter what, walks on water. Because of this, we all got the hell out of Dodge the moment it was time to move, because you never wanted to seem like a threat to the pastor that took over for you in what’s called “move day.” I only remember the exact date for Houston, because it was the day before I met my emotional abuser (we moved on a Saturday).

In order for their to be continuity across churches in the conference, everyone moves at the same time. There are exceptions to this, like when my dad received an emergency appointment because of the previous pastor’s death. But on the whole, it’s in the summer when things aren’t as busy, anyway, and it’s amazing how efficient the system is. I never had a parsonage that was full of things that were left behind.

They’re furnished because with parsonages, you really only carry your personal effects when you move. It’s a huge cost savings, especially for very small churches who can’t afford to pay their pastor much. Not everything has been my style or color because generally people furnish it with their old stuff, the “Dear Aunt Sally” collection at Goodwill. Naples was the first house that was perfect from the beginning, and Sugar Land made it perfect because they asked me what I wanted.

I wonder if the walls are still pale yellow (I accented everything with sunflower paintings, pillows, etc. I was inspired by the Elizabeth Arden perfume bottle. Of course I was in 1994).

I was lucky in that my father took me along for many meetings, visiting “the sick, the friendless, and the needy,” and consoling people whose relatives had died. I wasn’t around for this one, but I only remember one instance where we lost a child. It is felt by the whole community, particularly an empath.

She wasn’t even a member of our congregation, but in small towns, you’re everybody’s pastor when they’re talking to you. One person who talked to my dad a lot was the principal of the elementary school. They liked each other, I wasn’t a “problem child” all the time. In fact, the worst time I ever had in school was when a boy tried to kiss me and I punched him in the face.

That same principle walked through the reception area saying, “Leslie, I don’t condone fighting and this is not acceptable.” I’m sweating bullets as he closes the door. Then, he says, “I keep pencils in my desk for people I think have shown courage…. and they are some very special pencils.” He was bluffing, and also he knew what was up. Of course you hit a guy that tries to kiss you without your consent. It is the way they receive information the fastest because since men are angry that’s what they do. The principal knew that, which is why the loss of “our child” was so devastating for the entire area, not just the people that were closest to him.

Melanie Allen was a fifth grade student who was invited on a class trip to the principal’s house. He lived on a lake, and had a barge. Everything was going perfectly until Melanie realized that swimming looked so easy everyone could do it, and jumped off the barge. She started struggling quickly. The principal jumped into the water to save her, and had to let her go when he realized that unless he changed tacks, they were both going to drown. I don’t know what happened, but what I do know is that the principal survived and Melanie didn’t. The principal was absolutely blameless, because I’ve heard lifeguards on This American Life that not every one is a good save.

I can’t imagine the grief that comes with surviving something like that, but he learned to deal with his demons and was very good about boundaries so that we were as protected as we could be.

I tell that story because to me it illustrates how much pain I’ve taken in since I was a child that didn’t belong to me, and now I’m trying to shed it to be my own person….. and I feel more me than I’ve ever been because Zac and I are stable, Lindsay’s dropping in a lot of the time now, and my house situation is going to get resolved one way or the other because today I cleaned up hair dye. If I’d gotten a chance to talk to Bryn, that’s what I would have told her. Maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel because I am finally getting someone to notice that I’m doing all the work when it comes to taking care of common spaces.

I had to finally get tired of not being heard, and finding people who will listen is the thing that makes me the happiest. I do not need people to agree. I just need them to hear me out. I will always hear you out, because hearing and listening are sometimes very separate things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…….. what if I know that this amazing, wonderful thing will only be good for me and not my partners/friends/family/etc? I want the shiny thing, but I’ll brood for hours over any benefit to only me because I don’t want to come across as demanding or undeserving of anything.

I am way too hard on myself, but that’s probably because I know that there’s got to be a combination of words that will unlock my mind. I will find the secret to life, the universe, and everything. Because I’m neurodivergent, I’ve had a lot of emotional moments where I thought I was saying something new and exciting, but the way I said it made it seem like a bad thing…… when in reality, that’s my own social anxiety talking and unfortunately I am passing the savings onto you.

I have so many stories that have sad elements to them, because everyone is fighting a battle you don’t know anything about. I just tend to hear a lot of them, often, because I have that vibe that says, “tell me anything.” And people do. Sometimes it turns out great. Sometimes not so much.

Part of it is me; I am not always the same person in terms of where I am in terms of depressed or manic, meltdown or burnout, etc. I have so few moments of feeling well that here’s the good part about seeing pain on other people’s faces. I am grateful for what I have, and those I love….. and even when I don’t have two nickels to rub together, I have people who love me. Even when I’m not of sound mind and body, I still have people who love me.

It doesn’t make me feel better about transitions, though. I need time, and then you’ll know that I’m truly content. For instance, of course I want to go to San Diego with you, but I’d like some notice. If I got the news that I was going to San Diego, that would be one of those things where I’d call Bryn, the thing I do when I get the most excited about something.

The flip side of being able to deal with so much hurt is being able to take in joy as well. I will try not to panic in the moment, but I have a different perspective than I did when I was young. The first is that given enough time and space, I can make it through anything. That includes things that are supposed to blow my mind and make me happy- I will be, just give me a chance to take it all in.

I do not live for the bad moments, I live for the good. I try to find it, but my stories don’t always go down the road where there’s gold at the end. Happiness always writes white, as if the ink isn’t dark enough to make an impression. I have a tendency to delve into the dark so I can get a lantern in there. I also need to be reminded to look up, because my mind is a very busy place.

Going to see Charlotte Cardin was a great experience and I loved it. However, a live concert would not be my first choice to go out because of the noise, lights, etc. Therefore, it was wonderful news we were going, I was excited for weeks, then wanted to back out because of social anxiety until I put on my “honey badger don’t care” face and got my happy ass to the train. Sometimes I have to straight up say out loud, “you’re being ridiculous.”

It was Lindsay. It was my city. It was my kind of music. Charlotte is Canadian and it was her first American concert ever.

Still almost missed it because I didn’t have enough spoons. Luckily, I generally get a second wind. But if I get home, I do not have enough energy to go back out because generally, again, transition time.

The hardest part of this growing up is that my mother had a very specific idea about the way I should look and it took time in the morning. My dad would be like, “I have a wedding/funeral/visitation to do this afternoon. Want to come?” Of course I did. Free food. “What time are you leaving?” “Oh, I think we’ve got about 15 minutes.”

15 minutes to do my hair, pick out a dress, and hope I left with the shoes on the right feet. I wanted to go to the wedding (or whatever, this happened at least two or three times a month), but not having any transition time made my anxiety go through the roof. But then I’d get to where we were going and be okay again……. after I’d had some time to get used to my new environment.

The second thing I do is pour myself a drink. I need to relax, because we are celebrating. I don’t think I’ve ever done a toast with Sugar Free Tang before, but that’s what I’ve got.

Tomorrow is an exciting day- Air & Space with Lindsay and then it’s date night for Zac and me. There’s also a possibility that I’ll get to see her more than once because she’s staying in the NoMA area (which I always pronounce with a HUGE Boston accent like when Garciaparra played for the Red Sox).

And the first thing I did was tell you, so maybe that’s the real lesson in all this. What’s the first thing I do when I get good news? Share it with the community who has come to love me and my weird little life over the years.

But again, transition time. I haven’t had a boyfriend all that long. It’s taken a year for me to even get used to the idea that this is a real thing. He’s so unfailingly kind that I know he has my back, and I feel the same way about him.

Even when he’s snoring.

I Don’t Care How You Feel About the Royals If You’re Tracking With Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you’re tracking with me, I feel that The Firm is in a crisis right now, because King Charles hasn’t been King for all that long and he’s been diagnosed with cancer. I’ve already posted about this on Facebook, but I have way more international fans here than I do there. I want input from English fans, and I know I have at least one. She’s not impressed with the royals, so I don’t know if she’d comment or not. I’m not impressed with The Firm because they’re important people. I’m interested in their family dynamics because I read the ghostwritten autobiography that Harry wrote in collaboration with whomever (sorry, not going to look that up) was an intimate portrait that is every bit as important as anything Richard the Lionhearted ever said…. not that it was so good (it was) but records of the royal family have proven to be eternal so far.

Plus, I loved where I could pick out the parts in which I sounded like him, as if it’d borrowed style from me without ever surfing here. It was great. Even if I don’t have everything about Harry’s personal style (I do believe he wrote parts of it because the ghostwriter had to know what Harry wanted to say, I have the style of one of the most famous ghostwriters in the world.

But there’s just something so universal and so specific about this particular situation.

Losing one parent is devastating. Losing both is losing your anchor to the world. For a moment, you don’t even know who you are in both cases. Actually, not a moment. About three years. The first year, you walk around in a fog of grief, finding your diary in the freezer and constantly forgetting said parent is dead and it shocks you all over again.

Nora Ephron gives the example of not being able to throw away her husband’s shoes, because she thought he might need them.

The fog of grief is universal. One of the things that Bryn pointed out is that there’s a possibility that both boys could lose their dad almost as quickly as they lost their mother, because unless you catch it early, there’s only a 20% chance you’ll survive it, anyway.

So, while William is grieving, he’s going to have to constantly reassure the public that the monarchy is stable… even though it’s not. But I’m not saying they’re hiding anything. I am saying that grief is so consuming that William is going to constantly have to stuff down his emotions just to get through the day. But the monarchy still won’t be unstable by the nature of anything that William would do, just by the nature of the quick change.

It remains to be seen whether Harry and William will end up needing each other or not. There may be too much bad blood…. that sometimes gets worse when both parents die. Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time tragedy drives people apart, and both boys have PTSD. How could they not? The trauma for Harry was twofold. Grieving because he’d lost is mother privately, and in front of an audience so big you cannot take it in. His trigger is the flash of a camera.

And that was before he went to war.

They’ve both been to war after the tragedy of losing their mother in a horrific accident. Both boys have had more days now with trauma than without, because it stays with you your whole life whether you open up about it or not.

Losing a parent fundamentally changes you, because there are parts of you that belonged to them. In my experience, this presents in two ways. The first is how much they’ve changed you. The second is how much time you were spending with them. What are you going to do to fill it? In the beginning, there is nothing that will fill that space because there’s nothing interesting enough to stop you from dwelling on it constantly, especially in the first few months. It is shocking whether you’ve known long in advance or lost them in a moment.

Especially when people get old enough where you realize it was just time, you’re still shocked because it’s the loss of not being able to drop by or call. You try because you forget, dialing or driving by, and remember on the way or right before you’re about to hit the icon for “call.” You might have a lot of car accidents during this time because your brain will blip out at inconvenient moments….. very much like they tell you not to drive under the influence. Your attention is every bit as scrambled as the rest of you.

Because again, you’re rewiring your nerves to the point where you will no longer recognize who you used to be before. Both in the liberation of not needing their approval because you can’t have it anyway, and the absolute abyss-deep process to get back up to the new normal.

People who seem functional are the ones hiding it well. They’re not getting over it any faster than anyone else. As time goes by, there is an expectation that you’ll get back to your old self, and it’s much too fast for my liking. First of all, there is no old self. I am not software you can roll back after a traumatic event.

No one is. Whether you know it or not is whether they want to open up to you, because most of being in public is just armor. They’re dying inside, trying to compartmentalize while their brains are spinning out like a tornado with memories. You spend a lot of time trying to hold back tears- even more pretending that you’re not crying all the time when you’re not with people.

Just because people don’t see grief doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to all of us. Losing a parent is in some ways universal, in some ways as individual as a fingerprint. What is universal is that it takes a long ass time, not just when the casseroles stop. People don’t check in after about six months, in my experience. This is not malice, it’s because they think you’re okay again now.

But the reality is just like the moment when Elizabeth realized that she was going to be queen. It’s just as jarring for the monarchy as it is in everyone else.

But most people don’t see their own grief writ as large as a change in the monarchy, and don’t take it seriously. They begin to act as if, rather than really focusing on what matters- their mental health. They feel fine, of course. They’re not being snappish because they’re overwhelmed with grief, they’re stressed at work (when before it was nothing). They’re doing things they wouldn’t normally do, like my own example (finding my journal in the freezer). Even that is written off as forgetfulness, even when they haven’t been like that in their whole lives.

You absolutely lose your mind for a little bit, no matter what your relationship with your parents was like. This is because it’s losing your tether, your protectors. You’re your own parent now, and therefore an “adultier adult” just by the nature of hierarchy. You’re the new generation, the changing monarchy in which you have to resurrect yourself, whether you use the analogy of the Christ or the phoenix.

You will definitely feel mocked in some cases.

One woman compared my grief over my mother to her grief over her cat. I was offended, but I’m sure she meant well. I don’t know what her relationship with her cat was like. I’m just not the kind of pet owner that would compare losing a mother to losing a pet. The worst part about you feeling mocked is that you know everyone means well, so you just have to let it roll off when those comments are impossible to forget……

I showed someone my ichthus necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint pattern in the middle. He asked where I got it and I said “the funeral home.” He said, “well… that’s really creepy.” Where else would I get something like that if I couldn’t ask her for it and the funeral home thought to do it when I didn’t?

That was a comment I’m still not over, and it affected my life in a big way because I never talked to him again.

I couldn’t look at him anymore, because I was so hurt every single time and it wasn’t worth working through it because he’d never been the most respectful person I’d ever met. It was just the last in a string of one-liners that were “jokes.”

It was not something I liked tolerating at the best of times, and this was when I couldn’t even see straight. Grief that deep is heavy and exhausting. You don’t learn to live with it all at once because you can’t. You’re basically in a shock blanket at first.

It comes over time, when there are fewer and fewer moments where you deny yourself happiness because of what they won’t get or what you promised that didn’t come true. You don’t heal from grief so much as sit with it until it doesn’t hurt anymore.

By thinking about it, over time you remember more and more good memories. It makes thinking about their death less draining and more about the things that make you smile. At first, I could only picture the open casket at her funeral, and it’s still the first picture that comes to my mind when I think of her because it’s etched in a way that my other pictures aren’t.

(I don’t mean I literally took a picture. Gross.)

If there is an open casket at King Charles’ funeral, there will be billions of pictures of it. In the newspaper. Can’t hide from it.

So specific.

So unique.

Like grief.

Taking Things Literally

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I spent a lot of time walking around the grocery store this afternoon. I ended up walking out with a lemon parfait and a Diet Pepsi after almost 45 minutes of trying to decide what I would actually *eat.* That’s what happens when you’re on Adderrall and you go to a grocery store. You intend to buy groceries, and nothing looks good. Plus, I was absolutely lost in thought. I couldn’t have shopped at gunpoint because I was so knocked for a loop emotionally. The reason I walked out with so little is that the longer I spent lost in thought, the more demand avoidant I got. It happens to me frequently, a sign of the neurodivergent brain. If I can’t think about anything else, I can’t do anything else. That’s because autism is famous for monotropic thought processes.

I could not pick out food I would like to eat in the future when my appetite is so suppressed that I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate. This is also because I get demand avoidance around cooking, because I don’t like going downstairs. One of my roommates and I are tight. One of my roommates and I are now in a war because she expects me to clean up after her in the bathroom, to the point where she won’t even change the toilet roll.

I can’t remember the date, but the time I got together with Zac before Burns Nicht, I was at his house for two nights. Since I knew I was going to be gone, I didn’t change it just to see if she would.

She didn’t.

We have cameras in all the public areas, so people would notice if this was happening in the kitchen (it does). I have been her maid for nine years, except for the day the maid comes. It won’t take three hours before there’s hair all over the vanity because she has washed her hair in the sink.

The shower is a mess of her hair, because I don’t shower that often in the winter. It’s too big a swing in terms of sensory environment and if I was going somewhere, of course I’d pull out all the stops. Mostly, I just want to avoid cleaning up after someone else.

She will not talk to me about this issue at all, because she thinks I’m unclean (she’s a Trumper, a Modi fan, and has so far made me aware of all the cultural stigmas that come with being queer in India. It has never happened to me before. One of my previous housemates was a Nigerian. No issue whatsoever, and their taboos are probably worse than India.

Said Nigerian was a doctor who went to medical school in Crimea, so he’s the only black person I know who is also fluent in Russian. Oh, and Arabic because he worked in Saudi for years. I don’t remember whether he was a GP for the populace or whether he was working in a palace taking care of the royals.

My hatred of the Saudi monarchy knows no bounds, but I am not insulting the people of Saudi Arabia. The people have nothing to do with how they’re governed. What I know for sure (because my landlady is Lebanese) is that families in the Middle East are all about hospitality and being welcoming. For instance, if I could get into Iran, there are a lot of people who’d want to welcome me because they have no beef with the American government. A minority would be trying to peg me as intelligence, shouting “death to America. Death to CIA.”

Actually, I can’t remember if they said that last part in “Parts Unknown” or whether I’m mixing up the Iran episode and the first few minutes of “Argo.”

Incidentally, there is an “Argo” quote for every occasion… but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be when Jack and Tony go to present their idea for the film crew. Right before Jack opens the door to what is presumably a 7th floor kind of office, he says, “careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”

Iran’s continuing ire at us is a real thing if they’re still protesting us exfiltrating the Shah. He lived out his days in Great Falls, VA, working for us (presumably) because one of the reasons we exfiltrated him was that he had cancer that he knew would kill him with the medical treatment in Iran. So, we got him to the US and that was the end of that.

I understand that the Iranis have the right to hate our guts for it, too. I don’t have to have a dog in this fight, because it’s been going on since I was two. No one, especially me, is going to figure it out. The best outcome would be coming to an agreement at least good enough to reopen the embassy. But that’s a pipe dream, like asking Israel to stop bombing the hell out of Jerusalem, because Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care who dies. If he has to kill his own people to make the Palestinians pay, he doesn’t lose sleep over it.

They came to a sort-of deal in the 70s, in which the Palestinians were given land. Good to go. But then Israelis were encouraged to move into those neighborhoods so that they could push the Palestinians out.

“You can’t do that. We live here.”

“Do you have a flag?”

-Eddie Izzard

We could solve a lot of this by cooking together, as Anthony Bourdain showed us for many years. We are more alike than we are different. Even the Israelis and Palestinians have learned this. There are many, many integrated neighborhoods where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side and never spout that Zionist shit, because they live in the real world… the one where Muslims lives are not worth less to Jews because they know them… not like the Israeli government.

Israel is a recognized state. Palestine isn’t. Therefore, Israel has all the military power they could ever want. Both Palestinians and the Israelis who support them are the Resistence. Zionism has been used to great effect, both in Israel and in the United States, to not only try and push out the Palestinians, but have the world’s full support to do it.

In America, this leads to Evangelical Christian money being pumped into Israel because they think that since Christianity came from Judaism, that means we are like, the same.

I don’t have time for that bullshit. This is not our fight, and we are clearly picking sides. There has to be a reason, I’ll tell you that. I just don’t know what it is. Because that’s what generally happens to me. I criticize based on what’s public, and find out later what really happened, through either the news or an op being declassified so you can look it up online.

So, maybe I’m telling you all the wrong things because there’s more to the chessboard than I can see at present. But this is what I think based on what I know *right now.*

And as I’ve said before, I dive up and down in my writing because I’m using a technique that Louis L’Amour taught me. He said to just start writing and let the faucet drip. Say whatever comes to your mind, because eventually you’ll hit on something worth exploring. For me, that shows itself in having random connections with stories in my brain, and some of them are not pleasant.

Therefore, I start feeling anxious about what I’m writing, and I come back up. Then, as I’m sitting with my negative feelings enough to breathe, I can dive back down again.

Because if I take the blog prompt from this morning literally, my favorite foods to cook are the ones I learned from Dana. She was my first chef, and I wouldn’t know anything about cooking on a professional level without her. So, I take time with breakfast.

My housemates called me “Pancake Girl” for a year.

 

 

This Was Going to Be Fiction, but ADHD…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I really need to start making outlines before I write, because gardening leads to great things in blogging and plot holes in fiction. The reason there are no plot holes in my blog is that I don’t care if you find them. Just because I didn’t tell you the whole story according to everyone in the room doesn’t make it less untrue. It is me crafting the narrative without taking anyone else’s feelings into consideration. It sounds harsh and cold, but I don’t mean it that way. The reason I only include my perceptions of people’s feelings rather than what they actually are is because I am not a mind reader.

If they were bloggers, their stories would be up to a hundred percent different from mine because we were watching something from different perspectives.

“What color was the light?”

This is why I don’t care what anyone says about me, either, because they’re just as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine. For instance, I know for sure that Supergrover’s story is completely different from mine because she stopped telling it; she could then easily blame me for being a dictator when I laid out my fears, hopes, and dreams. In fact, she actually said that I was not the only arbiter of our relationship, and that’s the message I’ve been trying to give her for 10 years. She doesn’t have as much power in the relationship because she’s not vulnerable. If she laid out her thoughts and feelings, mine would adjust. Because now I just feel like I’m intruding, I’ll write her a long letter every few months because I can’t be sure God is listening, but I can be sure she is. I’ve been saying that for 10 years as well.

I destroyed that relationship out of my own insecurities because she would not do anything to calm them. She’d waffle between feeling like my Mama Wolverine and wanting out of my life for good within weeks of each other. She has also said that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future….. because I’m part of her wild and crazy brain. When she said that, I told her she was part of my wild and crazy soul. It’s true. I’m yin and she’s yang, except with a lot more gray area in the middle. What I’ve always tried to stop is feeling worthless because the cycle ran thusly:

I would open up about something deep, and she wouldn’t respond at all because “she didn’t have time.” I didn’t get frustrated that she didn’t have time. I got frustrated that her letters were short and didn’t tell me anything. I know that’s half because she’s protecting herself and half because I’m a blogger. My blog is the bane of my existence because it brought us together and tore us apart all in one breath. She knows she’ll always have to be a reader because we know each other, and as I told her in my last letter, “none of this will mean shit to you until it’s been five or 10 years and you see yourself as a different person. Then, the 3D character you don’t see will emerge, because you’re looking for the good things now because you want to remember. I told her about the 614,000 words I’d written in 2023, so I said something like I’ve talked about our problems, but I’ve loved you up just as much…… in all six books.

I also think that if her life is cut short like my mother’s that other people who knew her will want to read my perceptions all the more, because they’re the ones that are going to want to “spend time with her” the most. I feel like I started writing more deeply about her after my mother died, because she wasn’t my mother, but she was someone’s. The worst time she never knew she hurt me (because I didn’t want to rock the boat) was when I told her that she had a “suburban mom vibe.” She said that was probably the meanest thing I’d ever said to her, and because she is who she is, I thought she was joking. She proceeded to rip me a new asshole, when in my mind that archetype was the one I needed the most desperately, the one I’d just lost.

I’ll never forget that because she was a fan first, she has read my story and accepted it as my reality, not hers…. but she’s found truth and beauty in it. When she hasn’t been angry, she’s been very kind about how brilliant a writer I am. But what I don’t know, and will never know at this point, is how she really feels about me.

I called her on it, and she noped out…. because she realized she was waffling and couldn’t give me a solid answer. But what I know for sure, like, Oprah-level sure, is that she’s worth it….. that the experience was worth it even if it’s over now.

I didn’t move to DC to be near her, because I already had my own thing going and my sister dropping in all the time (I actually see her more now). But what I didn’t expect is that we’d still be having the same fight 10 years later when it would have been so easy to solve everything in the length of one coffee/beer.

What I know is that I was too hard on her in my own insecurity, because if she didn’t want to make up her mind, I was out. I didn’t need to inflict fear of a phone call or get-together. I was furious that after 10 years she wouldn’t tell me the truth about anything.

She practically treated me like a stalker when I never was that…. at all. If I was, we wouldn’t have made up. But those feelings of fear remain, so I thought it was crazy when she said, “do you think I care if you look up public information about me?” Ummmm…. yes. Yes, I do. To the point where if I really thought about it, I might throw up. Going back to those days in my mind is torture, and I’ve been trying to forgive myself and can’t. I said some things that never should have been said on a wide variety of topics, and the fact that she hung in for the ride means more to me than she’ll ever know.

However, when I started doing actual conflict resolution and not letting her rattle me by escalating, I was dismissed. That leads me down two trains of thought. The first is that she likes the ups and downs because getting her anger out is a good thing. I don’t care if it’s at me. She’s got to emote sometime, and anger is an emotion. Her outbursts at me are the most emotion I’ve seen out of her in a long time. That’s because I know she’s going through the shit, so I pray for her. The second is that she’s simply avoidant because she doesn’t know how to open up, and that’s not personal to me at all. I can imagine that if she’s shut down with me, she’s shut down with more than just me.

The way you resolve conflict is learned in your first family, and it takes extensive therapy to make a relationship last because you’re constantly trying to merge two parenting styles. My family was all buttoned up for many years. We got over it. It was better to be mad in the moment and forgive quickly than it was to hold onto frustration for years and years. Therefore, it’s very hard for me to be in a relationship where people keep their anger, guilt, whatever bottled up. I can’t stop thinking about when the other shoe is going to drop. Neither does my beautiful girl, because her answer is to keep avoiding everything and my answer is “there’s no way back, only through.” I can’t do much to help the relationship heal, but like I said, I pray for her every night, and it’s been the same prayer every night for the last 10 years.

If there truly is a God, they can go places with her that I can’t. It comforts me to know that she’s not alone, because even if she doesn’t think God is listening, it’s a comforting image, anyway.

What I missed were all the ways we treated each other during new relationship energy. We lovebombed the absolute fuck out of each other. I have never found anyone like her, and I keep saying that, but some things are too unique. It’s not only that letting you know would be telling her story and not mine, it’s that there are some things about any relationship that I keep private so that there are some things only for me.

You absolutely can’t go back to lovebombing each other if you can’t do conflict resolution over and over. When I stood up, she did not rise to meet me. I didn’t so much let her go, but let her go back to the way she used to live.

I told her she was a phoenix, and I can’t wait to see her rise from the ash…… because she has, professionally. I’m not so sure about relationships, but I only have ours as an example.

I got that INFJ judgmental bastard urge to drag people into the light whether they want to go or not. However, I am not judgmental of people. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer most of my life and have done well in undergrad regarding the preparation for it. Therefore, I will lay out facts representing what I think about both sides of a situation. I am not saying “you’re a bad person.” I am basically reading my emotional docket and the case in front of me has as many complications as medicine. The diagnosis in medicine is the same as the verdict in law: it depends.

I am emotionally capable of being fair and balanced, but because I’m autistic, I’m often not thinking of how to phrase things so that they’ll come across as how I meant them to a neurotypical person. And here, on my blog, some of the literary devices I use don’t make sense unless you’re talking to me behind the scenes.

That’s always what brought Supergrover back around. She didn’t like reading the blog without the brochure, as I’ve said before. But if she talked to me, she’d see that I was being quite reasonable and had a good head on my shoulders. What she has not realized is the lengths I’ve gone to in order to protect her and harps on breadcrumbs I never would have seen……… unless we had talked about it.

In this way, I am my own main character (in the original writing prompt, the kid was a picky eater), because when I feel these emotional situations weighing themselves in my mind, I develop sensory issues because I need deprivation so badly to regulate my emotions. I don’t even listen to music when I write anymore. I just listen to my typing.

There are days when I can’t take exciting food, because I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs. A meltdown would be serving me something from a restaurant instead of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, because I was overstimulated before you brought home lobster.

I don’t have very good meltdowns. I have shutdowns. I am not very good at standing up for myself, nor being impolite or socially awkward in any way. Therefore, having a meltdown in front of someone would have to be major. I’d eat the lobster, I’d just hate that the food is one more thing I don’t have the bandwith with which to pay attention.

Meltdown often comes online, when I am overstimulated and itching for a fight. But I’m so dextrous with words that I’m not looking to destroy people (though some would say I am after a straight woman read an entire thread from me and a friend talking about how straight people could support queer people, and then asked me for ideas on making an ally flag. Now, in this instance, angry black woman and angry white lesbian are not dissimilar. I don’t want to do work for straight people. Look it up. Read the rest of the comments, at least.

She caught me on a very bad day and she was also uneducated as fuck, so I could have been nicer and I didn’t know how. I just had to be kind. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was heated…. where I took apart every one of her talking points in order to educate herself on being the parent of someone queer, because if you have a queer child, you can’t possibly have institutionalized homophobia, now can you? I also have mixed emotions about straight people wearing rainbow flags, because they have the option to take them off.

Most of the time, though, I go in and de-escalate a situation. I’ve whipped line cooks’ asses and it turned into an actually deep conversation. It was a Taylor Swift joke in poor taste and I took issue with that.

I am certain that I have responded like this to Supergrover, but because she didn’t see the meltdown, she didn’t see me as trying to be kind but not nice. I will agree that I was over the top, but I never said anything untrue about our anxious/avoidant attachment. I don’t expect her to treat my anxious attachment with kid gloves. I expect her not to withold information so that I know exactly what’s going on, because I can’t process situations on no information from the other person. I will send myself into a spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem about which I couldn’t overthink.

So, the less information she gave me, the more I spiraled out trying to fix things, because I assumed that everything was all about me. It’s not because it actually was. It’s that I had absolutely no information to the contrary to put things into context/perspective.

We don’t have a context, and that’s a good thing most of the time because we can talk about things without it affecting everyone else in our physical lives. But over time, it began to be a hard row to hoe, because I wanted peace……

One way or the other.

Mr. Goodbar

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What snack would you eat right now?

It’s so simple. Just peanuts and chocolate. Delicious and doesn’t taste cheap like a Krackle or however it’s spelled. I need the protein, because I haven’t had breakfast yet. It’s about 0930, so this is not unusual for me. I’ll get home around 10:30 or 11:00 and I have stuff in the fridge begging for my attention. If I’m hungry enough, there’s leftover pizza. We’ll just see. After getting all my medication back on track, I’m sick as a dog with nausea. There has to be a better protocol for me than this, but going through the rigamarole of trying something new can introduce more problems as you find out that something doesn’t work for you.

I’ve tried Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Effexor, and anything else you can throw at depression. Lamictal is the only thing that has worked in 20-odd years. So, I’d like something new that didn’t make me quite so ill, but it might take a year or two I don’t have or want to take. When you’re trying out different meds, it sometimes leads to mood and behavior that seems like you’re off them completely. For instance, Effexor can make you suicidal.

That’s actually a sore point between Dana’s old therapist and me. I thought she was a complete hoe bag. I can safely say they don’t interact anymore, so this story goes all the way back to like, 2015, maybe earlier.

When you are in a psychiatric emergency like your medication wanting you to kill yourself, you are stuck in the shit. You can’t see past your own pain, and someone has to step in because you literally cannot make that phone call by yourself. So, with Dana’s permission, I called her therapist and said that she couldn’t come to the phone herself (currently with her own head between her knees), and explained the problem. She’d just started Effexor and it made her nosedive.

She called Dana back, didn’t tell her to go to the emergency room, and told Dana that if she couldn’t come to the phone herself, then I was controlling and she was codependent. We can explore all that once Dana is out of immediate danger, but first of all, you’re Dana’s therapist and you don’t know me from shit or Shinola.™ I have experience with psychiatric emergencies both from watching myself with an omnipotent third eye, and being the one to take care of my friends when they cannot do things for themselves.

When you are in burnout, can you make a phone call?

I can, sometimes, but it requires a Mr. Goodbar. That I don’t have. I’m on the train back from Zac’s, so I could stop and get one. But I won’t. It’s better in my memory, when my mom and I used to split them.

I particularly need chocolate today because I’m sad. Through no fault of his own (TDY), Zac is going to miss the book signing for “In True Face.” Maybe I’ll just bring a cardboard cutout. 😛 I am sure he would love that. #eyeroll

If I’m lucky, maybe Lindsay will be free that night, because I doubt she could go to the thingme with me, but might be able to meet for dinner before or after. Preferably before, because I’d just be reading in the restaurant.

If I’m alone, dinner will be a Mr. Goodbar It’s my way of taking my mother as my companion instead of Zac. I don’t know how much she knew about spies (you never knew- she read a bazillion autobiographies), but I know she did know quite a lot about chocolate…… and peanuts….. and the fact that you can’t by the King Size because the ratio is off.

I might have come up with that last one myself, but I doubt it. Institutional knowledge seems to come out of nowhere when I take the first bite.

Words Are Hard, Part I

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Zac got me a box of writing prompts from Freewrite for Christmas, so I thought I’d leaf through them. At first I thought you weren’t supposed to do that, but on the first card, “How It Works,” it says that you don’t have to do them in any order; it’s not a pop quiz. Just find one that speaks to you. The prompt is actually a quote, and I’ll highlight it when I get there. I told you I was at the bottom of a ladder, but thanks to this box of cards, I have a solid few rungs in front of me. Like I said earlier, if I have enough fiction to start a separate blog for it, I probably will as not to mix up my entries. Right now, I’m just seeing if I like posting my exercises at all.

Rebecca Alexis Radnowski checked her watch.

12:20.

They were late.

She had already kissed Kermit for the last time, her angel baby…. her little -frog.- She could not, would not do it again- torture on both of them. There was nothing to do but wait for the taxi.

As she got into the back seat, she did not see the little boy in the window, creating his first memory. For years, the only thing Kermit knew about his mother was that she owned a long red coat and high black heels. However, Rebecca wouldn’t have known that. Couldn’t have known. There were more pressing matters at hand.

Gregory, Kermit’s father, and Leila, Gregory’s sister, had to step up to be parents in Rebecca’s stead, because someone had to know the plan. It was too intricate not to have someone know how to get in touch with her, because she wasn’t sure how long the assignment would last. Was it going to be three weeks or three months?

This was a trip in which she had to get her ducks in a row beforehand, because she might not come home from this one. Overthrowing a government can lead to……… issues, and thinking about what was about to happen took away the sting of everything she was leaving (as she lied to herself). She was at least making it look like she was running logistics in her head; anyone with eyes could see the little death happening.

The file tree detailing her current life was dropping away, and the new information became synonymous with her initials…. Compressed and password protected, at that. People had always joked she was a RAR file because she’d always been buttoned up…… and failed to see the humor in it. People with emotions were unpredictable, and there were few things she could abide in life less than surprises. So, it was no issue that when she laid it out for Gregory, said she’d been “approached” and wanted to go, all he could do was kiss her and say “good luck.” Gregory knew that while he and Kermit were important, this was fulfilling Rebecca’s life ambition. Besides, Kermit wasn’t even out of diapers. Rebecca wouldn’t miss much and Leila was great with him.

Later on, Beck would regret this choice from the depths of her being, because she gave up a relationship with her son. It was not three weeks or three months. She doesn’t know that right now, though.

Right now, she is annoyed.

The taxi has dropped her in front of Dulles at curb check-in, which should have made everything a hell of a lot easier….. or it would have been, had Karen not been in front of her in line. Having traveled for so many years, Beck had packed her stuff in one large suitcase (she wasn’t going to check anything, but realized she wanted her weighted blanket) and a duffel bag. Since the duffel was a little oversized, she thought she’d check that as well. She had a small messenger bag with her tablet, keyboard, and some Sudoku…. plus a couple pairs of underwear in case her luggage ended up in France. It had happened before.

The name of the game, Rebecca believed, was traveling with the least amount of stuff possible. Ask around about local brands, etc. because you can always pick up stuff in your AOA and not count it as part of your weight limit. She was a firm believer in buying shampoo, soap, and hair products in whatever country she was “visiting” and giving everything away on her last day there. That’s the one part of her life that she will never change- being addicted to products she cannot find in the US.

Because of Rebecca’s clear superiority in packing, Karen did not impress her. Karen’s bags were full of all the shit Rebecca has learned to leave at home, because she didn’t want her stuff to end up all over the ground like Karen’s is now….. taking stuff out one at a time so that she doesn’t have to pay overage fees (but also her husband is very powerful and DO YOU KNOW WHO HE IS?).

Rebecca wears a tight smile and thinks, “I could have you killed.”

She doesn’t mean it, of course. Just a little black humor to let off steam. Or, it would have been if she’d not just realized she’d actually said it out loud. As predicted- once her idiocy was confirmed- Karen turns to her and says something to the effect of “who the fuck do you think you are?” Rebecca thought it best not to answer that.

Rebecca is, in the popular vernacular, “the one who knocks.”

She redirects to try and de-escalate the situation. “I’m so sorry. I was just annoyed. Take your time.” Also as predicted, it does not work. Karen is in show mode….. “THE AUDACITY OF THIS BITCH….” Rebecca steps back and thinks to herself, “I had a meeting at the White House yesterday. Aren’t I important?” This time, she made sure she only said it to herself, knowing that Karen would never know she was making fun of herself. She had one job. Get through the airport.

It was going so well.

After that kerfuffle, Rebecca realized that she hadn’t even had time to drink a cup of coffee and checked her watch again. 1:00 PM, and the flight didn’t leave for an hour. Her bags were already dealt with (surprisingly without any real bloodshed). Time to find a coffee shop.

She saw a couple of places, but picked Starbucks because she knew it would be the last time she’d really get a boost of that magnitude. She walked in and gave them her standard order….. “just fuck me up.”

A quad shot red eye later, she was smelling numbers….. just like God intended. She set a timer on her watch for 30 minutes, and sunk into her favorite novel, “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.” She often thought that she’d like to write fiction, and saw promise in David Wrobleski because it took him 10 years to write his first novel, which turned out to be a masterpiece. “In my next life…..” she thought. “I”m going to have to choose something else eventually. This job is for young people.”

Rebecca Alexis Radnowski is all of 28 years old.

She is not a complainer. She would rather die than complain about anything. But the hard truth is that intelligence is hard work. It’s less physically demanding than police or FBI, but that doesn’t mean that her knees aren’t 80. She tries to keep in shape by hitting the gym several times a week, but there’s only so much she can do to stop the passage of time. She was supposed to have rested three surgeries ago.

…..which is why when her alarm goes off, it takes her a second to get moving again. Transitions are so hard, and being autistic just makes it worse. Rebecca is not the kind of person that can walk into any room at any time without extensive preparation. For instance, if she has a meeting with a high value target to pump them for information on even higher value targets, she will stand in front of the doorway to the interrogation room for a few minutes and will herself to walk in.

It’s not that she’s not good at her job. She’s not good at transitions. She’s always gotten glowing reviews from her superiors, and God help the person behind the door. That doesn’t mean her life isn’t made hard by autism. It’s that she had to develop coping mechanisms….. both for when to emote……… and when to……. not.

This particular transition is actually getting on the plane. It is something she has prepared to do for weeks. Her husband and sister-in-law are cheering her on from home, excited for all she will be able to do for the people she’s trying to rescue……. deep in the wilds of Guatemala.

Editor’s Note:

CIA did try to overthrow the Guatemalan government in the 50s under Truman, so there is historical precedent. However, this piece takes place too late for that and is just a fictional example of something that could conceivably happen.

Because the environment of the airport and the environment of the plane are so different, Rebecca knew that she would need extra time to adjust. She didn’t need to go through security, and got on the plane as soon as they called for pre-board. The agent gave her a little guff, so she did something she never does. Ever.

She pulled rank.

No further explanation was necessary, as she knew would be the case. She loved that with the way she moved in the world, it was open to her. She also knew that it was not a skeleton key. That the rules still applied to her, but at the same time, needing extra time to board for autism was as valid as everything else. She always weighed options and tried to decide carefully if she was putting other people out with her power, or whether she was using it for good. After eight years, she still wasn’t sure. She just tried to be as humble as she could be given that she didn’t open doors, they opened for her. She didn’t just board early. The gate attendant gave her an upgrade.

Somehow, when your badge has three particular letters on it, people don’t see anything else. Rebecca is used to it by now, but it gets a bit tiresome. All of the fuss really only happens in airports, because no one at the airport knows where she works, but they do know someone must be powerful if they don’t have to go through security, and are allowed to keep their weapons.

Even with the special treatment, she can’t get to her seat fast enough. She needs quiet like air…… but an air hostess greets her and tells her that she loves her hair. It sets her off at first, and then she breathes deeply. Finally, something normal. Rebecca tells her that she just got it cut at this great little place in Burke, then offers to Air Drop her the contact info. When the air hostess replies to the message, she saves the number in her phone. It wouldn’t be bad to have an air hostess’s number in her back pocket given her LOW.

Shortly afterwards, the air hostess shows back up with a glass of champagne and a cup of orange juice. She says, “I know this is already free because you’re in first class, but I just wanted to do something nice for you.”

Her seat mate grumbled.

“Jesus. Who do I have to fuck to get service like that?”

The air hostess, looking embarrassed, says everything without opening her mouth. Rebecca has nothing to lose. “Are you going to treat all the air hostesses like that or do I have to cut off your nuts?” The knife in her boot started itching, craving a workout.

Her seatmate looked amused, but said nothing except “I could have you killed.” And then, it might have been an accident, but she thought he winked. Winked!

She looked down at her tray and wondered what all this was about. They hadn’t even taken off yet, and she’d managed to make two enemies already….. but he didn’t seem that scary. It looked like he knew she wanted to be scary, but was actually just three little girls in a trench coat. It was unnerving, but she couldn’t say that she didn’t like it. No one looked at her as innocent. Not anymore.

Her seatmate said, “I’m sorry. We should start over. I’m Robert McCall.” “I’m Susan Plummer,” Rebecca replied, catching the theme. Robert didn’t miss a trick.

“Good catch, Rebecca.”

All the color drained out of her face. Her real name wasn’t even on her Guatemalan passport. Tony had crafted it especially for her, and it was a gift. So perfect there weren’t reproductions like it anywhere in the world. Who WAS this man?

They were now climbing through the air, 50-100 miles from the ground, and Rebecca had never felt so unsafe. There was no going back, there was only through. Someone had gotten the jump on her, and she wasn’t even sure of that. Maybe “Robert” was part of her ground crew. She didn’t know every company employee ever.

Rebecca went back to the Sawtelle farm, unsure of what to say next. A few hours passed, and she looked up. Robert was asleep, and the rest of the plane was quiet…….. right up until it wasn’t.

Robert and Rebecca noticed it first. They had flown a left hand triangle twice with 2 minute legs, so they knew it was coming. There would be an announcement that there was total engine/comms failure, a signal to the tower that the plane’s behavior might be erratic.

When the announcement was made, the tin tube of misery became as quiet as a crypt. There was no yelling. It was not like a movie. Terror is quiet. In those moments, even the hair raising on your arm feels too loud. Rebecca wasn’t religious, but she was raised in the church, so she said the only words she remembered….. “Jesus loves the little children…. all the children of the world….” Tears started to fall as she thought of her sweet baby boy, her tiny -frog.- Robert’s tenor soothed her…. “red and yellow, black and white….. we are precious in his sight….” He did not finish. His own daughter, Kiambre, was three. He broke when he thought of that particular aisle he’d never walk.

As the plane went down, they both made a note. If we get out of this alive, we’re going to need supplies. There’s a lot of jungle near the airport, so I am sure we’ll have resources…. but what kind and how much will vary, as will the speed of our ex-fil if we do not die on impact.

For both Rebecca and Robert, this kind of “casing” is their normal….. and now they each know the other is fluent in this particular language. Or do they? Rebecca really doesn’t know. She thought she knew everyone in the office, and her team wouldn’t send her help unless she asked for it. Robert, for his part, does not mention how he knows what he knows…….. nor that he’s not CIA.

They sit there in silence, fingers touching just for human comfort, until the plane comes to rest between several trees. The air is dense, a hot and wet blanket as they exit the emergency hatch.

Because Rebecca is who she is, she thinks that not being at the scene is a good idea. Nothing like being caught in a camera sweep during film at 11 to ruin a perfectly good day. She’s about a half mile away from the plane when all her adrenaline runs out. She looks down.

She really should have rested three surgeries ago.

A softball-sized hematoma is growing on her knee. There is nothing left to do but sit down. She thought she had power in this situation, but the universe decided otherwise. She didn’t need to stay in the jungle all day, but she decided that a few minutes of rest wouldn’t hurt anything.

Robert’s curiosity got the best of him. He knew Rebecca was CIA. He knew that in her agency she was more powerful than he was. He knew he was sent to find her because his government needed her more than hers did. He decided to push his luck.

“Well, I’m not actually a doctor. I attended med school for a few semesters… I’m not so great at finishing things…. Looks like I’m your best bet in the middle of the jungle, though,” he said between enormous bites of banana.

You May Be Entitled to Compensation…. Probably

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?

Let’s be clear. I don’t have baggage or drama to heap on someone else because I deal with all that stuff here. I don’t have to rely on my friends to help me know how I feel about a situation and how I’m going to react. So, the reason I say that my billboard should be “you may be entitled to compensation” is that I am so independent that it’s hard to pin me down….. get your mind out of the gutter (I know you won’t, you’re Fanagans. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t swear like a sailor or wish you could).

OMG. OMG. I am so wrong. Why didn’t I think of this before?

My Blog Makes Me Sound Like a Dick…. theantileslie.com

I will never not keep repeating that phrase, because when my friend popped off and said it she had no idea what she was unleashing. I had already been mad at her for years because she was poly and I wasn’t the person(s) she was dating in addition to being married. However, we met on OK Cupid, when I saw her profile and just said, “I’m not sure that I even want a date, but I’m new to the area and would like more friends. Would you like to get together? Bring your wife if you want. It’s just easy.”

So, we did meet up and her wife did come. It was there that I made the mistake of a lifetime, because it made her wife not like me for the rest of our relationship. I hugged her. She’s really hardcore about consent and being a Texan, I walked right into that trap. Betcha Brené, Matt, Renee, and Beyoncé have done the same ass thing. We all grew up in the same state, the same areas, so I’m betting that piece of history/future is solid. It’s a mistake you don’t stop making, because Southern politeness sticks in your bones. Someone who doesn’t hug people politely is going to be creeped out, and in effect, that’s what happened.

I became a stand-in for all the other women she didn’t like, because my friend was dating and her wife wasn’t (not a thing, her own choice). That being said, even I raised my eyebrows at how much my friend was going out because I was like WTF? You just had twins? So, in any case, I was actually on her wife’s side the whole time, but she wouldn’t have taken the time to get to know me.

I told her that I was from Portland, she said it smelled like pee. So does every major city in America, fuck off. It was just a dig at me, and I knew it. But basically, my friend was getting around and leaving her wife on baby duty all the fucking time, so of course her wife resented her and everything that came with her. I saw it in 15 minutes, and I stayed, anyway, because the friend was actually cool……. right up until she told me that my blog made me sound like a dick and I should have been nicer to the woman that ripped my heart out and served it to me. Again, fuck off.

I never want to see her again if I can help it, because she became a train wreck in her own life and dared criticize me. This was not constructive. She has the right to think what she thinks and say what she says. She does not have the right to control my reaction, which was to say that she had no business being friends with a blogger and I was tired of her shit all the way around, anyway.

It was too much when I only wanted to be friends with both women and their twins. I noped out pretty fast when I saw I had an out. We could be done with each other, and I needed it.

If you want to criticize me, please do. I love criticism. However, if it is mean-spirited, I’ll shut down. There’s a way to say “I think you’re wrong about this” without emotionally destroying each other….. but make no mistake. I promise that you will never meet a writer who doesn’t love verbal combat, so take that warning seriously. I won’t start a fight, but I’ll end it. I know this about myself, and that I say things that can’t be taken back. So I would rather focus on not making myself angry. I did that by stopping caring about a lot of shit, like other people’s feelings about my writing that get frustrated and say something that I’ve remembered for YEARS.

It’s funny now…. but, “your blog makes you sound like a dick” when my girlfriend had just broken up with me a few days before was egregious. OF COURSE I WAS FUCKING FURIOUS. WHO DO YOU THINK I AM? I am not made of stone. I was lucky in that I had another beautiful woman to catch me, and I leaned into that, instead. So, for all practical intents and purposes, I broke up with my friend and my girlfriend simultaneously. The friend hurt worse because Sam and I had only been together for three weeks.

I deserved the right to have my own feelings about that relationship ending, and for someone to say that there should have been rhyme and reason to what I think about a breakup after what seemed like 15 minutes is insane. She wanted me to post more recipes and shit, as if that’s going to attract anyone.

If I started putting recipes at the bottom of my blog entries, that might be interesting. You wouldn’t have to read any less, it just wouldn’t be about Kayden, Kory, Kerry, and Kayleigh.

But the bottom line is that I had to make hard decisions in my life about what I will tolerate, because I am not a person that can click long-term with just anyone. I can talk to anyone in the world about anything for a few minutes, but it takes a miracle to spend time with me day in and day out without wanting to stab yourself with a fork. I know this because I drive me crazy all the time and I don’t want to be with me every single day, either, but here we are.

The piece de resistance was when I decided that Supergrover could either give up her “this is threatening” shit and work with me on what I could say and what I couldn’t, or she could get out of my way. I wasn’t going to tank my career for her, but I would have. What I did not know were ironclad boundaries to stick to before I started writing in the first place. I know a few things that would identify her to the public, but not enough.

I told her I would never give her editorial control, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to get our story straight. It’s not fun for me to think that she thinks I’m making things up as I go along. If there were plot points or character exploration that needed to be done, that’s on both of us, not just me. I am not blogging her story. If I did, she’d probably begrudgingly read it. It’s not that I want to write a story about her. I’m writing a story about me, and she happens to be involved through a strange set of circumstances, but not because she’s a hotshot. That part is the least impressive thing about her because it’s code for “I’m exhausted every minute of every fucking day.”

No, with Supergrover, who is my beautiful girl, there was only empathy for her struggles and an ache that I couldn’t fix it for her. We don’t do the same job, we aren’t even really in the same city anymore. That doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t go out to her.

I hope that when she’s screaming down 66 at some point, there will be a sign telling her all is well.

Because it would be a better sign to say “my blog makes me sound like a dick, and you may be entitled to compensation.”

SG, I love you out loud. I hope that covers punitive damages.

Not in the Slightest

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?
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This time last year, Sam and I had broken up maybe a week before. It was a blessing and a curse all at the same time.

I loved being around her, being with her. I liked doing things for her, like cleaning up more than I needed while making coffee. Everything was nice and tidy, I just love all kitchens a professional amount. A mom of two is not going to go after a kitchen the way a line cook would, unless they’re also a mom of two. It doesn’t generally work like that. The mom of two kind of line cook hates that they can’t keep their kitchen as clean at home as they can at work. The kitchen is detail, and one of the few things I am quite detailed about, being AuDHD. It is through nothing but repetition, this iron will in the kitchen, because ADHD does not lend itself to remembering details, particularly if they have to be in any kind of order.

I told a friend I was cleaning Sam’s kitchen because I wanted to be a good houseguest, and they said, “clearly, you have UNDERSTOOD THE ASSIGNMENT.” It made me laugh, but I wasn’t doing it so Sam would love me. I was doing it because I love the kitchen, and Sam was the package that came with the kitchen. 😉 So, if I thought I’d be doing something differently this year, it’s that I thought I’d be spending Christmas with my girlfriend and her kids, but we broke up for a very, very good reason. I am no longer the person who will anticipate someone else’s needs. I will respond to yours, but I will not guess what they are. If you tell me what your intentions are with me and they don’t match what’s actually going on in your head, you don’t get to blame my reaction on me. I would have had a different response with different facts.

I’ve said this before, but Sam told me that she had a full-time job, two kids, and time management issues because of it. There just weren’t enough hours in the day. So, let’s not get exclusive right away. I agreed to that and she broke up with me while I was on my first date with Zac. She knew I had a date with him coming up, knew that if she was uncomfortable, I’d cancel my date with him (I made it before I met her), and sat on the information that she was upset until it would cause maximum damage with drama. She’s a singer. She is not unpracticed at this, I believe…………………….. I was hurt that she thought about this for three whole weeks and then smashed my heart into a million pieces. I was completely blindsided, but I didn’t mourn her. There was no point. Clearly she didn’t like what she saw, clearly she was horrible at communication, and clearly it would have been a mistake to get further involved, because if that’s her conflict resolution style, I’m done. Not everything is an opera.

Even our breakup wasn’t an opera. It was a text message. So, not only was she bad at conflict resolution, she wasn’t brave enough to break up with me in person. I was already in a relationship with someone bad at conflict resolution, and it was going so spectacularly poorly on some days that I was relieved I wasn’t going to have to double down on it with my girlfriend. This is because when someone else is bad at conflict resolution, I don’t deal well. I get frustrated and lose the plot quickly. That’s because when my trauma reflexes kick in, it’s normally rage. CPTSD/AuDHD rage is unparalleled, so I have to have an extensive network of coping mechanisms. The longer bad conflict goes on, the more I regress into a wet cat in a corner, claws extended. It’s not pretty, but I’m being real. My work is learning how to react when all my coping mechanisms fail.

This is because words have power, and you can say things that will stick with people for years. I try to say things that will tell people their actions are fucked up, but that I love them even on their bad days. I do not suddenly stop communicating with people because I don’t love them. I stop communicating because clearly you expect that only your needs matter and mine are just me complaining. 90% of the time, the problem is that I’m a neurodivergent trying to translate from and into “neurotypical,” and I’m very stubborn. At the same time, people accuse me of not listening when in reality, I’ve just spent 15 minutes beating the wrong dead horse instead of the right one.

I feel like the relationship with Supergrover holds this up. I don’t get angry at many people like I get at her, because we’ve known each other for 10 years. I have different expectations now than I did 10 years ago, because I’ve put my heart and soul into making our relationship better, and for whatever reason, I’ve been answered with avoidance and rage every time. Therefore, by now I feel like it’s not my problem. I’ve tried to change our dynamic over and over, and whether it’s due to information I don’t know or projecting my own insecurities onto someone who also has CPTSD, I’ll never know. For all practical intents and purposes, she has rarely had a day without PTSD. Trauma occurred very young. It is so easy to bleed out with empathy and also be severely frustrated and angry. I love her on her worst days as much as I love her on the good ones, but she doesn’t see it. I can’t make her do that, or even know if she wanted to be more to each other and didn’t get it. But, by “more to each other,” I don’t ever mean crossing the line from friendship into romance. I mean that my personality profile and my experience says that I have one or two close friends at a time, and I pour everything I’ve got into them rather than having a more shallow relationship with more people. It’s how I found out I was poly, honestly, because even though I wasn’t necessarily looking for romance, I realized that it would never not be true that she was more important to me than Dana. And to Dana, I apologize, but you and I both know this is true and for me, an objective truth rather than subjective. I can’t be too careless in my writing, and Dana was threatened by how much I got lost in it.. We connected on a deep and spiritual level, and nothing anyone says can take away from that fact.

She says that I only know random factoids about her life and I’m telling you things that aren’t true. I have more evidence than you will on why this isn’t true. It’s not that there’s not emotion in what she said, far from it. However, because she’s not connected with her emotions, she thought she was saying something logical and hated that I responded emotionally. If there’s any speech I could give to her that I’ve heard recently, it’s Ncuti Gatwa’s monologue about how exhausted The Doctor is because they never stop to think about how fast they’re moving to avoid emotional injury.

This is because when they get into a scrape too big for them, they die. And the regeneration energy convinces them that “they’re fine.” It hits close to home because we all go through it. Regeneration energy making you think you’re fine. In polyamory, this is called “new relationship energy,” or NRE for short. It’s a thing. You have to know whether you’re losing established boundaries or whether, when a partner meets someone new, they’re just “high.” No, I wouldn’t know anything about that, and I bet you don’t, either. People are poly all the time, they just call it an affair…….. when the reality is most people are afraid of cheating and lying, not that their partner is spending time with someone else. I noticed in “Christmas at My Own Pace” that I just sat around waiting for Dana to be available. I did not seek out other people at all. Even with my closest friends, I couldn’t be arsed to go out that often. And in reality, it doesn’t matter if you’re romantic with multiple people or not. I predicted and did that losing Supergrover’s friendship was worse than getting divorced because the situation has been far more tense and unpredictable than it was with Dana. Neither of us has any idea what to do with the other, and we show up with guns in a knife fight.

Meanwhile, “There’s a Place for Us” is playing in my head, because “showing up with guns to a knife fight” reminded me that Supergrover and I trade off being Sharks and Jets…… but I’d like her to settle in France. If she is 14, I’m The Doctor Leslie……. although I have never and will never be a temp in Chizzick. 😉 If we’d ever spent time together talking instead of writing, she’d also see that she’s 14 and I’m part 12 and part 15. Ncuti is at playing The Doctor as queer, and it’s a welcome surprise. I feel like this should be canon, because there’s no way they’re not bisexual after a regeneration being female. You can sort of tell because 14 had “Captain Jack” energy. Also, just because The Doctor can change genders from male to female doesn’t mean they didn’t marry River Song. Now, I just love the idea that The Doctor has settled into family life, being best friends with Donna and uncle to Rose (Noble, just to be clear).

(Speaking of which, I totally believe The Toymaker got in her head, because think about what she made with her institutional knowledge…… and it stands to reason that The Toymaker is “the boss.”)

With Sam, there was no hierarchy like that. I didn’t feel like Sam was The Doctor and I was a companion. It was a death knell for Supergrover and me because I never gained ground as an equal. The hierarchy came from her keeping information from me and blaming me for it. I knew that if we’d survived Sam’s feelings about this issue, I would slowly come undone at being steamrolled all the time. Plus, I think it’s good that she’s not run over by the autistic brain, because her son is also autistic. That being said, I may be projecting again because it’s unlikely that she’s not autistic as well- or her ex-husband is- because neurodivergence doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It’s not an indicator (necessarily) from observing mood and behavior, just Gregor Mendel’s pea plants. It is almost impossible to know whether you’re autistic or not before you start doing the work, because the quirks you think you have aren’t quirks at all. Your brain is just different. What you say when you say, “I’m autistic” is never what people hear.

And that’s why I am nowhere near where I thought I’d be this year. I didn’t know myself well enough to know I was being treated badly, and I had a right to stand up for myself. It felt often that Supergrover was annoyed by me, and I was having to fight through that annoyance to get to a better place, but she didn’t respond to it. That was my cue to leave, because I get the right to say “you’re not helping me, you’re hurting me…” and if nothing changes, to walk away, because clearly they don’t care about my feelings and it’s okay to stop thinking about theirs.

I have all my own theories as to what happened, but we’ve never talked about it, and I’ve ensured we never will. That’s because I’ve noted and observed that she doesn’t open up to anyone, and it’s not personal. It became personal when her behavior affected me….. I felt that she felt the more she annoyed me, the more I’d go away…… and got angry when that didn’t happen.

So, as of now, I am spending Christmas by myself (seeing Zac for the holidays, just not on Christmas Day). I am excited about this, because it’s my favorite day to wander around the city and take pictures. I will absolutely freak the fuck out if it snows on Christmas Eve, because it’s the best time to take photos when there’s a light dusting of snow on the monuments…………………………………………. That was an inside joke for Dana, because once she wanted to go to Beth Israel in the snow, and it was a light dusting that day. What happened was that we got in our Jeep and crossed the river, going up to a higher elevation. By the time we got to Beth Israel, we were in it up to our knees. We looked like idiots, because the caretaker said, “where were you yesterday?” He did not appreciate having to do work in the snow, I’m guessing.

It was good we had the Jeep, because we needed it. I can’t remember if it was that week or whether I’m mixing snowstorms together, but one of Dana’s coworkers came up to us and said, “I hate to be stereotypical, but do you guys have some sort of lesbian vehicle, like a Subaru?” We laughed and took six people home. One of the perks of being on the bus/train is that if we get into a simple car accident in the snow, the bus is going to win. My travel never gets waylaid by snow, because even if I don’t get an Uber to the station, It would only take 20 or 30 minutes to walk to the Metro, and 20 minutes to get there by bus. I try to walk as often as I can, because then I can justify a shake at Shake Shack or BurgerFi. That’s a once in a while treat, though, because they’re nearly $10 apiece and I get get a pint of Jenni’s for that. 😛

This year, my goal has been figuring out my sensory issues. I started buying the same food every week so that I could focus on more important things, not that my structure is so iron I don’t want to taste anything new. It’s protecting my bubble.

So, I am exactly where I thought I would be this year in that respect. So much Oregon Dark Cherry ice cream, not so much with the shakes…… although Zac did get me an immersion blender. Maybe I don’t need to buy a shake as much as I need to learn to make them. 😛 Also, so much Zac. He’s really made my year better because I had that friend I could call if I needed something and he’s always responded in a way I’m not used to and don’t expect. It’s probably the most healthy relationship I’ve ever been in because I insisted on it.

If I had guessed a year ago that I’d be perfectly happy with a boyfriend, I would have laughed in your face. But I surprise me all the time.

It’s Hard to Quantify

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?

This year I started taking care of me for the first time in my life, ever. People who learn a little bit about boundaries install them with spikes, because they don’t know balancing language yet. So many, many times have I been fed this year on a meager emotional diet, because someone would cross a boundary and alarm I’d never had went off. There has never been anything loud enough in my mind to say that my opinions are valid, because I get intimidated and fold easily………………… in person.

On paper, I am not anticipating someone else’s reactions, so I come across as judgmental when I actually want your input/correction, I’m not dictating to you what our situation might be. My work to do is to learn how to control my autistic brain symptoms, like “I have explained this six times and it hasn’t resulted in any change at all, so that means I only have to explain it ten more ways and we’re golden.” I will absolutely argue with a signpost……… in text. If a waitress served me soup with glass shards, I’d be so mad I’d only leave a 20% tip.

I talk a lot about the first blush of excitement on both ends at Supergrover and I meeting each other, and it’s those memories I focus on when I feel the kind of desperation you absolutely will not admit to anyone, I am fine……… meanwhile, your eyes are rolling out of your head because you’ve thought I was an idiot about it for months why has this taken so long dear Jesus get a life…….. and actually, that’s not true at all. It’s how it feels to write out pain. It doesn’t change all at once. It changes a little every day.

I do not have any interest in telling our story as if it is our facts. No, they are only my facts, and I am a hundred percent certain that our stories are different, but I will never know to what degree. I’ve guessed at the extremes and the middle and been wrong every single time. I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me. I cannot drag a relationship kicking and screaming into the light when I only own one half…… and if it sounds like I’m holding myself up as some kind of beacon, that’s not it at all.

We fucked each other up nine years ago. Our relationship shouldn’t be so dramatic and toxic all the time. It’s not good for either one of us as we both sound like Dorothy Sbornak and Ouiser Boudreaux in text. We are both first children. We fight until someone is bleeding, because we are not used to losing…….. and I’m laughing about it now, but believe me when I say I have seen Oppenheimer and I didn’t even know it was a movie until recently.

I am just as filled with rage as she is. We’re The Holy and the Moly because one day I’m the bomb and she’s the detonator……….. and then she’s got the big red button. We installed them in each other quickly and use them to great effect. After we fight, I will say “this is what hurt.” She won’t. She says, “I was licking my wounds.” I wish that just once this year she could have seen my face when I read it. If there are moments that make me want to reach through her phone and hug her, it’s lines like that.

Autistic people are not here to be nice, because we do not have all the social masks involved in sensitive situations. I used to be very, very practiced at it, but I’m not in front of parishioners all the time anymore. As I’ve been away from being a preacher’s kid, it has been a slow, painstaking process to unmask. Everyone does the public/private thing to a degree. There is a truly marked difference in “show mode” and “autism.” Most people are trying to hide their emotions a little bit, certainly. No one wants to ugly cry if Oprah’s not handing out Beetles. Autistic people cannot regulate their emotions like neurotypical people, and we can catalogue their behaviors by the hundreds, but what we cannot do is replicate them. This is because the reason we thought you had the reaction was different than why you actually had it.

Impasses are frequent because “I just don’t get it,” and I have empathy for how tiresome that is. I really do. That’s because if your’e exhausted, you’ve experienced a few hours of my symptoms and I live this way. Not said to shame you, just to say “I need empathy here.” There are other areas in which I’m stronger than my friends and we trade off….. no one is ever getting the short end of the stick……

And unfortunately, reminding Supergrover of that didn’t go over so well because I don’t think she was picking up what I was putting down. She told me several times some version of “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” First of all, that’s a huge red flag. If you tell someone up front that you have a disability like bipolar or whatever and that’s what they say, that’s not the healthiest response ever. The reason I ask people for help is that they’re the first person to ask me. In this one case, the tables were turned where I needed help first….. so, of course it felt like I “was the one who always needed help.” But it’s 10 years later and those words just don’t hit the same way anymore. Healthy people do not shut you down every time you want to have a dialogue. What would have been perfectly healthy is just to walk away for both of us, and yet neither of us did it. I don’t think we meant to be in a relationship this crazy for 10 years, but those tickets are non-refundable.

In some ways, I felt like it was really hard work and deservedly so. Most friendships like ours end quickly because of who we are jointly and severally. I am sure this is conjecture, but it seems to be that the key words are “friendships like ours.” What I see as trying for connection, she sees as “telling her every bad thing she’s ever done.” Sometimes when my sensory environment is turned up to hell, I do come across like I’m nitpicking. Because it’s all text, she can’t hear my tone of voice and she doesn’t ask for any clarification. So, whether I intended to provoke ire or not, I will have done it.

I have never wanted that for her, and I had to learn not to want that for me. I stepped all over her boundaries because that’s how it works in my world. If you troll someone, they’ll leave you alone. We just both met our match and wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash. I will never be as strident as she is in person. She will never be as over emotional as me in text……………… but not because she’s not capable of it.

She’s my fairy tale author girl. As in, not the author of my fairy tale but the writer friend I have who is interested in creating fairy tales for actual children. I keep telling her that “50 Shades of Gray” was so terrible I didn’t even read the whole first page, but it did prove to me that either one of us was capable of writing a book on our phones while using public transportation. I have more time in a day to dedicate to it, but I will never write something akin to the main quest of Skyrim, and she could. I don’t know what her future holds, but I do know that if she wrote a book, she’d sell a copy.

What I know is that if I keep talking, one of two things will happen. The first is that repetition gives the story less power. How do I know it has less power? When I can write essays like this and I don’t end up sobbing so hard I can’t see what I’m writing anymore. There’s so much to cry about, really, that doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s universal. You lose someone significant in your life, and you adjust- but I do not know anyone who is downright happy about it.

It would also be easier to focus on this prompt at the end of the month than it is right this moment. Finnish Independence Day is always craptastic because it’s trying to replace the parts of my heart that are black with the lights and music of Helsinki. Finlandia, yes, but also Finlandia conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The black parts of your heart will respond to music if you let them.

That’s it. That’s the thing I’ve learned this year. The black parts of my heart will respond to music when I let them. This means that I can author the destruction of someone I 100% regret having to cut out of my life because I didn’t have any other choice. I could no longer make decisions about the health of the relationship based on what only I thought, because what happened on a large scale a few months ago was happening all the time in conversation.

We hadn’t talked for a few months, so she was reading me without responding….. months of posts in which we weren’t checking the stories we were telling ourselves, and that always feels like “WE WERE ON A BREAK.” That’s what makes our bond cemented for life. She has editorial control and I’ve told her that. She also cannot stop herself from reading because she thinks that I’m out to get her……. or does she? Because she says it frequently and then she’ll take a line I thought about for an hour, just slaved over to capture her perfectly, and send it to me with a “thank you for this.”

The main reason this whole thing is important to me is that I have never been this person before. I wouldn’t be as safe and secure in who I am now if she hadn’t been sure of me first.

What makes her unique in my life is that she managed to get past all the barriers I’d set up. All the social masking that didn’t make me look like an alien, all the catering I do to other people to make sure everyone is focusing on having a good time and not the fact that I am standing here, damaged, in a corner because I don’t want to get my crazy spatter on you. I have never been that person on the outside. Why I don’t always come off as depressed, anxious, ADHD, or autistic. It’s all just a bunch of spaghetti code in there.

One day I’ll reach “eof,” and I know it’ll compile……………….. even when there are so many lines I wish I could have commented out. But that’s the thing, right? The first step to finding things that do serve you is letting go of the things that don’t. I wish I could say a lot of good things happened this year, and I know they did in small measures. But mostly this year was about learning to deal with pain and rage. How much I’d social masked away all of those feelings as a child determined not that my emotions were bottled, but how many six-packs.

In a lot of ways, all my social masks failed at once, and then I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had to build myself back up from 12 on, adjusting to new emotions that weren’t there before and mapping out the dead spots. If you have not done this in yourself, it is backbreaking emotional work and depression/anxiety medication make it easier, not easy.

This year I’ve felt infantilized more and bothered less. That is because I do not have a world-ending autistic meltdown if someone doesn’t like me. I just find out quickly who my people are in those cases and move on, because I’m past the point in my life where I want to justify anything to anyone, because I have enough belief in myself to know that I have limitations and to ask for help when I need it. People rush to parent the people with mental processing differences and psychiatric illness, and I have to anticipate it. I have to deal with it, because there’s nowhere I won’t. That’s a social mask I do have, though, because it feels very much like apologizing for your existence because you’re queer or physically disabled.

The hard part is being a realist without being too negative because I can control my environment, but only to a point. I do not like telling people I’m a Christian anymore because it invariably ends up being an image of me in their heads that just doesn’t compute. Either I’m a bad Christian because my exegesis is bad and God didn’t really mean all that stuff about inclusivity, helpfully written right there in the RED LETTERS……………… or their God is about the letter of the law and not the spirit; homosexuality does not occur in most, if not all animal populations……. it is a demon to which I am solely responsible for its care and feeding. If I just stopped queer behavior, I’d stop being queer.

Gay men are widely accepted as priests in the Catholic Church because especially in the third world, that’s where you go not to get bullied. Most families know when they’ve got a priest on their hands by kindergarten. Please know that this is in no way trying to be shady. Gay men are pushed toward being priests because of their sensitive/more effeminate natures, because then their families don’t even have to meet the boyfriend. They’ve been eating at his table for years.

I’m just trying to let myself evolve, and thinking about systemic issues makes me happier than thinking about my own progress or lack of it, because I have so much that’s up in the air and little that’s solid.

That’s just how it is in a rebuilding year. Next year might be one, too, but this is not to be taken lightly. I cannot be my authentic self until all the pieces are together, or at the very least, scattered on the table in front of me.

Pieces, for me, are thought fragments. The most positive thing in the world that happened to me this year, above all else, was that in January of course I knew I’d found a flawless diamond in my beautiful girl……………… but by December, I realized she had, too.

Show Mode -or- Fixed Point in Time

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been disconnected from everyone lately, because having two people validate my experience as AuDHD has made me run. I am not isolating to piss people off, it’s just that there’s three people in my life for which I have enough energy because I’ve made commitments to them. To augment that is to overload my sensory perception while I’m going through a hell of a lot, and I have not taken this tack my whole life, just the last 10 years (on purpose- I’ve isolated, but through mental illness, not working out a processing disorder). Meeting Supergrover was the catalyst for leaving Dana, but falling in love with her was not.

While I had a virtual relationship, it unlocked the disconnect between ADHD and autism. Dana and I began to drift as I holed up in my office to write. It wasn’t just attraction on my end; it was being able to process through writing all the time and becoming dramatically more introverted and quiet. I have a tendency to let another person drag me along because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, so me being steamrolled for eight years in this relationship is what I do. If I am not pleasing someone, I will not give up. I didn’t give up on the woman that emotionally abused me until someone who could read the situation blind (three someones, actually) and tell how she messed me up. They gave me permission, in a sense, to stop. Nothing was ever going to change or get better, because she made a horrible emotional mistake and was running from it. She gave me a college journal that was full of information about sex I never should have had at 14. Whether she meant to or not, she’s opened a door to something that I couldn’t handle…… but I was 14, so I wanted to…….. JFC I was so wrecked. I wanted to be married before I could drive or vote. She piqued my interest on so many levels that I know it wasn’t all abuse and there were genuine moments.

I wouldn’t be the singer or the personality I am today without her, for evil or for awesome. I would like to think that as I grew, I shed the things about her that no longer served me and tried to let go of rage. My rage toward her is the biggest trigger that makes basic anger multiply into red mist rage. At the time, in my mind I wasn’t being abused. She was a bird with a broken wing and I was going to help her fly again…….. in my infinite 14-year-old wisdom.

Guilt and anger led her to tell everyone how mentally ill and obsessed with her I was, because she opened herself up to becoming a monotropic thought process for me and fucked me over. The reason that the relationship with Supergrover is not the same, because the woman who abused me was a narcissist who fed on my emotions. Supergrover didn’t trust me after I’d hurt her. I got screwed over by my emotional abuser, so I perpetuated a bad pattern. Full stop. But regaining trust was impossible because for as much as Supergrover hates when I say it, their mutual experiences are the same, therefore so are their trauma reflexes. That doesn’t mean their behavior comes from the same source. I could not take responsibility for being 14, but I can take responsibility for being 36.

My isolation is thinking about The Gospel of Billy Joel:

They say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known….. and I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. I have seen that sad surrender in my lover’s eyes… I can only stand apart and sympathize, for we are always what our situations hand us… it’s either sadness or euphoria. So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing has ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same. -Psalm Summer, Highland Falls 1:1-2

I wrote that from memory because an interviewer asked Joel what song was his favorite of all the ones he’s written, and this is it. I don’t have anything but the first two verses memorized, but that’s because they’ve changed my life the most. I realized that my entire personality was living life in two different time streams, because my writing digs backward as I move forward. It’s not a thing I do, it is a comprehensive response to life. I skirt the edge with blowback not because I’m asking for it, itching for a fight. It’s that I cannot understand my environments without it. What other people think of me is none of my business.

I did not come to that thick a skin unscathed, I just want you to know that. I had to tank my blog out of embarrassment and stop writing for a few years to get up the confidence to come back. It’s all connected, though. If I hadn’t taken the time out to regroup, I might not have written the article on Facebook Notes that translated into more popularity than I’ve ever had…. popularity that snagged my beautiful girl out of my peripheral vision and made her the whole show. I didn’t fall in love with simple adoration. Like Driving Miss Daisy, it was “I’m here to take you where you want to go.” You want to know how well Supergrover knows me? She bought me a font.

She’s crazy gorgeous, and remembers all my favorite things. Tell me my feelings are wrong. I’ll wait as long as it takes for all y’all to catch up. 😉

And in fact, I do not not think she had the same effect on Dana, the source of her jealousy and ire. It’s just a whole other thing because our adoration looked different. As my beautiful girl and I opened up to each other, it excluded her in a major way. Her jealousy was not wrong or bad, just, I feel, misplaced. Logic and emotion are not the same. Even if she didn’t understand my feelings, she completely understood why I would feel that way.

That being said, I do not think that Dana and I would have worked it out later because a) I couldn’t shut up and II) she overfocused on Supergrover being a monotropic thought process for me and not that I was actively trying to remove her (not from my life, from my “obsession” that’s actually autism- a trauma bond making it impossible to not make her my first thought every morning.). Thoughts of being with her were fleeting. Thoughts of supporting her were not.

I told her I would be the Merlin to her Arthur, and at no time did I stop meaning it. I figured out the balance years ago, and waited for the butterflies to fade. They did, but she hasn’t left the space she occupies in my head. Due to a series of fortunate events, I might be able to move her from a monotropic thought process to a passing interest, but she’ll never move out. She’s in the tapestry of my writing and my gray matter.

But, sensibly, since I couldn’t shut up about her it made her nervous. I didn’t have to love it, but I did have to live it. Therefore, I just had to be okay with seeming threatening in order to leave Dana; I didn’t want to be within a hundred miles of her. Staying in Houston would have been okay if I’d moved to a different quadrant. Leaving to go back to a familiar city was better, because I felt that the biggest mistake of my adulthood was leaving DC originally and not establishing myself on my own…….. social masking my closest friend was easier, treacherous when I realized that she wasn’t, in fact, my closest friend.

If I hadn’t left DC, I wouldn’t have been in water that kept getting hotter. I also wouldn’t be where I am now, so out of pain came glory. If I hadn’t moved back to Portland, no one would have been able to see the patterns we established in my childhood because they wouldn’t have been current patterns. An abuser always cold shoulders you when they’re done…… but you’re still pining for them because they trained your body with a Pavlovian response.

In fact, that’s why we “broke up.” It was years before Supergrover and I connected, but the spell had been broken and I’d started to reevaluate. There are three instances that pushed me into a cathedral of my own.

First, coming to Portland was rough on day one. Basically, I’d come to visit about four weeks before and we solidified plans for me to move. Then, when I arrived with my car, she looked more freaked out than I’d ever seen her in my life, like telling me I should move and encouraging me to find a job and a place was just child’s play. Like we hadn’t been discussing this since she got the job offer in 1996 or 7. It wasn’t a dumb move. She’d moved to Dallas so she could live with her partner while she used her for free rent to get through grad school (don’t think I couldn’t suss that out- her partner was every bit as much trouble as Dana- with her DUI, not Dana’s ability as a wife.) With the emotional abuser, as it turns out, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions were the same.”). Coming to Portland was about being able to have someone to lean on, even if we weren’t a couple…. just like had been modeled for me. She might have stayed with her partner, but not because she meant it.

Secondly, I know said emotional abuser saw the pattern repeat coming, the abusive one between her and me. I know she did. For every time she pushed me away, her love for me was the purest thing in her life. I know this because I got in under the wire. As I got older, I was not a person. I was an event….. an opera with many intermissions, plot twists, and both sopranos die at the end.

I don’t know how she knew, because I don’t know how she knew Dana’s drinking history. But I swear to God that’s what her eyes said….. “this is a mistake, but I know you cannot even see it yet because I have walked this path and you haven’t.” I was mad AF and still defend Dana to the ends of the earth.

Thirdly, at the time, it came across like “you’re better than Dana. She works at a grocery store.” It was very muddled because she was not the only one who held such an opinion. Neurodivergents have trouble holding down jobs. Period. She had to find the job she could do, not where she’s the most talented. Consistency over excitement. Hospitality every single day. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t studied Shakespeare. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a technical theater major in college. That doesn’t mean she’s not an actor. She would have been hilarious on Portlandia- I would have, too, in the writer’s room.

But did my current friends see that? No. No, they didn’t. I didn’t just dump the abuser, I dumped all of them, too. They weren’t my real friends because they couldn’t see Dana the way I could. I saw her the same way as the people who birthed her, grew up with her. I didn’t live in her limitations, I reveled in her strength. Despite her truly bad case of ADHD, she’s higher functioning than I am. Social masking her was like social masking my sister (and that line is specific).

I learned all of this by going down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way.

One day when I was particularly wrecked about all this, two friends took me hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, where I sent my tears down Wahkeena Falls, out into the river, and around Cape Disappointment. They were the friends who bailed me out the first time I got dumped by this woman in a way I knew we’d never come back.

I mentioned before that abusers install a back door in you that activates dopamine/sex drive because it feels exactly like the first rush- if they’ve been turning the sunshine away from you to regain access. This came in the form of a phone call when I was in my 20s, one that when I got it, I didn’t want anything more in my life…… until it was over.

I would say her tone was seductive because I’d just watched her do it to someone else, but I’m willing to entertain the fact it’s not correct. At the very least, her tone felt inviting in a very heightened way, and I’m dead serious, not spitballing. She said that she felt like I was a woman she’d like to get to know. I don’t remember anything else because it was a trigger. I went into fight or flight immediately and damn near passed out from red mist rage. I’d had a full-on panic attack at work and went home early. It was 10 years before I knew why I’d been triggered, and couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt, but avoided her from there on out.

Two things about that. The first is that when I reacted, she immediately pushed me away and I knew there was no chance to prepare my environment and “win” another chance. Second of all, I have to believe that she knew what she was doing. She didn’t stop herself, but she realized it was wrong afterward. On some level, she realized it was hurtful because of the back door and because it was a little too little too late.

I watched her marry a partner I didn’t like because she was just like me, the spitting image except older and more degrees. I watched her manipulate her best friend into “friends with some benefits,” keeping her on a leash for years. Someone I’d once wanted so bad I couldn’t breathe proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she didn’t deserve me in her life, much less as a partner.

She has no idea how much damage she’s done, because since I was social masking her, I’ve been the best and worst of her without ever understanding why. It’s not that I’m not the best of my own mother as well, it’s that we didn’t spend time together as intimately for her to know me on that level. She got frustrated, I did, too, we gave up.

Years later, I went back to the Gorge with Dana, crying and singing my eyes out; it was the moment I knew I wanted to marry her, in retrospect. We were years away from it, and I knew. That’s because when I was finished crying and singing, I looked over and Dana was crying, watching me. She saw how much pain I was experiencing and took it on. It is a gift I will never be able to repay. I traded something valuable for something valuable, even though the relationship wasn’t valuable to me at the end. We became a bad thing for each other, we didn’t start that way.

Those three experiences shaped me- the ablutions in the river after a truly rough jump scare. I was so frightened of everything because I lost all my social masks at once; they weren’t social masks. They were triggers, and why I don’t like to speak. Speaking means not having enough time to think or delete things so I can never be sure when I will say something without thinking that she used to say and the pitch perfect imitation becomes the jump scare. When I mentioned having her sense of musicality, that’s the healthy part. The negative part is that I’m not in shape because I don’t like to hear myself sing.

I’m a lot more low-functioning than people think because of her and my dad. They’re both unique presences on stage and social masking them covered up just about all my executive function disarray because I was always “on.” What covers my executive function now is not covering it, because people thought I was coasting on charm because I was lazy….. not that when I don’t have a social mask for something, I am utterly and completely fucked. “Coasting on charm” is not a want sort of situation. I am only now trying to social mask Leslie Lanagan,™ because for once in my life, I don’t think she’s that bad. I also don’t think that “Diving Into the Wreck” is something I should avoid.

Supergrover and the rest of my friends don’t have all this context (or, they didn’t until I started writing it down). They haven’t known me since I was 12 years old.

Supergrover in particular gets on my ass about said abusive relationship, always has from day one. She does not see why I do not spit white hot rage all over this woman every day of my life. Easy answer is that monotropic thought process damn near killed me for real. Fuck her, but I’m taking my peace on my own by telling my story exactly the way I want to tell it, because she’s the one person in my life that I absolutely want to tank her career. Writing it out over and over gives the story less power and I’m done being worried about what she thinks, have been for 10 years. I’m not a vindictive motherfucker. She’s just worked with too many kids over the years and I’m also done protecting her. We cannot, do not have any more mutual friends….. or if we do, I run away when she comes up. I don’t talk shit about her in person because I already have a “shelf” for that.

I would Google tattoo her every day of my life if I hadn’t indirectly told Supergrover I wouldn’t. She didn’t ask me to do it, just disapproved of my approach to things because she knew my attention needed to be redirected before I did- not that my ire toward this person was unearned and/or undeserved. She encouraged me to lose my shit on many occasions. Though I decided loving Supergrover was worth my all-encompassing attention, I didn’t get over that abuse immediately because of the genuine moments it contained. My experience, unlike others, wasn’t all negative and I had to wade through it. With the information I had at the time, I wouldn’t do anything else but move to Portland if I could do it over.

For better or for worse, Supergrover is a wolf with terrible yellow eyes when she’s angry. When she met me, she found an excellent use for her jaws in my emotional abuser. When Supergrover bit her, the abuser’s claws finally, finally let go of me…… a mask falling off like the end of a Very Special Episode of Scooby Doo. What was valuable was not concrete. I’d had an experience with my cat recently that felt the same way. Asher was closer to a human than she was a cat, and I could tell the moment her personality left her body, because her face changed and she looked like a wild animal. Revealing the emotional abuse gave that face a different context, looking no less feral.

Supergrover and I are so much better at fighting for each other than we are fighting against, because if someone crosses her, God help them.

The only reason I was okay with the abusive relationship dying at the end is that I got time to make my peace. I was reborn into something I never would have been otherwise. My grumpy old wizard did find a knight, a “Wart” who’s already Arthur and I have to avert my eyes (WELL,STOP IT). I made it to Camelot, which is indeed a silly place.

Because I don’t have to think about abuse anymore, Supergrover has been in my head for 10 years as I process my mutual experience with abuser. Her anger carries me when I don’t feel it enough, and that was important in the months afterward- just not now because none of that is close anymore. I can write about it with the emotional separation I need not to explode emotional landmines.

I’ll let you know if Supergrover moves from her castle “in the cloud.” Just because I gave her an eviction notice means legit nothing in terms of the way I process, and she’s stubborn enough to keep me around in her mind, too. No matter what, we have a past, present, and future

…….because I live in two time streams, forward and backward. Where they meet is a fixed point in time, and you can’t cross your own timelline (I’m so, so sorry). You can only understand it after you’ve passed it by.

Skips

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No the hell I am not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While I have no problem skipping down the sidewalk.

Saying Macbeth Outside the Theater

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Shakespeare understands grief better than I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow…. AND tomorrow…. AND tomorrow….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow….. AND tomorrow… AND tomorrow.

Grief Sucks

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rearranging Emotional Furniture

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What have you been working on?

Hm. Today it’s “Sunday mornin’ rain is fallin,” and I’m hearing Adam Levine singing in my head. I made myself an outstanding cup of coffee in which I mixed every kind I have in one airtight container (the only one I have, thus mixing the end of other bags). It’s Cafe Bustelo, Community Coffee King Cake, and some kind of Folgers I don’t remember buying, but someone did. Not sure what I’ll brew next, but I have a lot of tea I’m looking forward to as well. I still haven’t drunk all the Pu-erh John sent me and I’ve also got lots of Stash English Breakfast and powdered matcha. Of everything I make in the morning, I like matcha the best. I just don’t like to drink it every morning because making it takes longer than a Keurig pod. I have about two hours before I have to “get ready for church,” and by that I mean I’d like to take a shower before I watch YouTube. It might be a good day to take a look at the scriptures later.

I had a line cook that didn’t know me from Adam come after me online for saying that the pen with which Biblical literalists paint the Bible is the root of all evil, and he thought I was saying that Christians were the root of all evil. Ripped me a new one for saying David and Jonathan were in love. We can’t even prove Jesus and John weren’t, it’s just more likely that he had a partner and a housecarl……. like me.

If that wasn’t clear, I meant he was married to Mary Magdalene and it is written that John is his favorite Disciple, so I’m sure he showed up big for everyone to think that and write it down. I don’t think it was sex. I think it was being willing to give up your career for someone else’s…….. like me.

The line cook said that if he made fun of my community, it would be a hate crime. But if I made fun of his, that was fine. Got butt hurt, so I knew that it was a pointless fight before it started. I said, “you don’t even know who you’re talking about when you say I have no idea what I’m talking about, and this is not a fight you want to have with me.” And I tapped out, because I couldn’t get across to someone with a literalist view of the Bible that taking the Bible seriously and not literally is the only thing I can do in this day and age. There is no proof, and we need to stop pretending there is. There’s not even any proof in the Bible that God exists, only people’s reactions and responses to them. No Biblical literalist is going to accept that as truth, so why bother? He doesn’t study theological giants. I do. If I am the one studying debates between Rowan Williams and Christopher Hitchens to learn the finer points of what puts Christopher off about organized religion, I can use it. I can use Hitch’s words against him in a wonderful way, because I know he doesn’t care about Christians who take constructive criticism and use their faith to improve themselves. I feel like Christianity would do a lot better in this country if it stayed in its lane.

It is embarrassing. EMBARRASSING. That England does this better than we do and they have had divine right of kings and no separation of church and state since the beginning is one of the weirdest things on earth. We supposedly built this country on separation of church and state….. but what we really said in effect with our cullture is that each state was free to pick its own organized religion. Georgia and Massachussetts Bay were not the same.

We of the United States have never protected freedomm from religion as much as we’ve needed, and I’m tired of it. Again, there is only so much of white supremacy Jesus that can be justified, as well as hypocrisy. People are leaving the church in droves and we shouldn’t stop them because we brought this upon ourselves. Our membership will change when we do and not before. In my opinion, I can hold everything I love about religion in my own heart. I don’t need the church if it decides to die, and it seeems to be doing much to help itself along the way. Catholocism will probably die before it changes because Pope Francis is not as liberal as it needs to get. He is just a Band-Aid, and cannot be even that because there are so few priests willing to push the envelope further than saying that gays and the divorced are people.

You have to leave behind what no longer serves you. I have already decided that I am right for the church, but they decided when I was 15 that they were not right for me. I moved to a denomination where I could be ordained, I was just tired by then…… and frankly, too hurt. I really think so. I think I went into shock at my situation, then my adulthood believing I wanted something I didn’t. It wasn’t untrue. It waas when I was ADHD and masking I could handle leading a congregation. When I was autistic and trying to comfort myself, I couldn’t handle even one other person in the room because of overstimulation. All of my behavior cannot be contributed to depression and hypomania, because my energy levels switch too fast for that.

I am a neurodivergent that is self-aware to an enormous degree. I realized that I should not handle a congregation because of what I could do to them and vice versa. I don’t think that mentally ill people make good pastors, because you react differently to emotional stimuli when you feel good, and the difference is so striking that you can’t project stability because you aren’t stable, actually. And there’s no shame in it. Realizing that you are not mentally healthy enough to take on the needs of others because your own health is a lot to manage is courageous.

I didn’t want to stop leadding people. I wanted to start leading people in a different way. I think I do because so many people tell me that. A woman yesterday told me that I have a very interesting life and that I wrote from deep inside me. Exactly what I was trying to portray in my writing and something I needed to hear because things haven’t been going all that well in my estimation.

I have no doubt that Supergrover has looked in on me and decided that healing and moving on is better for me, but I’m only doing it because I have no other choice. It’s what I’m working on because I have already done all I’m going to do. The way I write is assuming she’s out because she told me she was, but she rarely holds me to one entry or letter forever. We’re just not close enough to stop her ire because we’re not checking the story we’re telling ourselves anymore. She has no idea what I’m doing or not doing in trying to portray our lives when they meet. I use the adrenaline of sex to cover a lot of other ground and I promise she’d rather people think we were naked in the middle of the freeway, and even more interesting to think about what has more adrenaline than sex? All right. You’ve got me. She designs roller coasters.

She doesn’t like all this, but she gets it. Symbolism in writing is a thing. Also, Dana will laugh. She doesn’t like it, but she gets it……. or at least, I hope they both laugh because it’s been 10 years since all that for Dana and 8 years of trying to manage just the two of us since. It’s an interesting conundrum because the longer I go without contact, the more okay I am. And then I’ll hit a trigger and need her immediately, but I self-soothe instead of getting anxious she’s not around. However, I do not think this is the way our relationship should go. I think we’d be much happier if we made the commitment to be imortant on both sides. This is because the more we communicate intensely in the time we have, neither of us have to worry about each other. For instance, having one 45 minute meeting early on would save us a lot of them later, preferable for people who are both obsessed with other things, including their families.

It’s weird to feel like our spines are sewn so we don’t face each other, and our strength is in the seam. I wish I could watch her face when she reads that line, because I think it’s one of the images that she’ll love. I have so many perfect pictures of us, and exactly none of them are something she wouldn’t enjoy as well. That by now Michael is real to me in a way he wasn’t before, especially the way he changed her life in a way that I would have wanted for her if I’d been able…. and not just on one level, but many. I told her than and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. No, just trying to say that I love her for who she is, not who I’m trying to get her to be. That she can be straight if she has to be. I am absolutely certain at times she wonders why, because I’ve never met a woman who didn’t say that if they were in any way queer their husbands would never hear from them again.

What has happened over time is that I want to be there like a family member without forgetting where I started. That our relationship is an evolution and I’m always going to treat her like I used to be attracted to her and not because I am and trying to hide it. It’s that I can’t change my speech patterns. I’ll always have a hundred terms of endearment for her. She will always take my breath away in a photo or audio/video. There’s not a moment I feel I won’t love her forever in a way that people remember love in third grade. What she has to decide is if she’s okay with that in a friendship. That it’s tinged with romance because I felt those feelings and moved on, not that I’m uncomfortable with her life now. And I know she knows that, and feels so guilty that she cannot be there to catch me right now, because she thinks I have no idea what she’s dealing with and I do. Desperately and completely. It’s why I have no idea whether she’s taking time to mull things over or never coming back. She does not have time to pay attention to anything. She, like Mel, is in the position of starting her own kitchen and I treat them the same way. “See you in three years.”

What she views as goading and provoking is not that I get impatient with timing. I get impatient that no matter how long we go, there’s never an e-mail longer than a few words…. which indicates that no matter what I’m talking about, she’s always avoiding it. When she does have time, she’ll respond to anything that doesn’t involve our relationship. We don’t work through anything and yet she’d eat anyone’s face off who tried to look at me in a way I didn’t like and I feel exactly the same way about her. I would bitch slap her boss if I thought they needed it, and neither one of them would like that very much….. but I would. I would be Mrs. Don Draper on their asses and every single one of them would hate me down to the mailroom. The thought of this makes me laugh harder than it should, because she is definitely a Don Draper-type personality (or comes across that way in text), and I feel like I have the sensibility of Betty’s chihuahua personality.

The funny thing about Betty Draper and me is seeing how much she got away with and what I could’ve….. I am actually pretty happy she ended up with a husband when I think about how her life would be different with a female partner. Like, this could be a script. I’ll think about it. However, it would not be based on us. Just the idea is funny. All powerful women who have wives act differently in a large crowd than those with husbands. It doesn’t jive with the way straight women are vetted to work at high levels in government or industry. The way they are groomed to react like men because nothing gets done if they don’t. A woman with a wife has been pissed off by that her whole life and has the strength to fight back because she doesn’t have to deal with it at home. Her career is also the worst when it comes to her partner being a writer, so if they were like me in any way at all, it would only be that they have that one thing in common to create comedic tension.

And the thing is, Supergrover is just an archetype. Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama. My sister Lindsay. Carly Fiorina. Melinda Gates. Helen Thomas. I could base what I’m thinking about on any one of them…. the push/pull of a powerful person meeting a no one on the Internet and finding out the other one is smarter in some ways. I feel that I am older than Supergrover, that she is older and sometimes not wiser. I hope that she is impressed enough that she would agree with me and that she is every bit as much right as me on the opposite end of the spectrum. That we all age at different rates and in different ways. But to find that it transcends class is a particular blessing. If she thinks I’m smart, I’m smarter than nearly everyone and no one could have convinced me of it that didn’t have her pedigree. I’ve felt like a dumbass since I was born because I didn’t realize how much I had stacked against me. How much the Internet took away my limitations in communication. I feel smarter around her than anyone else because it comes with such strong belief in myself. She also has the presence of Picard. When she says something, it’s with the authority to make it so. She thinks I think of her as a suburban mom. No, I think of her an an Evelyn. A Michelle Yeoh, an accurate description of her beauty in one picture.

She doesn’t have a prayer life except running, and I hope it’s productive. Sometimes, you feel more in prayer by zoning out and letting your body do the work. Sometimes, it’s thinking through things. The answer comes from praying, not what happens afterward. You know yourself, you’re just afraid to say what you want outside of the intimacy of prayer, because that would involve talking to someone else with an opinion. Either way is fine, and I feel like she is taking care of herself by listening to her body. I am taking care of her by listening to her mind and sending her support by letting her know that I’m thinking about her. But if I tell her that I’m thinking of her and she doesn’t want to open up to me, it doesn’t mean my prayer hasn’t mattered. It means thoughts and prayers can be only that because I haven’t been invited to sit down at that particular table.

I picked up a term on “Covert Affairs” that I really like and I use it all the time to describe my blog. At CIA, to talk about security credentials, they talk about who has been “read in.” In my life, that fits perfectly, because I know exactly down to the letter I’ve typed how much you guys have been read in, and it’s only the amount I want you to have. To go further than this is not helping me, it’s hurting them. That’s because if they wanted to tell their sides, it would be in the comments section, not from me. I reveal so much that anything more is their story to tell. I don’t push limits on purpose. It’s hard to negotiate boundaries and hard when you’re brave with them out of necessity, not lack of love for others.

Dana and I had a hard time because when Supergrover found out that I’d read Dana in on something that she didn’t okay, I freaked out. It wasn’t the initial secret that kept Dana and I emotionally apart, but its reverberations and how she reacted to me after it. I was a hndful, and so was she. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. When I say I didn’t have a choice on whether to leave Dana (because that would have involved our triangle or foursome being solid and it wasn’t), I mean that if Supergrover had talked to Dana and I had talked to Michael, Dana and I could have worked it out. But, I was left in the position of choosing between them and Dana had to lose because Supergrover forced my hand in a way that no one else could. I had to write about her to handle our lives together and I couldn’t let Dana see my reactions to it. Case closed.

But then Supergrover had the audacity to look at the clusterfuck she created and make it all about her. That she hadn’t created a situation I couldn’t handle, but that I was stalking her by coming to DC……. then getting surprised when I was perturbed about that. We’ve been stuck in that push/pull since 2015, and I didn’t decide to stop loving her. I decided to stop working on it.

I can handle what she’s dealing with on my own, but no I can’t. She can read this blog and not worry about her safety, but no she can’t. We could solve all this in an afternoon, even if it was just chatting on Facebook Messenger, but I’m betting we won’t. After eight years and no need to look me up because I gave her all my contact info, she cannot possibly have been too busy to connect. She just wouldn’t. She decided what kind of person I was then and has looked at me through that lens ever since……. the one that says I’m perfect for everyone else except her because she can’t forgive me and never will. Not in the way that truly means redemption and intimacy. But she said she could do nothing about how I felt, how she felt, etc…… but she could do something about the present. If she can, I hope she will. I just will not accept being the person she only talks to short sentences at a time. I don’t want to get by on a glass of water when I have ridden her waves.

I am working on why she affected me the most because I don’t completely understand how it happened, but I want to. I want to even if she does not, because even if she didn’t want the next decades, I did. Even one is a long time when you’re talking about life afterward and how it changes. But it is very interesting to work on the issue of how relationships change over time when you don’t have context for anything but each other- the fact that I have seen she has dogs, but never petted them. That I have heard she has a husband and kids, but never met them. That she likes art but I’ve never been to her house, etc. And yet by writing to each other like a soldier and a lovesick girlfriend for 10 years, it has created the same type intimacy now that they felt then. Do you think my love for Supergrover is less real than those type movies and novels based on very real life? Hayat only spent a few hours more with Mike than I spent with Supergrover before we created a lifetime connection like reader/writer, which carries more responsibility for me now than I had before. It is not a wonder that I wanted my wife and that responsibility to be locked into one person because it was too hard to manage it when they weren’t. But that’s because I was green and didn’t know what I was doing. It’s easier now that I don’t feel the pressure that she’s paying attention to anything I say. I just hope it shows I do see her in 3D when she can open her eyes to that possibility. I think that the message will resonate later, it’s just that right now it’s incredibly loud and extremely close.

Working on how I feel about everyone else is easy because I don’t have the pressure of keeping their identity secret to the degree I do with Supergrover, which is why it’s so hard to put anyone else above her for any reason. I’ll do that when she’s older. Right now she’s my baby, and I have to wait to go back to work til she’s in kindergarten. It’s the best analogy I could possibly have for what we’re going through, and I hope she takes it in because I’m childless so what I’m putting down is not something she’d pick up. That I am definitely responding to a baby, but it’s her. She doesn’t see it because she doesn’t think she needs it, and I’m the one that sees the burn on her face when no one else can. It’s a lot. She’s a lot. But thank God my life isn’t anything else, because I’d still believe I was straight trash if it hadn’t happened.

I don’t want to be disrespectful to her, ever, so I’m just arranging my life so that it doesn’t matter when she’s here and when she’s not. I am Amy Pond and River Song, setting a place for her at dinner in case she shows up. And with her even unto Trenzalore………….. but only when and if she’ll have me.

Or at least, it’s what I’m working on.