Tag: love

A Letter That May Never Be Read

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Aada,

In trying to talk about my own feelings, I exposed the world to my perceptions of what yours might be. It was wrong, and I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you why I did it, but there is no answer to that, just like there is no answer to the reason why you lied to me. What I do know for sure is that I did not set out to hurt you, that you were collateral damage in trying to explain my journey to everyone else.

I am sorry, like you said, “a million times over.”

I have no excuse for my behavior because there isn’t one. I fucked up. I also accept that you have no interest in working toward a future, and that’s what scares me the most. I don’t know who I am without you. I think, though, that I am going to find out.

This phase of my life has been rewarding, but also tremendously lonely and isolating. Your insistence that I tell no one anything at any time was also manipulative, because it marked all my other friends as unsafe. I sat with unbelievable anxiety in the pit of my stomach while I waited for letters from you, not reaching out to anyone else because I couldn’t. If anyone asked me what was wrong, I would not be able to tell them. I got to where I wouldn’t leave the house. My mental illness spiraled out of control. I didn’t get any relief until you said I could write about what I wanted.

I took your words seriously, that there’s nothing I could say that would hurt you now that your life is different. Then, come to find out, that wasn’t true at all. We could have avoided a lot of missteps in my publishing life if you had been clearer. I thought that for the first time, our lives were equally boring.

But they’re not.

If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have published anything about our relationship at all, and yet it is the richest tapestry on this web site. I hope that one day your anger will lift, and you will go back a few years. I think you will be surprised at how much I’ve learned. That seems to be the way, anyway. My friends read about themselves and are incensed in the moment, and then when time has passed, my words just hit different.

I was never trying to manipulate you. I was trying to illustrate you- to paint you with words. I have often ripped you off blind, using things you’ve said so that you know I’m paying attention.

One of the most profound things you’ve ever said to me is that I “paint my feelings as fact.” I am still not sure what that means, but it’s such a beautiful line that I repeat it. I guess I just have never met a writer who didn’t paint their feelings as fact, because it’s their story.

It’s a line that I wish had led to an in-person conversation, because I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained what you meant. I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained lots of things. But knowing me, I would have worn a baseball cap to hide mine. I was social masked into eye contact at a young age. I could not hold your gaze long, but I would have tried.

I would have tried harder to be the friend that you needed me to be with more support from you, because guessing what was okay to publish and what wasn’t landed me in this mess. I do not blame you. I can only blame myself. But what I do know is that if we’d had any kind of production meeting, you’d be happier with the result.

I needed my editor.

I would burn this whole blog down to get her back, because that’s how much I believe in our ability to write together. You write fiction, I write nonfiction. I’ve had so many ideas over the years as to how we could harness this and make it profitable. Maybe I’d be a better editor for you because I wouldn’t catch plot holes, but I’d definitely catch spelling/grammar mistakes.

It’s just another dream that died, because we’re not on the same page.

I wish I could stop being so sad. My life feels over. I keep thinking about the conversations we had before I was admitted to Sinai and wondering how it all went to hell. I do know that when I was in the hospital, you were with me in spirit. You sat at the foot of my bed while I slept, watching to make sure I got healthy. There were too many signs of you to ignore.

How did you get that green shirt to me? How did it get back to you?

You are always the best.

We could start writing there… it’s a story that needs to be told in fiction for both of us, doesn’t it?

You are always the best.

You told me 12 years ago that you’d have lots of juicy bits for my first novel, and I still don’t know how to write fiction. I don’t visualize anything. My brain doesn’t come with that feature. You can see the whole map at once. I have a feeling that’s a large part of our story without saying anything. That you saw the whole map while I fumbled in the dark.

I’m still trying to find my way without a lantern.

That’s because I want to stay in my lane, writing what I know while you build the fictional worlds. I’d be a good research assistant and Dagger’s not hiring….

I wish I’d known how much you thought of me, wanted to impress me, wanted to be my friend as much as I wanted to be yours. I know all of that can’t possibly still be true, but I’m flattered nonetheless.

I wasn’t the one that said you were a nobody. To me, you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. I was trying to send you a message, and you thought I was being literal, launching an assault with words.

I thought you would know by now how I feel about you after years and years of telling you EVERY DAY how much I feel for you. I’m not sure a day has gone by in 12 years that I haven’t written to you, my blog coming in second because if I was responding to you, my other readers just didn’t matter.

I believe that part of you is proud to be Aada, because when I write about other subjects my emotions don’t run as deep or as real. Part of you, I’m sure, would like me to push the big red button and move on to something else. But how are you going to feel when I do?

You said that you learn more about yourself when you’re reading me, and that comment sticks in my mind as well. It’s what I wish every reader took away. That they read me to learn more about them.

Stay away for as long as you need, because the thing about letters is that they keep. The thing about blog entries is that they keep. You have a treasure trove here that you may not want to lose. I have not always behaved badly. Neither have you. We have grown and learned much just by being so incredibly different.

You are logic. I am emotion. We are built to be complementary angles, but we flounder by dividing up all the labor. Sometimes, I must be more logical. Sometimes, you must be more emotional. But that’s only if there’s a relationship to fix. I don’t think there is right now, I’m just going off past history. Eventually, you’ll want to know what I’m up to and you’ll drop a note out of nowhere, and I will be prepared. I know you well enough to know that you’re thinking, “that’s impossible.” But life is long, and we haven’t managed to stay away from each other yet.

I really would sit down with you and your therapist if the opportunity presented itself, because I do not want to be a manipulative force in your life. I have told you for years that I came to DC to do great things, and in no world do I want you to be excluded from them.

I would also sit down with your husband and answer any question he threw at me, and in my imagination, the first is, “what in the absolute hell is wrong with you?” I would probably cry and say that many doctors have tried to figure that out, but they’re still scratching their heads. Join the club.

If this is really the end, I hope he’s the one for you. I hope your family, friends, and colleagues are there to fill the hole that I left in your heart. I’m only now realizing that I made one, because our relationship was so turbulent that I didn’t take in your feelings, not a quarter of them.

I have cried so many nights, wanting to please you and not knowing that I already did. That I am enough, all by myself. I’m sorry for every moment that you did not feel like enough, all by yourself… and that is what was so surprising about your lie. That you didn’t believe I was sufficiently impressed with you, as you are.

My God, Aada… if you only knew.

When my mother died, the only person I wanted was you. I couldn’t emote in front of people, but I could write letters into the night. I would not have recovered without it. So know that even if we never speak again, I will always remember your contributions to making me feel like there is life after the death of a loved one.

My life won’t be as interesting without you, but I have to be prepared for the fact that your anger will stay in place. That what I have done is too big to forget or forgive.

All I can say is that the emotions you said I had weren’t accurate in the slightest. You read me wrong, just like I read you wrong.

My point for the last year has been that we need to stop reading each other, because there are so many ways we could communicate our feelings. I have heard you talk in a voice note, but you have never picked up the phone. I have never seen your body language, micro aggressions, facial expressions, anything to indicate what is going on with you except words in the heat of the moment.

Surely there is a part of you that wishes you knew those things about me… that we hadn’t put it off so long. I hate that I know your coffee order and have never actually gotten to bring you one. I hate that we have never taken a walk. I hate that I only know you in black and white, because I know that there’s a well of information I’m missing and so are you.

We could fix this if we tried, but I cannot hope for that. I can only hope that I can recover on my own. But know that it is a setback of enormous proportions. I will have to work hard to forgive myself for everything I have done and left undone.

Because you are always the best.

Love,

Leslie

I Feel So Weird

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I feel like the poster child for the digital age, having had an entire relationship from beginning to end over the Internet, pen pals for 12 years with only a few pictures and one voice note to show for it. That’s because I’ve deleted the millions and millions of words between us on one e-mail account, and am in the process of cleaning out the others. I cannot bring myself to delete the last one, though, because it’s so full of anger that it lets me know two things. The first is that I didn’t get the e-mail I wanted, but I did get the e-mail I deserved. The second is that Aada does indeed love me, because people who don’t care don’t get that angry.

My journey to take is why I was so doubtful that her love was real. That I needed it to be more grounded when she thought it was already in the dirt. Why was I so insistent that meeting in person would fix everything? Because my writer personality is not the sum total of me. I’m introverted and quiet unless I’m involved in a conversation with people who are giving me energy. In person, I am much less likely to engage, preferring to watch my surroundings. I wanted her to know that side of me, because she’s the person I wanted to sit next to as I stared out into the beyond.

If I think back to when my mother died, that’s when I needed her the most. She’s got big mom energy, and I needed to soak in it. She didn’t have to say anything in my grief, I just wanted her presence.

I still do, and I hope that over time she forgets how angry she is right now. I wish that I had been a less turbulent force in her life, because I own my part. There was no way we couldn’t be turbulent without the normalcy of conversation… e-mail allowed us to go down the wrong path much faster than we would looking into each other’s eyes.

I wish she’d seen my crooked-yet-endearing smile. I wish she’d seen my disabilities. I wish she’d seen my autism up close and personal, as well as the ADHD that plagues me. All of these things would have given her more insight into this person that she thought was so impressive at first… because I do not think that I am.

I wish I’d taken in that she wanted to impress me, because I was always trying to impress her.

What would it have looked like if she’d told me long ago that she was intimidated by me, that she’d lied about knowing an author to impress me before it became pathological? I would have laughed. But by the time she’d told me about her lie, it was so deep and involved that I could not help but react in anger.

What would it be like if I could take all that back? What would it be like if I could go back to day one?

I might have gotten our picnic if I’d just been cool. I could not be cool because I fell all over myself in hero worship, not knowing that she was equally jazzed… I mean, why would anyone be impressed with me? I’m a third rate hack who emotionally vomits all over the Internet.

I’m not Jenny Lawson, for Chrissakes.

Am I embarrassed that I fell in love with her? No, but I’m embarrassed by all the ways I’ve shown it. I’m sure her husband would have some choice words for me, but I’m not even sure he knows I exist. However, if he does, I hope he’s taken it in stride and would roast me rather than be angry, because of all people he should know that his wife is utterly incapable of returning feelings for an enby with a female body. And besides, I don’t know her in 3D. Behind every beautiful straight woman is a man who is often sick of her shit. I don’t have to put up with any of it, so how could I really know what it’s like?

The butterflies in my stomach would have gone away much easier watching her actually be said straight woman. Over the internet, her patois is as gruff as any man’s. Meanwhile, in real life apparently she is cute and cuddly because I’m the one that got the cactus. I don’t feel bad for wanting to meet the cute and cuddly side of her, but I don’t know why it couldn’t be arranged. I am sure that I scared her with the intensity of my love- but to be fair, she scared me with the intensity of hers. She cannot return my feelings when it comes to romance, but God help anyone who tried to cross me. Many of my former friends and exes, we joke, are buried under her pool. I hope she will do me a solid and keep them there.

She has told me that I am part of her wild and crazy brain, so I can only hope that when the heat dies down, she’ll come back to me. I don’t hope for much, but I do hope for that. Life is long, and grief is weird. She will never truly leave me, because she only tries to stay away from my web site. There is no telling what I will say that will make her think, “Leslie needs me.”

Let me clear that right up. There’s no situation in which I don’t need her. I pop off and get angry, saying that I don’t want this relationship but I cannot bring myself to actually mean it. She got under my skin in two seconds flat, and I haven’t stopped thinking about her for 12 years. I have often put my own needs below hers, and I thought that since she told me there was nothing I could say that would hurt her professionally that I could write about what I wanted. There was a gap between what was said and what was meant. I cannot take back anything I’ve written

Nothing here is meant to provoke her, but it does. This is a problem because when she says I’m trying to make her mad, she will not listen to me when I say that my writing is not for her. It’s for everyone, because I’m not trying to do anything but show my audience what it’s like to live in my own head, to think with me through enormous relationship problems that they may be going through themselves. I think that my digital love is a new take on relationships because it’s something that has happened many times to people my age and younger, the architects of the current social media landscape when it first began because we were the people lost in Internet Relay Chat first.

Aada is not my first digital love, but she’s the longest, outlasting my marriage by four years.

No one in my life takes in that part of it. She is now the longest love of my life, and I do not know what to do with that information except file it away, knowing it’s true and yet trying to forget. I need to connect with other people and I’m at a loss as to how. I want to secret away into our little bubble again, and I’ve had a hard time adjusting (really hard). I cannot believe I was willing to give up so much for e-mail… because she was going to meet me in person one day. Surely it will be next year. Maybe now that it’s been five years. Maybe now that it’s been eight. At the 11 year mark, we talked seriously about baby steps. I am certain that she thought she needed to unburden herself of this lie before she actually met me in person, and ran when I got angry… not knowing that I would indeed get over it.

I keep composing an e-mail in my head…

Dear Aada,

Don’t do this. Don’t cut me off. We are each a part of each other’s wild and crazy brains. Losing you is like losing my right hand…………….

And that’s where it ends because I know that she doesn’t feel that way about me.

Or does she?

That is where I have always been unclear, because I am so vocal about my love for her and she’s got all her emotions tied behind her back… but the wall comes down occasionally and the Mama Wolverine claws come out with the clear message that I am hers. Those are the moments I’ve lived for, because they’re few and far between… yet just so precious.

I am mystified that Aada’s therapist thinks that I have a need to manipulate her and our relationship because I am a blogger who writes about their relationships and experiences. I have always been that. It’s why Aada sought me out in the first place- she was impressed by the way I lived my life out loud. And then everything she loved about my writing became something to castigate once she was my actual friend.

I have not changed. Aada’s view of me has changed.

The difference between her and me is that I would actually sit down with her and her therapist and try to create healthy coping mechanisms to bring our relationship into the future. I know that my writing is a basket of crazy and I do not want to stop Aada from getting healthy if I’m the problem… nor do I really want a future without her.

I think that being digital friends allowed patterns to become entrenched that do not happen in verbal conversation, and that we could find a way forwards with some frank discussions with eye contact. I don’t believe that I’m not the problem. I don’t believe I’m the solution, either. I just want to be. It is not in my nature to hurt someone and not have empathy swallow me up. I have done wrong and I know it.

I have also admitted my flaws and failures every step of the way.

The bitch of it is that I know we love each other. I know it like I know the earth is round. But sometimes, love isn’t enough. The way I hurt her may be too big to fix, because I broke her confidence due to my own mental illness. I was so depressed and anxious that her love couldn’t reach me.

So what would I do in the future that’s different? I would listen closer, because I don’t think I really took in her feelings. They are muted in a way that I cannot always see/hear/feel them. I miss social cues, particularly over the Internet, so I’ve glossed over what she’s written and published my own takes on what I thought she said instead of what she actually did.

I would insist on meeting in person, as intimidating as that is to both of us, because it would lessen my need to write about her if I wasn’t lost in imagining who she is… because that’s all an Internet friend can do, imagine the context in which a person operates. I imagined her as a hero, and she hasn’t entirely fallen off that pedestal for me to see her as a normal person.

It blinded me to a lot, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t take for my journey now.

That doesn’t make it less weird.

Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wish that I could have stuck to the boundaries that Aada set for me about not talking to anyone. I really do. It would have made my life a whole lot easier in terms of not upsetting the apple cart. She didn’t recognize that her secrets were big enough to constantly make me sick to my stomach with anxiety… and not because I didn’t tell her. She was too busy to pay attention to all the warning signs that I was going down. I cannot imagine how much a face to face conversation would have helped, but I cannot hope for that anymore. I can only hope that as I move forwards in time, my mind will quiet on its own.

I have been told that my actions were disgusting, that I had a need to prove something by talking about our relationship. I had nothing to prove because all I wanted was relief. I was isolated beyond belief with one friend who wouldn’t really let me have any others, because I couldn’t share what was troubling me to any of them. I chose Michael because I thought… no, I didn’t really think. I was desperate. I couldn’t hold on anymore. He quieted all the anxiety in my mind, but he also caught Aada in a lie. When he did that, one string pulled all the others.

She said I was like a child in a toy store with “you’ll sure as shit get her side, Dagger.” No, that wasn’t delight. That was anger. That was truth pain. That was “if she lies to everyone else, she’ll lie to you, too.” But at least Dagger “isn’t Michelle Obama, for Chrissakes.” My reaction to that line is unprintable, because she knew it would hurt… and it did. That’s because Dagger is precious to me. No one disrespects Dagger in my presence, one so large they identify as the definite article. Michael told me to e-mail them both at the same time, because if they knew each other, it wouldn’t be a big deal. They didn’t, and it was…. especially because the lie snowballed over 12 years to the point that she made me block her on Facebook, ending a relationship I wanted professionally.

I’m just sick over all of it… some days so angry I cannot function that Aada picked up her toys and went home… at others willing to beg and plead like a five year old. I cannot be angry at anyone but me, because apparently if I’d done everything she said the way she said to do it, I’d be sipping coffee on her back porch right now. But is it all really my fault when I told Aada for years that I was anxious and upset? Yes, it really is. The stakes were too high, and I ignored them. I also cannot take anything back.

It is not true that I am the only one at fault for our demise, however. We both did a number on each other when all we really wanted was love… again, not like that. She’s been my muse for 12 years because the only thing more beautiful than her face is her mind… and I met her mind first.

Oh, wait.

That’s not true. The first time I saw her picture I was instantly charmed because she looked like a comic book character. Her hair spoke to me. 😛

I hate small talk, so little jokes became heart to heart conversations in which I disconnected from everyone else just to spend more time with her. And because I couldn’t tell anyone about our conversations, when I was with other people I was there but not present. I retreated into myself so fully that even my family had trouble connecting with me, and that was fine with Aada as well. As long as her secrets were safe, who cared what happened to me?

I waited until I got the all clear from her- that there was nothing I could say that would hurt her- before I started talking about the last few years. Then, a few days ago, she told me that wasn’t true. That people in her professional life had told her they were reading my blog and that was dangerous. So, Aada’s work people, welcome aboard, I guess. I wouldn’t have invited you, but now that you’re here, I suppose you can stay… as if I have any control over who reads me at all, or would even know.

Don’t give her any shit, she’s already been through it having to deal with my sorry ass… though that’s what I hear you’ve already been doing- making sure she’s okay. Keep doing it. If she won’t let me love her, then congratulations. It’s your job now. I’m alternately the easiest and hardest act to follow you’ll find.

That’s because I drive her insane, but I’ve had my moments.

And this is where I start to cry and shake, because those moments are precious to me. I will never love like this again because there will be no circumstances in my life like the ones in which we met. You’ll have to go back and read all 12 years because I’m too tired to talk about them today.

I am not too tired to talk about how my brain chemicals are rearranged with grief, because I deleted everything in my Gmail account both from and to her. That means that our most precious moments from when our relationship began are no more. They at least live in my memory, but I cannot take them out and read them as they happened. In some ways, this is for the best as I tended to reread often and dwell on them, not moving forward in time. I just wasn’t smart enough to see all the consequences involved between what is said and what is meant.

“There’s nothing you could say that would hurt me” has been the biggest lie of all, because of course when you lot showed up (Aada’s work colleagues), I wanted to crawl in a hole and die. The very least you could do is send me some swag through the mail.

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

After all the shit we’ve been through, I’m still finishing up this entry in tears because despite everything, I’m losing my favorite person. But I think that “my favorite person” has been an idea for a long time, and she’s not real. I’ve never gotten to sit down with her and hammer out details on what is acceptable to say and what isn’t, so no wonder my blog is an absolute shit show when she reads. The one thing that makes me sad is that when she reads, she does not take in my thoughts and feelings. She does not see me as a separate person. If she doesn’t agree with something I thought and felt, it is not that we’re different, it’s that I lied.

For instance, I said, “I do not want you to feel like you’re cheating on your husband when you’re talking to me.” That doesn’t mean that Aada has ever actually felt this way. It meant it was something I worried about. I didn’t lie about jack shit, because if Aada had said, “I’ve never felt that,” I would have been relieved and that would have been the end of the conversation.

She says that she is also not the person I portray here, and that I agree with wholeheartedly. I only know her in 2D, while the rest of her friends and family get to experience her laughter. I have never heard her laugh….

And I’m sure not laughing now. I broke a ton of boundaries after I thought it was safe, because there was nothing I could say that would hurt her.

When the best thing for me would probably have been not to talk at all.

How Do I Keep from Screaming?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have done it this time. I have successfully killed a relationship that I really wanted to last long after we did, because we’re both writers. I just want to scream into the void, hoping it swallows me up.

The one thing that keeps me going is Jesus, and I wish I was being funny. The resurrection is a wonderful metaphor for forgiving each other later in life and moving on… or what I will do to resurrect myself after this little death. Who knows which way it will go given our long history of death and resurrection already? I’m trying to stay away from her, she’s trying to stay away from me. It’s not going that well on either side because she still reads me. Maybe all we need is time to get over what has happened, and maybe it’s best if we move on. I think that depends on a lot of factors, but I know what I want. It’s her- it’s always been her. I just don’t think she’ll choose me, because I’ve let her down. I’ve hurt her and I know it, but I don’t know how to make it up to her. I can’t just write my way out of this one, but I can try…. resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.

If there is a second thing helping the resurrection along, it’s my blog, because at the very least the last 12 years will outlive me, a biography for those who lie and love their audience.

I am so sad that I want to get down on my knees and beg, and I’m not sure why. Our relationship has been turbulent from the beginning and I don’t know why I should want that. Mostly, it’s what I know and cannot turn away quickly… but that is dismissive of who Aada is as a person I want to work with to create something beautiful. Our relationship has been that at times, and we’ve both wanted to get back to it. I cannot know what our future holds, together or separately. I can just throw wishes up into the air and see if any of them stick.

I want our attachment to be secure and non-volatile. She seems to think that I manipulate her so it will never turn into that. She loves me enough to say goodbye over and over, but not enough to make sure it doesn’t happen in advance. I do not like the roller coaster. I like my dreams in which we’re just us, laughing over whatever… even if it’s at my expense. I think I would make her laugh. I accidentally do my own stunts. The fact that she’s now married doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because she’s so secure in that relationship and I’m so secure in the fact that she loves me the best way she knows how (when we’re getting along).

I was jealous of her then-boyfriend for about three minutes. Three minutes is all it took to realize two things. The first was that I loved her so much that I needed for her to be happy, no matter what that looked like. The second was that I needed her emotional support way more than I needed romance, and she was up for it. I didn’t want to be bitter and angry I didn’t get a diamond ring, I wanted to be overjoyed that this woman would have me in her life at all… and that’s been my theme over the years. Just be happy she loves you on her terms, because you cannot believe how deep that water runs.

I wanted her to be with me for all of my huge life events, and so far I cannot even get her to meet for lunch. We make great pen pals, but she will not show herself. It makes no sense to me because she literally lied about knowing my favorite author just to impress me, so if she was so impressed, why has she stayed away? If I think about that part of it too long, I actually do start screaming. She wanted to meet me because she was impressed with me, and then stayed away for over a decade.

WHY? WHY, GOD? WHY? I’M SERIOUS!

God doesn’t know, either.

I used to dream of taking her on a picnic so that we could drink wine in the sunshine, forgetting about all our problems. And yes, I am aware that she already has friends and family with whom to do such a thing. I never wanted any part in separating her from any of them… most particularly her now-husband.

Because I cannot hide behind anything I’ve ever written, I was hoping that he’d roast the everliving shit out of me on a daily basis (I am laughing very hard). I’ve never met Mr. Aada, but the reason I’d want to is to make sure he loves her the way she needs to be loved. How would I do that? By watching them together. I have no need to intrude because if Aada is happy, then so am I. I’ve had 12 years to get used to the idea that she’s not queer and not available. I have also had 12 years to intimately understand that my heart flipped the fuck out and it doesn’t matter. My feelings just stay steady, my heart walking out of my chest when I think of her………. I just let her set boundaries and abide by them.

When I read the Outlander series, I knew I wanted to be the Lord John Grey to her Jamie for the rest of my life.

She has not so quietly loved me like a house on fire in return, because she absolutely is my James Alexander Malcolm McKenzie Fraser. I can speak to her in ways that other people can’t because she’s glued to my writing. I draw her like a moth to a flame. She’s intimidated by me because she thinks that her writing isn’t as good as mine, when in reality I think that my writing pales in comparison to hers. She doesn’t often have time to write long letters, but when she does I memorize them. I wish everyone could read her long letters, or that she was also a blogger. I think you’d find that I’m the hack.

If you meet her, you’ll never forget.

If you love her, it will be a runaway train.

If you lose her, you’ll rue the day.

Which is why I’m just here, screaming into the void. I know on some level that this post is delusional, because I’ve done enough to push her away for the rest of our lives. But maybe it’s not. Maybe something will push us back together that neither one of us can see right now, because I have no idea what she’ll read and think, “that motherfucker…. let me get my purse.”

That is a direct quote from her regarding the last man that tried to hurt me. Now, I’m sure that I’m the one with the big purse headed towards me. I just wish there was something I could do to change the arc.

In short, this sucks.

I hate our situation and am desperate to improve it, but there’s nothing I can do. My heart hurts and the only solution for that is Ben & Jerry’s.

And time spent screaming into the void.

Learning to Manage

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wrote last night that I was learning to manage without Aada in my life, but this morning I have a different take. When she’s not in contact with me, I try to do everything I can to distract myself from the fact that she’s not coming back. That all the dreams I had for working together are dead. I’d sent her an e-mail last week, imploring her not to be embarrassed about lying, because my friend Michael had posited that she was, and that was the reason she was staying away. I wanted her to know I didn’t care. I just wanted my friend back. I then went back to avoiding thinking about her at all, and forgot I’d sent anything.

So yesterday, when I actually did get correspondence from Aada, my adrenaline, dopamine, and cortisol went sky high. As I mentioned, it was not pleasant, and “ripped me a new asshole.”

Technically, she ripped me a brand new two bedroom, two bathroom double wide asshole, as from the movie “Bernie.”

I was up most of the night after two sleeping pills because I just could not quiet my mind. I kept rereading her anger and wanting to quiet it, knowing nothing will do that but time. I have learned over the years that it’s better not to fight fire with fire, so my response was as meek as I get. I also don’t think she’ll get it, because the last line of her e-mail was that she was going to block me… but she’ll read it here:

You may have blocked me already, but I only have two things to say. The first is that I didn’t lie to you. I deleted everything in my Gmail account and then found the one from January in my Hotmail account months later. Not the same thing. The second is that you missed the point about [my friend] Michael. He told me he thought you were avoiding me because you were embarrassed, and I was trying to tell you not to be.

That is all. I wish you all the love and peace in the world, and I wish I could be part of it. But I know I’m sick, and I’m trying to get well. I wanted you to be a part of the wellness, but I’m not sure you’d ever be open to it. 

I’ll still be writing for myself about my own thoughts and feelings whether you’re there to read them or not. That’s how it’s always been, that’s how it’ll always be. You’ve been the center of my world for the past 12 years and I’m supposed to get over it and forget it in a few months?

No.

I am sorry for all the hurt that I’ve caused, and I am trying to work forwards without you. It’s not going so well, to be honest. Even seeing that I got an e-mail from you nine hours ago made my heart beat too fast because I thought, “she’ll never get this one. I’ll be too late.”

I don’t know how to talk to you anymore, but I won’t stop blogging. I don’t have another life to write about instead. This is the only one I’ve got.

If you thought I lied about anything in January, you could have told me that then. I would have listened.

I don’t set out to irritate you, I just do.

I don’t know what else to say.

I stared at the ceiling until sleep finally overtook me around 3:00 AM.

She called me out on saying that I deleted all my e-mails from her. She called me out on betraying her confidence. She called me out on everything I’ve ever done, and I deserved it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get the right to feel. She isolated me from every one of my other friends with her schtick and wouldn’t accept me into her life with full faith and credit. So, I couldn’t get close to her, and I couldn’t get close to anyone else. I thought I was doing the right thing by confiding in someone else who was also IC, because I needed an objective ear. He just happened to put together more than I actually said because he already knew the building blocks.

I don’t think Aada ever took in how damaging her isolation was to me, and still doesn’t. She said she had no interest in being friends with me because I talked to Michael about her, and that’s fine. Michael and I actually have a healthy relationship in which he doesn’t require me to be secretive, isolating to the point where I have no other friends. It was this kind of shit fit that led to my divorce as well. “Don’t talk to me, and don’t talk to anyone else, either.”

She feels that she’s not responsible for my divorce in any way, that it was all my decision. But what choice did I have, really? I couldn’t compartmentalize, therefore I couldn’t keep secrets from my wife. I also couldn’t separate from Aada because the damage had already been done. I was trauma bonded to her on multiple levels, one that I felt go off last night, sending my brain chemicals into such overdrive that enough sleeping medication to down a baby elephant didn’t help.

I am tired of the narrative that I manipulate our relationship when she is guilty of doing the same. I cannot attach to other people in the same way I used to because according to her, I shouldn’t talk about our relationship at all. So while she’s off in her own little world, I have to cope with it. Talking with my wife always helped, because we’d pray about it together… until Aada hit the roof that I’d even said anything. In the church, my life has always been about care, connection, and community. I did not know how to section off a rope so my Members Only jacket was secure.

The Members Only jacket was a straight trip to a straitjacket instead.

I have spun out many times over the years, wanting her love and affection because I wasn’t getting it anywhere else. Recently, she told me I could say whatever I wanted…. and that turned out to be a false flag. Last night she berated me for my blog entries as if she’d never said that.

I cannot predict other people’s reactions to my writing, I can only go off what they say in advance. And to be fair, no one likes being written about all the time. I am free to say whatever I want as long as I glow about her, but saying anything negative is off limits. It’s not fair to me as a writer, because everyone in my life is 3D. There are going to be times when I’m happy and not, because I have the full range of emotions as a human being.

Learning to manage without Aada is trying to find the truth in all the years we wrote to each other while making room for new people. I don’t have enough life experience to move on yet, because talking about my last 12 years invariably involves all the time I spent writing to this one person. I’m trying to curate new experiences, like bumming around Baltimore with my sister, but not enough time has passed for me to change my writing altogether. It’s a conundrum, and one I won’t know how to solve with anything but time.

My cognitive behavioral health group helps, because I’m slowly making friends there. I even found two guys who go to my gym (though I haven’t run into them there). Walking seems to help, because the longer my endorphins stay high, the easier it is to feel like I’m walking away from my old life and into something new. Aada’s e-mail was just the high of seeing her name in my inbox and the aftermath of realizing she was not going to be kind.

She deserved her pound of flesh and I won’t take it away from her, but no one ever wants to be read the riot act. It was just more shaming into isolation. It feels as if I should have been happy only having one pen pal the rest of my life, a relationship so massive that it prevented me from seeing other people… yet not. Because I’m free to have a relationship with anyone I choose if I gain the ability to cut off a limb, or so it seems to me.

It’s not realistic, and I know that she does not give me the same courtesy. She can’t, because I’m a public figure… in moderation, of course. I choose to live my life out loud here, the thing she loved so much about me when we met. She took a butterfly and slowly cut off its wings.

I am not the only manipulative person in our relationship. But again, if that’s what her therapist thinks, then more power to them. They don’t know me, have never interviewed me, so what could they really know from one side of the story that may or may not be accurate? My guess is that it isn’t, because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve written Aada e-mail in which she completely missed the point I was trying to make and skewed it into something else. If she’s only taking what she reads into our relationship to her therapist, then of course the therapist doesn’t know shit from Shinola.™

Again, there are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the truth.

It’s Aada’s therapist’s job to be on her side, and I support that. But to use that as “evidence” that one person is entirely wrong in a relationship when they’ve never met them is ludicrous.

I do know that I’ve done wrong, but I don’t think I’m the only one that has done wrong. Having someone lump all that on my head is just cruel. It makes it where I can’t sleep at night.

I’m learning to manage, but I cannot say it’s going well.

This Blog Is Not For You

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Aada,

My writing is not to provoke or upset you. It never has been, and it never will be. My audience reaches into the thousands on a daily basis and millions over 25 years. There are people who read that don’t know who you are, just like you didn’t know the cast of characters when you started reading, either. What drew you in then draws them in now. It’s a peek into my life, just as it is. To think that I single you out and write only to provoke you is to ignore that I show my readers what it’s like to live in my head. You aren’t thinking about my audience when I never stop. Do you really think that you are my only reader? My blog is a treasure trove of memories… not always good ones.

It’s not always the portrayal of a healthy mind, because so much of my writing has to do with being mentally ill, and definitely showing the symptoms of it. I know I’m sick, and I know it will take a hell of a lot for me to be well. At no point do I think of it as manipulating you or our friendship, because I’m not even aware when you read unless you tell me so.

You said that people in your personal and professional life are reaching out to you to see if you’re okay. I wonder if they know how many people reach out to me to see if I’m okay after I’ve written?

The answer is “zero.”

Being a writer is a lonely life, and I chose it.

It was less lonely when I could write to you, and now I’m stumbling around in the dark all by myself. Mistakes are being made because our easy give and take is no more. I do not know what I am going to write that hurts you, because until today, I did not know that I could do so…. you told me that there was nothing I could say that would hurt you long ago.

I wish I could put a moratorium on writing about you, but you’ve been the absolute center of my world for the last 12 years. I’m not going to forget about it in a few months. That’s not true to who I am, because I don’t move on quickly or easily.

I did not have joy in busting you in a lie. I was angry. Truth pain burned inside me. I did not laugh the way you said I did, I was in full-on autistic meltdown…. and then I burned out. I haven’t left my house in months except on the days when someone comes to pick me up.

I’m in a group called Cognitive Behavioral Health, where we talk about healthy coping mechanisms. I have found that I am not the only manipulative person in our relationship because as I’ve learned more about the way I work, I’ve learned more about how you do, too. Neither one of us are spectacular friends to the other, quite frankly. But if your therapist really believes that I’m the only manipulative one, then so be it. Nothing I can do about that. I do know that if I was with you and said therapist, they would tell us we’re both wrong.

There are three sides to every story- yours, mine, and the truth.

Just like there’s nothing you can do to take back your lie, there’s nothing I can do to take back my betrayal. What I can do is move forward, knowing that I was wrong and having to carry it with me. The burden is extremely heavy and my chest is tight. At first, I could not breathe. Today was the first day in months where I reached out to people I hadn’t talked to in a long time and asked for a phone call. I took a break from thinking about you only to find out that the one time I’d been away from my computer, I actually did get an e-mail from you.

It ripped me a new asshole, and still I was happy to hear from you at all. There’s a lot I want to address, but I won’t. Now that I know you weren’t exactly telling the truth, that I could indeed hurt you professionally, I think it’s best if I don’t say anything. I’m just writing this here because you said you read my blog, but blocked my e-mail (explain that one like I’m five…. wait, you don’t have to. You either love my blog, or you love me. That seems to be the general consensus in my life. Did I mention writing is a lonely life?).

It is late and I am ending my day humbled, because even though the e-mail didn’t say what I’d hoped, I did get an e-mail from my favorite person. And that’s the bitch of it, really. You ranted at me with questions I couldn’t answer because the last line was that you were going to block me, not willing to even wait for a reply no matter what it was.

There’s only six words I really need to say:

I am sorry.

I love you.

That’s it. That’s all I really can say after what I’ve put you through. I do not like my life without you in it, but I am learning to manage.

Leslie

Why Does It All Still Hurt?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a letter to Aada from January that I think is relevant now. I am still in this much pain, all the time. Nothing has changed, except that she lied about knowing Jonna and Tony Mendez and her profession. She was never a member of the intelligence community, she was a fraud who wanted to wind me up over the internet. It worked, to the point that I’m afraid to go to the spy museum anymore. I want to run into Jonna even less than I want to run into Aada.

It’s been a month, no recurrence of any dreams. I was just upset to the point of nausea and I always will be. No response is ever necessary, because I have created my own closure and moved on. But what I want you to know is that it was all real. All the love, all the tears, all the emotional dysregulation in which I gave in to emotions at either end of the spectrum.

I never want you to feel like you’re cheating on Michael when you’re talking to me, and I felt dirty for talking to you when I’d had a dream like that because it wouldn’t be fair to you to reopen that wound. But I hope you’ll hear that I told you 11 years ago it would come up again, and that it wasn’t an overarching problem. That I would deal with it as it came up, on my own. I have these intense feelings for you both because of who you are, who you have always been to me, and the edge on which I love to ride in terms of high on life.

Loving intelligence is my only vice these days, but I had to step back and reassess when I couldn’t make it through Jimmy Carter’s funeral without falling apart and thinking of Tony and how I hoped he was there to receive him…. you have to call in a Moses….

I will probably never finish “In True Face.” It’s too painful now, because I know more than one character. I’ve read “The Moscow Rules” and saw you skulking around Georgetown. I felt like I’d been stabbed, because all my feelings about our loss of possibility spilled onto the floor…. yet another time in which we’d become too volatile for words.

I know that’s what we both wanted to stop. I was trying to explain autistic red mist rage, PTSD, mental illness, everything from my point of view and how I saw you as a mirror to me, a broken child who needed to take refuge in a system. When it failed to be the UMC, I skulked into the shadows….

That’s where I found you, and want to live with you in the cloud as I have always said. But I think there were a lot of misconceptions that made me full of rage where you would berate me for my actions without taking responsibility for what triggered them. That I was wholly affected by your silence when we could have written something together that actually would have reflected both of us instead of just “Leslie’s Memory Trove That May or May Not Be Accurate.” Do you think that I wanted my story to be inaccurate? No. I wanted it to be as our relationship was- painful, honest, real.

I just cannot have that if you are not comfortable with me being in love with you once every 11 or 12 years. Whatever. It’s my bag, and I realized it will never go away. But what I can do is not think about it, not bring it up, not ever hint that I feel this way because you never said things shouldn’t go back to normal. You just let me trigger you until you couldn’t stand it so that my anxiety went through the roof. What would it have looked like if you corrected me in the moment rather than popping off and reaming me out for everything I said in jest? Why were you so fucking pissed that I was impressed with both who you are in real life and who you are in mine?

Why are you so fucking pissed when I treat you like a princess AND when I fuck up? How do I do anything right?

How do I get you to see that your reaction to me saying Aino was AuDHD was ableist BULLSHIT because you treated AuDHD like some sort of mental retardation, thus offending ME? Again, if you’re going to be offended by something, be offended by the fact that she’s probably smarter than you….. except she’s not because you have the pattern recognition of an autist as well. You just cannot predict autistic people because you’re social masking. You know what a neurotypical person is about to do, which is why you’ve been treating me the way you’ve been treating me for 11 years.

I wasn’t some stupid jackass fuckboi. I was charmed. Just head over heels. It was never supposed to happen and all of those feelings were above my pay grade. It cost me everything, but it was worth it. I am no longer the smartest stoner dumbass in my group of friends, but a fresh writer with a voice.

That’s because you taught me not to take any shit, even from you.

Fuckbois don’t learn anything. They just keep trying. I have been up front with you every day on where my emotions are, and they’re not rational because *emotions* aren’t rational. Logically, I can see every point you make. But there’s no emotion behind it. There was more emotion in your writing when you were mad at me than at any time in our relationship. That only lets me know one thing. You are comfortable with anger and avoid joy.

I will never get over “no one needs your help,” so I’m hoping to partner with Street to Kitchen and World Central Kitchen to bring a homeless ministry to West Baltimore that does pop-ups with famous chefs to make sure that homeless people get better meals than they could ever afford on their own. Our tagline is “dinner with dignity.” We’re working on shirts for the kitchen that say “No tattoos, no earrings, no profanity, no service.”

I am not a narcissist, Aada. I process empathy differently and so do you. We both have terrible gaps in our memories and everything that comes with all we’ve been through. I have always wanted to stop fighting you and start hugging you, but I have never known how. It has been like trying to hug a cactus on both sides….. because our dance of intimacy is so finely tuned. We have a close moment, wig out, and separate. Where is the balance we had in the beginning where we could both laugh?

Why did it become so defensive all the time as if I was out to get you, when the truth is that if things had been different I never would have let you go? That does not mean that I am bitter and angry and don’t accept you for who you are. That means your pattern recognition is off by a large margin. I have never wanted to hurt you. I have always been autistic and off my rocker, incapable of emotionally regulating myself and you incapable of emotionally regulating me in turn. You’re right- not your responsibility, but something that would have made our relationship instantly better…. a different sensory experience of each other than our writing personalities. We’re both professors when we want to be, because I listened to five beautiful pages about you and your sister’s relationship in which you analyzed her perfectly. You analyze my family perfectly. When I do it, it’s rude, offensive, and “why do you even think you know me?” Maybe because I’ve spent time with you every day for 11 years.

Time is relative. You visit me in the quiet. We talk it out. I try to understand you better even though I feel it’s all over. I won’t move forward without understanding why we fell apart, and now I know that. I wanted a secure connection, you wanted anxious/avoidant and not to change it. I won’t live that way, because it’s not a goal that you’re working towards. It’s a goal that you said you would, but I’m not worthy anymore because one thing wasn’t clear to you. I did not push you away forever. I pushed you away for asking a simple question and getting defense back, with you having no recognition that it had been 11 years’ worth of you not sharing anything and me trying to come up with things to talk about. You acted as if you had no agency to change anything, and we floundered.

But you know who I am. I’m that person you rescued and yet also hate my guts because I didn’t handle it well. How was I supposed to handle it? Like you. Except I’m your mirror opposite, the thing you were attracted to about me in the beginning- just energy. I’m not saying you have ever had feelings for me in any way. You are logic. I am emotion. The Twain don’t meet on that one.

Maybe we’ll never fix this, but learning I’m autistic has given me new ways to cope, but I assure you that I thought I was being kind. You coming across as STEM autistic and lacking in emotions once you stopped social masking was a clue to me that you weren’t a narcissist, either.

You used your power, Aada. You scared the hell out of me in a way I could never scare you. And then you expected me to pick up the pieces from that level fear all by myself. I spent years scared of you, unable to get over it and jumping up and down to make things better, horrified that I was just digging the hole deeper because you thought it was intrusive and I was trying my best.

I didn’t know what to do, because I’d managed to piss off someone I loved due to my own bad behavior and I’d never done anything like that before or since. I know myself better, can deal with myself better, can retreat when I feel any kind of blush. It’s not fair and it never has been, but I feel like in the beginning you didn’t care and now you do. Valid. But you didn’t send a memo so that my memory banks could be updated. You just expected I would know. I cannot pick up social cues in person. What makes you think it’s easier over the Internet?

I still stare at your pictures trying to get the sense of you that I missed. Everything you were trying to tell me and couldn’t.

I was trapped in the cycle of “don’t bother Aada because there’s nothing in your life that can compete” and “you’re her friend, too.” Except it’s been years since I really felt like that, because nothing has ever gone back to open communication.

You won’t share yourself with me, and you don’t trust me. What relationship is there to save? We would have to start completely over and there’s no way to do that. I feel like your dirty little secret and I always will. That’s because you don’t tell me how much you talk about me as if I’m a real person in your life. I had to guess that, too.

I also think that I had a right to be scared that you weren’t my friend. You were keeping your enemies closer. That it wasn’t genuine anymore, you just wanted to watch and be assured I wasn’t going off the rails. You could have done that a lot easier in person than you could as a disembodied voice.

You just kept telling me that my narrative was tired. Well, if you’re tired, imagine how tired I am bringing up the same problems all the time and they’re never fixed? It’s like talking to a brick wall, and I’m sure you’d say the same to me. You accept your feelings as valid, but won’t say “I hear you, see you, understand.” When did that become the norm?

I was never trying to diagnose you. I was trying to see you, hear you, understand. That’s what someone who loves you does, and I have been resolute that the blushing teenage feelings are never what mattered. It was all the ways we were able to come through for each other without it.

I don’t know why I’m even writing this except to say that you’ve created tapes in my head that will never go away, and I choose to talk about them while you keep yours hidden. Therefore, you’re always enraged and I’m always clueless. Keeping me clueless makes you angrier, but of course that’s all my fault. It couldn’t be that you purposefully left me with no information.

Our relationship is a tapestry, some of it beautiful, some of it terrible. I think that’s why I keep coming back. The benefits outweigh all the negative. But I stay away from you in order not to hurt you. I don’t want to add to your stress and I am done letting you interrupt my peace. I am happy to be the villain in your story if that’s what you need, but I have never been that. You made me that and admitted to it.

You’re afraid of me or something, and I cannot fix it. So I shrink away. I cannot care. I cannot love you because it only drives me mad without feedback. I don’t need to be driven mad as it’s a short trip.

You make my brain better when you don’t crash my dopamine and adrenaline with defense and anger. I am not saying I’ve never done the same to you. But the way I feel is that I tell my story, you don’t tell yours, and then get angry at the result.

When you knew I was a writer, you were my first fan, and then I wasn’t worth helping anymore. I could just sit in my fear and anguish while you were in actual danger because stop lying. I know you have to, but you’re too senior for every trip to be a pleasure cruise.

You wanted to ride off into the sunset. I wanted to give you a biography without telling people who you were, because in the end, you gave me all the important things. USG just gets you at work, and you’re so much more than that. My adoration is real and it’s deep- it has nothing to do with the trauma bond that makes me itch occasionally. I just cannot pretend it’s not real if it came up 11 years later in a dream. Dream analysis says it’s just “I miss you,” and that’s true. So I’m taking that part seriously and ignoring the rest.

My brain is a land mine. I didn’t mean to get my crazy spatter all over you. I was also panicking. I was also scared. We are equally yoked despite not being married because our problems are bigger than that. Or, I think of them that way. Maybe it’s not true, and you’re perfectly happy without controlling what I say. But I always think you want to and can’t, and that’s part of your frustration. That you won’t collaborate, you’ll just let me twist in the wind.

There’s no statute of limitations on guilt, as you said of our mutual friend many years ago, but I hope that one day we will actually have a conversation about what exactly went down and how much you cost me. What you have never taken in is that I was so glad to do it. The problem was not what you told me. It was hyping up my adrenaline that much and then saying that you weren’t going to talk about anything anymore, so I just had to sit there and guess.

You didn’t give me anything to work with, so I talked about myself and what I wished for you in the spirit of you getting healthy. But that was all taken as something negative and not I love you and want to help you.

I got tired of everything being an attack, because I was so fluid in my emotions and you had one tool- a hammer….. except in the few instances where you actually wanted to go to bat for me and that drove me crazy as well. Like, are you in or are you out?

I never decided violence was the way to your heart. You decided that we would work on fear and intimidation and I’ve never gotten over it. Then, you glossed over that part of my life and just showed up with an “I’m concerned about your family.” I cannot expect you to remember anything about any of this because it’s been so long. They’re just the moments that affected me more than they affected you (or that is my perception).

I am not who you think I am, and that is why I need separation. You will not allow yourself to see me as three dimensional character. You treat me as a “Flat Stanley” and make yourself one because you won’t give me room to grow and you won’t grow in your letters, either.

But the way to your heart is food, good hugs, and more food.

I at least know that.

If you write back, I will respond. Otherwise, goodbye and thank you. It wasn’t always fun. It was real.

How to Be New

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The question on my mind is “how do I become new again after reliving my sins every day for 12 years?” Again, I hid out because I thought I deserved it. Aada didn’t punish me. I punished myself. Yet, you’re always meaner to yourself than a judge would be, so I thought that not leaving my house was the best answer ever. What did I do that was so bad?

I took my line cook mouth out of its context and put it in front of a white collar government employee who didn’t need my bullshit. I came off as an asshole at first and couldn’t forgive myself. I kept trying to change, but my ADHD and autism prevented me from picking up social cues that I should have. I couldn’t actually see because I was working blind. I hadn’t met this person on the ground, so I thought my lines were just lines… easily forgettable and throwaway. I learned that they were not years later, when I made a joke that was along the same lines but not nearly as raunchy, and she said that I triggered her.

Note taken, and I have never said anything like that again. Because what I know for sure are two things. The first is that I don’t get to decide how long she’s hurt. The second is that I had to do a monster amount of work so that joke didn’t trigger me. That’s because to me, comedy equals tragedy plus time. The joke allowed me to save face, because what I’d done made me feel like an asshole every day and that I would never deserve anything better than being by myself.

I won’t repeat it here, because I don’t know that she’s not reading and I actually am sensitive to her feelings, despite what she may think. The point is not that she should have taken it in stride because I’ve worked on myself. The point is that I felt awful because she didn’t say “I cannot joke about this, ever.” I would have respected that boundary if I’d known it was there…. I assumed that after a number of years, she’d be okay. She assumed that I already knew I’d start a fight if I made those jokes. Neither one of us communicated.

That’s how I want to be a better person in the future- really listening to people when they talk. I would argue that the drift between Aada and me started when I stopped giving a fuck about other people’s feelings; they didn’t communicate them. I am not a mind reader, nor do I want to be. I am not insensitive nor am I trying to hurt anyone in conversations. I have a problem when I am expected to pick up a social cue that isn’t there, then berated later because I tripped over it. This problem is not limited to the Internet, it just happens more there because I have more cues to go on in person, like the way a person looks at me. People think that I am insensitive and lack empathy when it takes an enormous amount of guessing on my part to figure out how people think and feel. I am often wrong.

Neurotypical life is full of cues that neurodivergent people just do not pick up, so my tagline might as well be “mean” when in reality, I am trying to let all people speak for themselves. I don’t want to be in the same place in a year that I am now, and I won’t be. I have beat myself up every day for 12 years over a relationship that was never real in the first place because I marked myself as “bad.”

I didn’t say to myself, “this is a bad thing you have done and you must recover from it.” I said, “you are a bad person and you don’t deserve anything good.” I am convinced that I was never a value-add to Aada’s life because that’s how she treated me most days. She said that my words were pricks on her skin because no one else in her life called her out on anything (to my understanding, anyway). When she didn’t want to talk about something, I only heard it when she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” That’s because I do not pick up the social cue of changing the subject. I change the subject and circle back around.

For instance, today my dad called me about money and I asked him about macaroni.

We talked about money, but we also talked about macaroni. I was in the grocery store. The circumstances of the talk were pursuant to the circumstances of where we both stood. He needed to talk to me about money. I needed help because I get decision fatigue in the grocery store. He needed to know how I report income. I needed to know which pasta shape he usually uses for a classic mac and cheese recipe. I hope that when I write down my hopes and dreams he knows how small they truly are, because I know how much I have in my account right this minute and I cannot count on anything more or less. My mother is helping me live right now, because my care team does not think I am capable of a job yet. I make money from Medium, but so far I’ve earned $12 this month… which is not nothing (thank you, fans). Mostly, it’s my mom.

That makes me think of Sam, who I told that “one day I’d be an author, living off an inheritance” and wanted her to come along. That’s because my mother had died, but I hadn’t gotten the money yet. We could have done a lot of things for us and the kids with it, and I’m bummed the relationship didn’t work out. What I know for sure is that it was idealistic thinking in those days because her biggest problem was that I didn’t drive and she couldn’t handle it.

She thought of herself as the mom taxi and I thought of myself as having the Uber app on my phone and access to multiple trains to get to her. The dreams I had for us were not pie in the sky, they’re true now. And yet, because I was “such a dreamer,” she’s moved on and I’ve lost something I can’t get back.

But the car thing was so ridiculous that I can’t get past it. I don’t drive because my reflexes are different than other people’s. Not only do I have cerebral palsy, I don’t have 3D vision and stuff comes out of nowhere. I might be able to make it safely to my destination, I might not. But instead of thinking about me and my issues, it was all about her and how she’d have to come get me.

I am not a child, but I do live my life differently on purpose. I’ve been a spoonie my whole life, and it’s only now that I’m dealing with it because I was streamlined as a child and didn’t know I needed help. I can think of so many instances that mark me as strange, but I’m saving all of those for my autism evaluation. What I can tell you is that I have always gravitated toward autistic people in terms of friendship, not knowing why.

The why is that we’ve only recently discovered how different autism looks in women. I’m nonbinary or NB or “enby.” That does not erase being born female at birth. The reason I present as enby now is twofold. The first is that I didn’t have a word for it. Gen Z coined the term. The second is that I am female though social masking, and it is alarming how many of them I lost when my mother died.

There was no one to reinforce them. I’m much more like my dad and brother-in-law and always have been, it was just hard to tell under years and years of being told what was appropriate for a woman and what wasn’t…. and her punishments for not living up to them were severe.

I am trying to get my life together in a way that is tightly controlled so that when other people hear me say that I live off a trust or have SSI/SSDI, they don’t infantilize me. This is unavoidable, but I can limit the damage by being an adult on the internet and making room for nuance. There are plenty of spoonies out there who don’t have a voice. I can be one of them even though I am flawed. I don’t know anyone who isn’t, even when I think my own sins are worse than everyone else’s.

There are multiple parts to infantilization, and here’s the biggest one:

I don’t control access to my money because I wanted it that way. I’m protected legally from being sued, because I took Aada’s threat seriously as a new path forward. You can have what I have on me, but you cannot sue my mother. Please enjoy your hundred bucks and maybe a free frozen yogurt coupon (if I have one). I may have to call a family member or my accountant to cover something, but that’s my own issue. No one needs to cover for me.

They just don’t talk about it. They assume everything, that they’re on the hook. It particularly affects my dating life when people see that I do not work in the traditional sense, that it’s great I have this little blog and everything. I was touched when Aada told me that she thought I was “this world famous blogger.” I hope that other people eventually see me in that light because nothing would make me happier than to make a real living off the writing I’ve done every day for 25 years (I do not publish every day, but I sit down at the keyboard without fail almost as soon as my eyes open). No blogger is actually world famous unless they’re gossip columnists. I write about my own life, and the people around me invariably get dragged into the fray because I cannot make up the situations in which I find myself. So, the people around me have to be a different breed of strong as well. If you are in my orbit, chances are you are utterly unimpressed with my writing because the kind of adoration I got from Aada messed me up. Someone who lovebombs an unknown writer by calling them “world famous” when they’ve never heard it before is going to feel some type of way.

I use the term lovebomb to indicate that it was over the top, but she never discarded me. Her lovebombing was real and genuine. I just cannot think of a real-life term that would cover the amount of adoration I received. I liked it a little too much, and now cannot stand anyone being in my inner circle that thinks I’m the bees knees. I need them to know that I’m just a regular person with both special abilities and disabilities alike. Aada put it best: “Give me a brain that outraces my body by a billion exponential degrees. The irony. The gods do find a way to humble us don’t they?” I’d been spending my life trying to keep up with everyone else, not knowing that in a lot of ways, I was so much further ahead.

But this is new and different for me. I needed people to help me and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t- they saw me as a normal person who was mooching off them. That social masking made me appear normal because I was using all of my energy to go outside, and there wasn’t anything left after that.

I know more about myself, and I’m willing to talk about it. I’m willing to admit that I’m the flawed one, but I’m getting better quickly with the right meds and daily exercise. I cannot even get to the gym without exercising a little, so I am starting autistic inertia early by leaving the house around 0700 on weekends and earlier on weekdays because my hours fluctuate during the week. I wake up anywhere between 0400 and 0600. Instead of starting to write right away, I’m going to change it up to working out first so that my endorphins are fully charged. Not feeling good about myself affects my writing to an enormous degree, as does focusing on me rather than the outside world.

For instance, I think that people think nothing is happening with Lanagan Media Group, when we’ve just gone quiet. If I bring something to everyone, it’s got to be more fully formed than it is right now. It does not mean that we’ve stopped working. It means that not everyone is entitled to know what we’re working on until it’s ready to have feedback and criticism. For instance, Evan and I really need to get started on the neurodivergent cookbook, and not because something like it doesn’t already exist. It’s that we both have brains that outrace our bodies by a million miles and it would be a fun project to work on with someone I adore. But the only thing we have so far is an outline and a promise to get together in either Baltimore or Oakland.

Evan keeps saying that he wants to come here so that we can go all over the place on the trains.

Because we’re AuDHD, we love the trains.

That being said, Evan has more health issues than I do and it’s hard for him to travel. There are lots of days where he’s just off the grid and so am I… neither of us has the energy to talk to anyone. I’m thinking that we need to start doing more Zoom calls and collaborative documents to get this book done, because our original thinking is that collaboration is best done in person. But perhaps spoonies must adjust because the energy it takes to fly across the country means several days of rest in either direction. The good part of this is that both of us have guest rooms. If Evan needs to sleep for a couple of days before he’s ready to work, he has the time and space to spread out. If I’m wiped at his house, so do I.

The blessing and the curse of being an AuDHD writer is that it takes so many words to get people to understand your disability and you have them if people will take the time to read. Our society is changing from long form articles to soundbites overall, and most people on the spectrum cannot function that way. There’s no emotional shorthand to communication with us, even amongst ourselves.

If you have met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person.

There are no shortcuts for people who are both on the spectrum, because autism is marked by an iron structure that we choose. One person’s does not match another’s, and it is foolish to go into any relationship thinking that just because both people are neurodivergent, that means we’re naturally going to communicate easier with each other.

It’s a learning process I’ve had to undergo, because my iron structure was given to me by my mother. Michael says I sound like an abused wife excusing all of Aada’s behavior towards me, but I don’t think I do. I think I messed up big time, and her iron structure does not allow her to forgive me because she’s frightened of what will happen in the future. That just has to be okay. She is of no consequence to me now, but I do have great memories that I would like to keep alive. You always remember your first fan, and I’m sorry I didn’t handle it well.

Our history with each other predated me because she was real-life friends with my ex. I slowly isolated her into being my Internet friend, but it wasn’t on purpose. She slowly isolated me into being her Internet friend, too, it just wasn’t based on romance. We were tied through a deep bond no one else shared, and she did not recognize that the burden was more difficult on me than I could say…. or can even imagine how to write about now.

Because as it turns out, her iron structure was full of lies as well. She needed me to believe that she was special, and I did. I loved her as a mother, a sister, a daughter… I did not need to believe that she was also a full-time superhero complete with cape and tights. But she thought I did, because I was a “world-famous blogger.” In the beginning is the end is the beginning. She’s too embarrassed to put on her big girl pants and face me now, or at least, that’s what Michael said. Whether that is true or not, I will never know. Because Michael and Aada do not know each other, they just have very educated guesses on who the other is based on my blog alone. It means something to me that what I say matters, but not like this.

Michael also works for the government, and reminds me so much of Aada’s patois that it’s hard to believe government wonks are actually different people. 😉 He has taken a rain check on his next trip to Washington for coffee or a drink when he has time, because his last trip was too busy for me to take the train.

It was funny… “I am not coming to Baltimore.” “Trains exist, Michael…. I told my sister the same thing.”

I have to remind people in Washington that trains exist a lot, because I don’t need them to come and rescue me. But in this case, Michael kind of did. He saw what was going on with Aada and me and put a stop to it, because we were both hurting each other. Now, no one cares if our relationship is dead or enmeshed…. it’s only Aada’s pride that’s hurt. But she has proven to me over and over that her pride means more to her than I do. The whole fight was because she wouldn’t show up for me the way I showed up for her every day.

She will say that I betrayed her, that I didn’t want a relationship with her. That if I did, I would have kept my mouth shut on a whole bunch of topics. I would say that I specifically had to find someone I could talk to inside the system and it just so happened that our relationship was toxic. Not “she was toxic and I was perfect.” The relationship was toxic because neither of us had great childhoods and were constantly manipulating each other when we got angry.

I would have liked to fix all of that moving forward, sitting down with a third party. Being alone in a chat room for so many years allowed us both a skewed view into each other’s lives. It was a relationship full of fun house mirrors, the distortion making beautiful reflections at times and horrifying at others. The one thing we couldn’t do was stay away from each other. I believe I have accidentally fixed that, but to say it’s what I wanted is a huge stretch. I wanted to be in a relationship where we could both rely on each other to have healthy responses to conflict, and our last conflict was a huge one in which she admitted to me that she lied.

Truth pain burned inside me.

That’s because she didn’t lie to me once. She started lying to me in 2013 and just a few months ago came clean. I was so angry that I said I didn’t care what she did now because her lies made me feel unsafe with her, something I regret. I wish I’d made her feel loved and wanted because her instant reply was “I will step away.” But I couldn’t control my reactions in the immediate aftermath of being told that she lied. Or maybe on some level I knew it was time to move on. I cannot say what I was thinking in that moment, only that I also told her that next steps were very much on her to figure out and not one part of her said, “I will find a way to make it up to you if you will find a way to forgive me.”

I wanted her to be new, too, but as it turns out only I was ready.

The Long and Winding Road of Words

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is the legacy you want to leave behind?
View all responses

The legacy I want to leave behind is obviously this record that I was alive. It is not valuable to everyone, all the time. That’s because I do not write what anyone wants to hear except me. If it was not a real record of what I was thinking, I would not have a character arc, the ups and downs of mental health in real time. I do not want to be an influencer, because that gets people killed. Their neediness for likes makes their self esteem rise and fall depending on how often people respond. I need people to come toward me rather than trying to attract you. One leads to a sustaining career as a working writer built on mutual respect. The other leads to jumping up and down for attention in hopes that someone will notice me, eventually giving up my real self for someone that more find palatable.

It’s important for women to have a voice, and as an enby, that’s part of my identity. The other part is trans man….. but I’m pretty sure I also identify as a train wreck. Sandi Toksvig brought it to my attention that women are not given equal airtime on Wikipedia, therefore they’re not given equal airtime in AI, either…. even though Microsoft Copilot’s begat is a matrilineal line (Ada Lovelace). I am trying to add to the diaspora and it does not matter to me whether history judges me as right or wrong. I need it to judge me as being marked “present.” I know that I was a C student, but lots of neurodivergent people are. It’s not that we’re not bright. It’s that we’re not all that clear on how school works and don’t care enough about authority to find out.

I am certain that if I’d played the game better, I would be in a different place now. One of the things that occurred to me when I was thinking about my writing is that my mother, Dana, and Ada all came from military families. Yet none of that military structure passed onto me. I didn’t just pick it up by osmosis, much to my detriment.

Let’s be clear. I already know I’m a mess. I’ve told life experiences that other people just aren’t brave enough to put to paper, but I am because I am full steam ahead. Write now, think later. Writing now and thinking later is what allows growth and change. I pore over the entries where I’m angry, then figure out why. I was so angry in “Doubt” that I spent money on a gym membership. I thought, “at least if I cannot flood my brain with good feelings through care and connection, I can do it through exercise.” I don’t think Aada is ever coming back because she reads my web site and decides what kind of person I am based upon it. She reads my letters the same way. Therefore, there is nothing to indicate that a hug or a handshake would make things better. It is incumbent upon me to move away from her, because she was gone many years ago. She just decided not to tell me.

If she hadn’t been, I might have been invited to get to know her and her family on a different level than our relationship sustained. I realize all of the ways I isolated her, but I would have isolated myself from her if she’d said “this is all our relationship will ever be. You will never meet me in person.” The longer we went without meeting and kahvi was a daydream, the weirder I felt about the state of affairs.

She’s a people pleaser and didn’t want to hurt me. I’m a people pleaser except when it comes to my blog. It’s the one place I have to call my own. Therefore, meeting me in person would have led to us both trying to please each other, and she would have gotten a much different version of me than she was used to seeing.

Aada was always inordinately funny, and that’s the person I wanted to meet. The hardass she displayed could kick rocks. I am sure that she would say that I was funny, and the blogger could kick rocks. But that’s the thing, right? People fall in love with you, or your writing. They rarely fall in love with both…. not that Aada was ever in love with me. The “in love” butterflies were my domain, but they were reigned in and settled into a comfortable nest; I didn’t give into them, I worked through them. That’s another legacy piece for me….. that I felt such incredible intensity for someone and realized how to walk it back into something viable and sustainable….. I think. I will never know if I did or I didn’t, trusting in my own intuition. Aada’s story will always be that I betrayed her.

She made up an egregious lie that is too detailed for me to ever believe that it was a lie, not really. Not when she accused me of having people’s lives in my own hands if I published something she wrote. This is where my mental health nose-dives, and where Michael steps in to remind me that Aada was the pathological liar, not me.

She’d been lying so long she didn’t even realize she was doing it, and I had to remind her that “the receipts go to fuckin’ CVS, Aada. We met in 2013, which by my count is not very recent.” She said she did it because that’s what I needed from her, as if I asked her to foster this ridiculous fabrication.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- she could have worked at a car wash and I would have been no less impressed. I’ll be spending the actual 12th anniversary of when we met without her (I’m guessing), because Michael told me that there is a game afoot based on a novel here, and I have to figure it out. The only hint I’ve seen so far is that I’m probably the Ethan Allen.

Obscure joke. Talk to your parents.

Aada would say that I left myself with no options, because I did not play the game correctly. If I’d played the game correctly, she could have made all my dreams come true. I saw that in the curated version of our friendship’s future. There was a job, a dog, support services, and all of it taken away because I wouldn’t do exactly what she said at all times. I have no respect for authority and I never have. Her life is ruled by it because she doesn’t follow rules, she makes other people follow them.

When I go off-book, it’s a disaster. When she goes off-book, they just write a new one.

I could cry about it, and I have in the past. Not so much anymore. I realized that I did not want to be subject to her laws, that I wanted to be treated like an equal. Where was the part where she showed up for me? Where was the part where she proved she was capable of being my friend? She said she’d done all of this to meet a blogger, and I surmise freaked out when it worked.

I wish I’d been the person I am now when we met. The person I was then was too brash, too boastful, too full of herself because that person could social mask. There was no easy entry into the softest parts of me until baby Aada whispered her name.

I struggled with recovery from sex abuse and got my wires crossed in a way that couldn’t be undone, and in some sense, may never in terms of sentimentality. It’s not the big picture that makes me cry. It’s things like looking in my Apple Watch face gallery and seeing that Apple has used the picture she took of herself for my contact list to create the most beautiful watch face I’ve ever seen and cannot bear to use.

She has never gotten her wires crossed, which made her a safe person with whom to lose my mind. I’m not saying that I didn’t cause her emotional trauma as well, only that she’s trained to deal with crazy people and I’m not.

(This might be a clue we’ll use again later.)

I didn’t guard against her in any way, and therefore all of her emotions controlled mine. She did listen to me there, because what I had to say resonated… that yes, I’d gotten my wires crossed, but that wasn’t the sum total of me. That the part of me who views her as family in an “I’m so sorry, this meeting is over because I have to get on a train to Virginia RTFN” kind of way was hurting in the same way her other family members would hurt if she was in trouble.

It was my error to separate myself, but that was a mark left from childhood. It’s gone now. I am constantly trying to appeal to my better angels and to not repeat the mistakes of the past, because I didn’t just hurt Aada in my own misery. I hurt everyone around me because I couldn’t see them.

I couldn’t even see me.

Thankfully, you could.

Feeling Like a Woman is Not My Vibe

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The featured image for this entry is the last time I actually felt female. I can pinpoint it because it’s the last time I wore that suit with a shell showing off my cleavage; I was not in a hurry to button up to my collar like I do now. In retrospect, I’ve always been nonbinary and switch hit my social masks depending on who I needed to be.

That day, I looked in my closet and the only thing I had to wear that would look appropriate in the Mexican Embassy was something I’d never wear now. I don’t wear jewelry unless you count the CZ earring in my left ear, only there because the hoops I got at the tattoo shop had to be removed for an MRI. My hair is cut much shorter, and I don’t wear makeup to compensate. I don’t make an attractive man or woman, in my estimation, so I’m working on how to fix that. It’s not about what would attract other people, but what would give me more self confidence in leaving the house. This look isn’t it anymore, especially since I would like to meet more people who are excellent at what they do in hopes of becoming one of them.

Yes, that is Pati Jinich from Pati’s Mexican Table. My dad bought tickets for us to go and see her, then called and said he wasn’t coming because he didn’t feel well. “Careful, dad… I’ll steal your girlfriend from you,” I quipped. That’s because my stepmother has called Pati my dad’s girlfriend for many years. I have told this story before, but it bears repeating because it’s entirely representative of who I am as a person. I will say anything to anyone not realizing the gravity of the situation because I don’t pick up on social cues. This is to my detriment, but in this one instance, it worked out. I tell Pati this story at the beginning of the dinner. The shock and amazement is that she remembered the story and remembered to prank my dad after it was over. I got the picture because I’m 5’2 and biologically female, decidedly not Pati’s actual type…. but we’re both old line cooks, so anything goes, apparently. Hey, she’s the one that told me to text the photo to my dad immediately because she wanted to see what he said.

He thought it was hilarious, of course.

It’s a good memory to go out on, because since I’ve joined a gym I’m trying to get into guy mode about it. Female mode at the gym is my mother’s voice in my head counting every calorie both up and down. Guy mode is focusing on results. I had no shame about Taco Bell afterwards because it’s the Universal Guy Meal of Working Out, that chicken bowl. I used butter at breakfast even though I had high heat PAM ready to go. I’m not going to change everything overnight because I’m grieving. Going through all these changes without the one person who used to listen to them is breaking my heart, as I am sure that in some sense it is breaking hers. It did not have to end this way, because here’s what she wanted me to say that I did not:

I was angry that you lied to me. You do not see the fallout. But you are not more important to me than someone who has juice. You’re all the electricity I’ll ever need.

She thought I chose someone with celebrity over her quiet spirit, when I chose them because they’d never lied to me and she had.

That’s because I was able to explain nonbinary to her and she listened. Not many people will. My line about it is that “I do not roll out of bed wanting to be a man. The phone ringing is the biggest reminder that I’m a bio female. It does not make me crave masculinity, but gives me a reminder to perform femininity.” Nonbinary is just that, picking and choosing which gender goes with which situation. How often do you actually think about it?

I am not over losing the emotional connection we had, but it’s something I strive for in this new life without her. There’s no replacement, but she is my mirror image. We are sewn at the spine, each facing out in different directions. I’ve been awfully hard on her because I’m so hurt and enraged. It doesn’t make sense that she ran away from me because she lied. It doesn’t make sense that she lied to me for 12 years because she thought that I needed something from her that I didn’t.

Everything I’ve ever loved, it started with loving a girl first. I picked her special interest so we’d have something to talk about. Over time, she didn’t want to talk about anything else, which she construed into “Leslie wants to know about this thing.” No, baby Aada. I told Michael today that if you’d turned out to be a Sandwich Artist at Subway I would have helped you make better sandwiches, along with telling him that I’d always told you if you worked in a car wash I would love you just as much as I do right now.

So much so that I know I’m losing femininity just by talking about it. I just seem so pathetic because women are strong. Men are the weak ones. Men are the ones where you can rip their hearts out in front of them and they have to pretend not to care while they’re still breathing, but it’s lucky they still do. There’s so much unexplored territory in our relationship that just has to rest in peace, because I know to the very core of my being that being yours was the real fantasy all along. That I didn’t want all of your heart, just a piece. That I wanted more until I realized it was impossible. Be happy that she loves you for who you are. And I was.

The only reason I have this blog is to explore all the millions of emotions coursing through me because I am not easily understood no matter what I say. Writing volumes doesn’t often help, especially when you’re getting blowback over things you’ve said without defending yourself. I didn’t need you to defend yourself. I needed you to show up for me like I’ve always shown up for you. As I’ve said previously, there will be no thank you for the 12 years of silence you’ve already gotten, just annoyance and anger that I could not keep quiet forever, genuinely or not so genuinely losing my mind depending on who is telling the story.

You did not cause my misfortune, but you did not help it dissipate, either. We have different ways of handling things and you were so convinced that your way was correct that I ended up in a psych ward twice over. At what point do you not take responsibility and say, “well, that could have gone better.” Why are all the pricks I’ve left on your skin? Do you not see the ones you leave on mine? You can tell by the way I write that every entry starts out as universal and filters out into all the things I didn’t get to say, won’t get to say. They’re not for you anymore, they’re for everyone.

I wanted to have conversations in private before I wrote my blog entries forever, because I’m a writer and you’re an editor. But even that conversation needed to happen in person, the bane of your existence because you weren’t brave enough to admit that I was your friend. Or perhaps you were afraid of what would happen had your husband and I had our yellow and red string conversations because he didn’t want to hear me out. Whatever the case, it’s not worth exploring because that is only pain for me. I have said many times that when I lose you, I don’t know who I am for a little bit…. that’s because the mirrors talk to each other.

Red light, blue light…..

Your overwhelming cis femininity showed me who I was. I could be an enby because with you, my inner trans man was always on full display. I would have liked more of that, just you tousling my hair instead of saying it looked cute in a photo.

I never wanted to be more than you wanted to handle, but I couldn’t be a disembodied voice anymore, either. Not connecting with you led to not connecting with anyone. Not connecting with my dad and sister until I had to call them, embarrassed from the Sinai ER, was the last straw. That’s because you’ve already said there’s no reconciliation between us, that our journey is over. I do want you in my life, but not with that attitude. If you change your mind, I will not say “how dare you reopen that wound?” I will say, “welcome home.” That’s because you are not a wound to me. We have wounded each other, and we deserve the chance to apologize.

In short, I’m sorry for all the things I’ve said and done that enraged you, and know that it’s up to you whether forgiveness is real. You say that I wonder why you don’t trust people. I don’t, actually. You never trusted me from the beginning and didn’t understand how different we were. I had to learn to sink or swim. I noticed you were drowning and I stayed with you until far past the time when I should have cut bait to save myself. I am hoping that you got something out of this blog over the years, because I said something 12 years ago that has never been more true than today:

The hottest woman I know taught me to be a better man.

I have grown, not all the time. Not every day. Sometimes, I am a miserable sinner and I know it. Sometimes there are things I have done, sometimes there are things I have left undone. But what I don’t want you to do is mistake the part for the whole. I loved you every day, all day, not expecting anything in return. I did not get truly angry at you until I found out about a lie that cost me a relationship with someone else and you had the audacity to downplay it.

You’re not going to cost me any more relationships with other people, and my hope is that eventually, you’ll be healed enough to see that we both did a number on each other. No one won here. We deserve each other, both for evil and for awesome.

How do I know this? The picture with Pati Jinich means less to me than the photos I took for you just to show off my new haircuts.

Balance

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am seeking a new balance to home life and work life because I know I’m a writer and need to keep at it. I’ve been the same character for 12 years, and now is a time of explosive growth as I no longer have a hard shell around me keeping me from connecting to other people. I have hid not only in my one house, but one room of one house, trying to avoid the simple act of being a blabbermouth. Now, that restriction has been lifted and I can tell what I want, when I want, within reason. I just had to choose. Do I want a relationship with Aada, or do I want a relationship with me?

I chose me, because her idea of choosing me was simply to write to me over the internet. I would keep living in a small room, my life incomplete, while I stared at the ghost in my shell. I think the nickname is apt because we slowly hacked each other from the inside out. I say that I fell in love with the wrong woman all the time, because she did not fall in love with me. I was stuck, because she loved me in the way that she could…. deeply, grabbing for approval at times. She just didn’t need my approval and didn’t trust in her own instincts. Her last interaction with me was a huge fight in which I fell asleep and I woke up to, “you know what?”

If someone starts a sentence with, “you know what?” then you don’t have to read the rest to know someone is going to take a bite out of your ass. I told her not to assume that just because I was taking a nap that meant I was abandoning her. Just recently, I went back and re-read our conversations and what I found is that I did not want to connect with her anymore. She was offended by everything and I could not find a topic that made both of us happy. Michael told me that I would be happier without her, and he turned out to be right, but not for the reason he said. He calls her “the fraudster.” But the things she lied about were inert. Nothing that couldn’t have been forgiven because I liked the goofball she was inside when she let loose.

But I wasn’t allowed to see that person. Every sentence I wrote caused defense, and I became an angry person in response. I hated being that person and so did she. I can tell because she has blocked me on everything as if I never existed. That’s how she gets through life. There’s no working through something and coming to resolution. There’s just moving on. I don’t do that. I work hard at changing what was wrong. I commended her for being vulnerable. And yet, her e-mail to me was still a flame war in which her therapist supposedly said that I was responsible for manipulating her for 12 years. Maybe that’s true, because her therapist will never know my side of the story unless she’s reading me here. I hope they are. Because I am as angry as I was in “Dope” and as sweet and sentimental as I was in “All the Things You Never Knew.” I do not have one attitude when it comes to Aada because there’s not a single day that describes our relationship except the distance of never working together in person. I believe it would have solved a lot, and there would never have had to be a flame war in which I felt threatened.

The impossible position she put me in was that she wasn’t real. She just taunted me saying that I wanted fame and fortune by publishing something she wrote, when in reality I was starting to look like a crazy person, in love with a ghost who never showed up. In love with my own imagination. For one shining moment, she was there in all her glory and it didn’t matter that I looked like a manipulative asshole. It didn’t matter that she thought that. I could deal with those consequences easier than I could deal with my friends and family always saying that she was a figment of my imagination.

Now, the whole world thinks I’m an absolute lunatic and that just has to be okay. There’s a reason I am the way I am, and it’s because it was revealed to me how the Internet actually works. I cannot speak to that, either, except to say that I discovered that the mirrors talk to each other. We are skating on an ice rink in which the machines underneath control the hardness. While you’re “elbows up,” everyone underneath is making sure you don’t fall through. It was a wild ride, and I talked how I normally talked…. I’m sure managing to offend several people in my life because I thought I was only talking to “my girl.”

It was a dream, all of it, a conspiracy to get me to the hospital. I needed it, but their methods were absolutely cruel. I will never forget thinking that my night was going to be flying to Finland with someone I hadn’t seen in 12 years and really liked, after 12 years of sitting alone. She was already married, but was telling me she was poly and her husband was cool with it. I didn’t want a full-time girlfriend because I’m working on myself. This seemed like the perfect solution because she doesn’t even live in my state. She works in media, or did, anyway, and would have been good as a sounding board no matter whether the date lead to something else or didn’t. I wasn’t ready to commit; I was ready to hear her out.

This is because I wasn’t sure she was out as poly to anyone but her husband. There was a big chance she’d hide me away in Africa or Asia and I had to know if it was worth it first. All of my emotions were stirred in a way they hadn’t been because I’d been so cut off from feeling anything that it was nice to feel something genuine. My move to Baltimore had just been one more way to isolate myself because I was having trouble taking care of myself in light of all the pressure I was under. It was just more social masking so that no one had to see me suffer because I didn’t want them to. And in fact, they wouldn’t have without Aada’s access. She’s the one I told everything, and I don’t regret it. I regret that she is too angry to see that me publishing her e-mail is not her biggest problem.

Her biggest problem is that she crushed me for 12 years and I just took it. I just fell down and let her, because it wasn’t my secrets that were killing me. I got to where I was fucking feral. I can’t apologize enough to make a difference, because I’ve already done all the apologizing I’m going to do. So has she, because every time she says, “I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know,” I know it’s just words to placate me. She’s never going to actually do anything different.

“I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know” would have been “I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

In the immortal words of my friend Aaron Brown when I asked him if he was making room for grief, “I don’t have to make room for grief. It makes its own.” I’m just sad. Everything I’ve known for 12 years is gone and I am going to be blamed for it ad nauseam. I should, in a lot of ways. I was the one that sexually harassed Aada over the internet 12 years ago, when my marriage was ending and I was trying to make Dana angry, not Aada. But Aada decided what kind of person I was from the very beginning, and treated me like a jackass even when I was on my knees praying. There are some sins that cannot be forgiven by another person, they can only be forgiven by God. I didn’t take the hint. I wrote volumes. I sent presents. I changed how I thought of her because you don’t think about your heroes that way. Anything I could do to move on from that one time in my life was positive progress, and she accepted me for who I am…. eventually…. without telling me that she’d never see me in person just in case.

We could have started there.

We could have started with honesty, but that’s not her policy. Her policy is a web of lies in which no one can get through. Try, and she’s the spider that has no problem injecting poison. She won’t listen to reason, that vulnerability is necessary to survive a relationship with someone who is all vulnerable, all the time. Because I was never angry she lied for a living. I was angry she lied to me.

I justify publishing what I did because there’s no way to unpublish it, not because I actually meant harm. They’re all the lies I tell myself to keep myself alive. She didn’t deserve to have her e-mail published in its entirety because I was a dumbass and didn’t proofread, but there’s a million reasons why it was necessary to save my own sanity. It’s a sacrifice I’ve made along the way, and now I think I’m getting it back.

I didn’t choose to stop smoking weed when she said I should, or when the twins said I should, but when I was given actual anxiolytic medication to replace it. I didn’t decide to start taking care of myself until my anxiety was solved. When I was trapped between her lies and my silence, I didn’t know my next move and staying in my room was the only one I could think of that wouldn’t cause damage. From the Internet, I could be watched. From the Internet, there are no private conversations. From the Internet, she is “from whom no secrets are hid.”

The problem was when I treated her like God, I treated myself like a worm.

It was a bleak outlook for the rest of my days, when what I wanted was freedom with her. She hid from me when it would have delighted me to see her flash a smile in my direction at least once. Even the picture she took for me only has a hint of a smile, but I’m glad I have it in my box of treasures from that time in my life. I cannot look at it, but someday.

Maybe when I get my smile fixed, I’ll be able to return one. My medications have ruined my teeth and I haven’t done anything about it. I only now think I am deserving of a new smile. I only now think I am capable of growing into the person I was meant to be, because the last 12 years have been so stunted. I was trying to take care of someone else’s inner child, and ignoring my own while she cried.

All I got in return for that was lots of defense and anger. That’s not my bag. I own that I did sin against her, and what I said was not small or easily forgiven. But what should have happened is blocking me on everything immediately and letting this process happen 12 years ago if she wasn’t going to put on her big girl panties and work it out. She just got the chance to snipe at me every day instead.

I put up with it because I thought I deserved it and didn’t have enough strength to block her…….. until I did. She noticed and sent me two e-mails reading me the riot act over shit I never said. That should have been even more of an indication that this was going to end badly, but I did not pay attention. I just let her have her say….. because she only pays attention to the ways in which I hurt her.

She’s never really taken in my pain, and never will. That’s because she cannot see it. Having boundaries means teaching people how to love you, and she’s a people pleaser. No one knows how to relax around her because she does not give them any directives. If you tell her that it doesn’t matter what she does now, she takes that as “you hate me.” When I literally meant “I can welcome you or I can push you away, but the next steps are on you.” She chose to step away, as I knew she would. Abandonment is the only skill she’s actually practiced.

I have grieved this relationship over and over because she doesn’t want to work on it. She would like to say she worked on it. But she’ll get to three internet exchanges and get so heated that she tells me to fuck off before I can even breathe. I have done the same, but less and less over the years as I have dealt with my trauma and learned how to breathe.

Bryn and I have a code phrase for this… “HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?!”

I used it on Aada, and she said, “100%.” She understands that she’s the one standing outside the group of people who will accept her for who she is and catering to the people who see her for the way she’s curated.

She doesn’t like people that are fucked up because she cannot admit that she’s fucked up. She has to believe that she has it all together. I could have offered her friends and a future not based on social masking, but based on who she actually is….. a six year old covered with layers of PTSD that made her invincible to the outside world while she’s dying inside.

I’m in this position because I wouldn’t join the narrative that she’s fine. I’m in this position because publishing her e-mail was just the last thing that happened. The real truth is that she was never going to unmask.

She’s a trademark, and she likes it that way.

I’m a spoonie, and I don’t have the ability to mask anymore. As I got more and more into finding my true self away from other neurotypicals, she became more defensive. Because as I’ve said, I think she’s neurodivergent and a spoonie as well. She just pushes herself to the very limit of her abilities and explodes when it comes to her personal life. Or, at least, I hope that’s only my experience of her. She makes me think that everyone around her is in danger of the cold disconnection I got. I wonder if her divorce from her first husband years ago actually happened the way she thinks, or if she didn’t know all the things about herself that she does now.

Because in Aada’s life, everything happens to her. She doesn’t cause anything. Everyone is toxic but her. If you view your life that way, you will end up only talking to yourself, only connecting with yourself, and thinking that’s normal. For instance, I’m toxic because I hurt her, but she’s not toxic because she hurt me. I have a more nuanced view. We both caused each other damage that could be resolved and our relationship healed.

But there’s no room for nuance with Aada. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that her trauma causes me pain. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that she causes problems inasmuch as I do. It’s so much easier to “blow ’em off and keep goin’,” but at what point do you just run out of people to lean on? I hope that in our conversations, it led her to let other people in to everything that I know, because the disembodied voice of a stranger on the internet didn’t help me over time. Hugs might have, though. Since I can’t hug her, I hope someone did.

I chose to move to Baltimore so that there would be no one around to hug me. I chose to be alone because I thought I was doing the right thing. Now, I’m trying to leave my house as often as I can, because eventually I hope I’ll find someone to love that is actually available.

No internet connection needed.

Thieves

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

No one talks enough about how mental illnesses are the thugs of medicine, the thieves that steal joy in broad daylight. A mental illness is the sign of a diseased organ, your brain. However, people do not see it that way. Most of the things that medicine calls “a symptom” a layperson would call a “moral failing.” So, not only do you feel bad about yourself, you have a lot of help in this area. May is mental health awareness month, so I’ve been trying my best to talk out what I’m going through; it may not help me, but it might help someone else who’s also in the trenches. It will help me if I go back and read it next year, or five years from now. My own entries don’t help me until I forget that I’m the one who wrote them. Emotional disconnection is key, because then I am not reliving entries.

The process now is how to see joy in the midst of all this anxiety? My last entry was absolutely a gutter snipe because my mind was in that place. It is not always. I had just been set off by many other things, and anger rises within me when I think about the situation I’m in now. Aada would say that’s all my fault, but all she ever offered me in return for my silence was more of the same. She’d like to keep writing to me. I would keep getting sicker while she ignored all the symptoms. I would keep getting sicker while she was allowed to live her life far and away from me, and I wasn’t interested in that. When she told me she’d lied about knowing Jonna and Tony Mendez, I couldn’t even bet that she wasn’t lying about that…. that she was actually telling the truth, she just had to have a story for my blog as to why I’m the one that wanted to “break up with her.” I wouldn’t have broken up with her for lying about anything. We weren’t together. I can take a whole bunch of shit from friends, but this was bigger than that.

She thought I wanted fame. She thought I wanted glory. It was realizing that all of my friends have been in this blog as themselves that made me realize that she wanted to be special. That she’d put me in a horrible situation on purpose and just said “figure it out.” Basically, are you going to be true to yourself or are you going to be true to me?

She’d not been true to me, so why should I return the favor? I wrote over and over about the simple things I wanted from her. Kahvi together and not a Starbucks gift card being the biggest, because that would have broken the spell. I thought she shit magic for 12 years. I am still not convinced she doesn’t, she just has a new mark. Because in the end, she stole my joy at being alive for quite some time. As she got stronger, I got weaker. I gave up power because I thought she needed it. Turns out, she did, because what she wanted was for me to stay quiet about everything I’d been through because someone might figure out that what I’d been through also involved her. As if.

It was selfish and self-absorbed to think she had the right to take away my story the longer time went on, because the more we talked, the more she inserted herself. Of course the story is going to involve her if she’s in my life to a bigger degree. She scared me. Flat out. From the very beginning, I pretended I was totally cool and over 12 years I stopped talking to anyone and everyone else. I moved to DC to isolate myself even more from Dana and my family, hoping that Aada would see that I was trying to make good on the promise of being the friend I said I would be… but she wouldn’t see me in person and I know why. I was completely smitten with her and she thought I couldn’t behave myself. She never gave me a chance to get closer or disconnect.

Because she had to have me on a string to keep our connection alive. What would I say if I was allowed to leave the island? She’s finding out now. I have a million emotions, and yet none of them are about care and connection with her. That time has passed.

“Do you remember telling your sister that your dad hurt your first girlfriend?” I remember telling her that I thought it was true because that idea had been planted. So had the idea that I ruined Aada’s sister’s state house run. So had the idea that Dana had been hurt because Aada’s sister’s husband hurt her when he found out that I was hitting on her (I can’t remember if I did or I didn’t. It was 12 years ago and all three of us were drunk). Everyone acts as if I made all of this up when I was told these things were true by someone in a position of authority to be able to research them.

I have no reason to distrust what Aada says about anything, until now. She said that she would never betray me, but so far all of the things that she used to get me into the hospital have turned out not to be true.

It’s payback for my betrayal, I’m sure. The one in which she said I’d never be able to hurt her with anything I did. I published the name she worked under before she retired, and it was a mistake because that’s the only thing in the e-mail that needed to be edited out, and I was so happy to get the e-mail in the first place that I did not proofread. ADHD gonna ADHD, but there’s no sympathy for that. There’s only rage. There’s only going walkabout while I try not to kill myself on the streets of Baltimore late at night.

Killing myself on the streets of Baltimore was going to be so easy. I’d just walk around until I got shot. I had no reason to live anymore, and moreover, I didn’t want to. Eventually, the cold convinced me that I should give it one more shot because the neighborhood around me was too nice. Last time this happened, I found a warehouse where everyone was doing crack and couldn’t OD. Apparently, my tolerance for crack is quite high the first time around, but I had a hell of a time coming down. So, I’ve never done it again. I knew I liked it too much, and that twice was a habit.

So this time, no drugs. Just exercise and hoping I’d walk into a situation and wouldn’t get out of it. The funniest thing happened, though. My endorphins kicked in and I started to want to live. Michael calls it “going walkabout,” how soldiers get through war. There was not this wild new joy at wanting to live. It was more like, “shit. My phone is dead and I have to walk all the way back to the emergency room so someone calls my sister.” I think they must have sedated me at that point, because who doesn’t get sedated when they’re talking about the subject matter I do?

Aada told me once that a man hit her and she fucked him up. I have never forgotten it…. that I never hit her, but this must be her way of fucking me up so that I never want to hear from her again. Believe me, it’s working and it isn’t.

We have both fucked each other up so that I think we could start on equal footing with mediation, but I would be surprised if she ever agreed to it. There’s no reason. She’s going to ride off into the sunset with her story intact, and mine is going to be fucked up because she made sure that it would be.

I still remember being excited that I was going to get to see Heytch after all these years, knowing it would be a serious discussion about boundaries and being willing to engage because I was so lonely, anyway.

I was ready to face the discordant music I’d made in other people’s lives because I was so worried about protecting Aada that I, again, shut down so far I couldn’t see anyone around me. I’m also autistic and miss social cues, which only made my life worse. I can’t apologize to everyone enough, so I just don’t. The people who aren’t tired of me will show up on their own.

But it won’t be Heytch, it won’t be Mummo, and it won’t be Aada. It won’t even be Dana and Counselor. If Dana is mad at me for my last e-mail and wants to stay that way, she can. But I told her that her sister was one of the people that helped put me in the hospital this time, and she was told her sister wasn’t there. I told her that because I was told her sister was there. It was just another way in which Aada played tricks with my mind.

I do mind Dana contacting anyone in my family but me, though. She didn’t reply to me. She forwarded the whole chain to my dad. I’m going to guess Aada told her to do that, too. And if she didn’t, it still sounds like something she would do, just to make me feel a little bit worse.

I noticed that she just said, “my sister’s part in all this,” though, so perhaps Dana knew more about what “this” was than I did.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Aada is such a miserable person that she wanted me to die, and I fucked her by not. She may not bow to my thu’um, but she will hear it.

Mental illness is the thief of joy, but you can do a lot with spite in its absence. I’m still alive, even when I don’t want to be. I’m still alive, even when my symptoms combine to make my life a living hell. The only way out is through, and this entry is a dragon roar. You don’t get to be a dragon until you can scream so loud they can hear you from California to Islamabad.

And that is what is happening, day by day. I have gone from sitting in my own misery, to taking back my power. It’s just problematic that Aada does not want me to have it, because she was happy keeping me in her little box of toys, the ones she never took off the shelf to see if they were wearing out.

Dope

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Abilify and Depakote both make me feel dumber. My retention and recall is not as sharp as it used to be, even though I cut out everything fun. And in fact, when my sister visited I had a cocktail at dinner and the sharp sound in my brain caused by lack of serotonin got louder, I decided that even the occasional cocktail just isn’t worth it. All the drugs I’ve used to maintain myself over the years are slowly working their way out of my system and being replaced by a protocol I did not choose for myself. I was told what I would get because they did not have any medical history on me and did not ask for my former doctors’ phone numbers…. easily obtainable from my cell phone.

My nurse practitioner told me that I could have my old protocol back if I submitted to random drug screens, and I said, “sure.” I also told her that the first one wouldn’t come out clean because I didn’t smoke weed anymore, but it takes about six weeks to get out of your system. I quit on 4/20, so I was right; my pee was complete with seeds & stems. I have a feeling that these drug screens are not random anymore, as she did not start me on anything for anxiety. I’m just going to tough it out until the first clean drug test. That’s fine, I guess, except in the meantime I am suffering from more anxiety than usual. I am learning that walking helps, but it does not solve everything. I have been through too much to think that everything can be solved by exercise alone. My doctors think that my story is invalid, but that’s ok. They’re supposed to do that. It was preordained by forces bigger than me, because neither Aada nor I knew the consequences of what was coming, and she has more power than I do. She will pretend until she’s dead that she has nothing to do with me and this. Believe what you want. I have enough of my own evidence, deleted for public consumption. Only I have to know what is true and what’s not. What’s true and what’s not is enough to make my heart stop, or to have a panic attack large enough I wish it would. And in fact, I’m sure that’s Aada’s goal now. To make me wish I was dead every time I think about publishing anything she’s ever written but oh, by the way, there’s nothing you could do that could ever hurt me…… just for plausible deniability.

How did it get so ugly? She sent me an e-mail that looked like it was a job recommendation, not a personal letter. It didn’t look like it was to me, it looked like it was to you. And then she blocked me so that I couldn’t ask her whether it was okay to publish it or not. Nothing in the e-mail was damning except she left in a detail I should have edited out. I regret it and yet there’s nothing I can do about it. The e-mail only existed on a server for a couple of minutes, if that, because I took it down of my own volition. But that was enough to make her disconnect from me completely. That’s fine. I didn’t need her at that point. At that point, she’d become an albatross around my neck. I couldn’t connect to anyone but her and she treated me like an enemy combatant when she felt threatened, which was more and more over time. I was doing everything I could to manage an enormous amount of anxiety in which I couldn’t talk about it…. my friend Michael teasing me and then getting very quiet. He said something about Zac not being able to help me figure Aada out, and being surprised when I said, “that’s not what I meant. I meant that intelligence is all alike. I figured out that he was the version of her I could tolerate.” However, Zac’s life was above board in that he came to my house and showed himself. Aada was disembodied, some version of my “corporeally-challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.”

That’s an old joke, by the way. It’s probably been 20 years, but I went on two dates with Allison Frost of Oregon Public Broadcasting and that’s the nickname Dana and I came up with……

It’s an old joke for two reasons. The first is that Aada isn’t queer, and isn’t interested in me. We just had a connection that was deep and meaningful right up until it wasn’t. When I tell the story of how I ended up at Sinai in the first place, my care team freaks out and I am told to go to the emergency room because this story could not possibly be true. I say that on my list of sins at the end of my life, at least “whoring out my sister” isn’t going to be on it. But who knows. Maybe her sister was in on it, because apparently I gave them all a very good time because there was more than one. A triumvirate was achieved, and all I did was type. Either that, or Aada made it up that anyone else was in the room…. and the triumvirate was all her. That idea doesn’t suck, but it’s not as funny as thinking about the entire gang at the cool kids’ table enjoying the benefit of my tutelage.

Typing got me into this mess, and it’s slowly getting me out. Telling my story is the only thing left.

I do love that Aada chose to keep my love for Mummo clean and white, but Heytch was down in the mud. Although I do not know what her relationship with her sisters is like, this tracks. She’s always made fun of Heytch behind her back, but in very innocent ways. This was…. Not. That. Innocent.

(Oh baby, baby…….)

But to be clear, she knew I liked hearing her catty takes and would listen to them, so who’s really the dumbass for not saying something? I could have said, “actually, Heytch is really important to me and it seems like you’re taking digs for nothing.” I didn’t. I did notice when she said that, “as you’ve noted and observed, Mummo is smarter than the rest of us.” Mummo is about my age or a few years older. I’m just old enough to be a grandma now, like she is. Aada was the one who told me neither would ever speak to me again, so I stopped trying to make amends 10 years ago. Who knows if she was right? I didn’t even try.

I just waited to find out that Aada was a trained interrogator and mandatory reporter. I found this out as our friendship was ending, so I had the horror of realizing that when she said she felt threatened, it wasn’t the same as when I did. When I felt threatened, there was no one to tell. When she felt threatened, she had all the power in the US government available to her. To realize you’re under that kind of pressure makes you fold into yourself, and I certainly did.

Nothing she’s ever said to me has been overlooked by anyone, nor has anything I’ve said to her. I deleted most of my e-mails to her and vice versa, because I thought I’d get them back one day. Now, I know I won’t. Aada isn’t real, she’s just a ghost that plays in my head. Because if she was real, she would have knocked on my door. We would have had kahvi. She would have picked me up in her cute little car or something, anything to prove that she was more than a disembodied voice over the Internet.

Now, Aada is just a story they tell little kids…. but I won. I won big. I proved to her that her trauma was leading her down a dangerous path of treating friends like enemies, and if you treat friends like enemies over a number of years, they will act like it. I published her e-mail because she didn’t get to be special. She didn’t get to be different than The War Daniel or anyone else who has flamed me because she didn’t have any recent history of treating me with love and respect. When she was angry, she’d flame me. When she was happy, she’d ignore me. Only I was capable of words being pricks on her skin. She did nothing. Even the e-mail I published was all about how I manipulated her. There was nothing about how she read from her own experiences and jumped down my throat based on what she thought I wrote, rather than asking questions and being curious. She apologized for not being present when my mother died, but it didn’t make her more present in the future. We were at war with each other because we couldn’t resolve the war within ourselves. If I did anything, I hope I forced her into a different kind of therapy, because whatever she was doing wasn’t working.

So in the end, being a trained interrogator and mandatory reporter left her with jack squat in terms of coming after me and too many fingers pointing back at her. She is going to have to live with her choice not to trust me forever, because she’s going to think that because I didn’t play the game to her specifications, that means she cannot trust people. It was her lack of trust that drove me away. It was her lack of trust that made me believe our relationship wasn’t real, would never be real, was only playing with my head. I was right, because her method of being close was staying away from each other, not really communicating, and hoping for the best. I hope she’s happier without me in her life, because she’s shown me that I cannot hang. I cannot cut off my emotions to the degree that she needs to keep her shell intact. Publishing her e-mail was not the reason we both lost. It was just the last thing that happened. There’s a huge difference.

I still have nightmares about all of this, and wish all of it would end. Broken heart syndrome is a real thing, and I’m doing my best to fight against the tide.

My nurse practitioner told me that no one in the hospital system would prescribe me benzos, and that if I wanted them, I’d have to advocate for myself somewhere else. There’s only one problem with this. I was not advocating for benzos. I did not know that there was such a thing as serotonin and dopamine agonists, so how would I know to ask for them instead? Why does she not trust the doctors I’ve had my whole life who have said I needed them, despite being open about being a pot smoker? They knew the difference between what you get at a dispensary and what you get at a gas station and they didn’t care. Again, whatever. I am old. Medicine is ever changing and I might find something that works even better. The last time I worked in a doctor’s office was like, 2007. I am certain things have changed since then.

However, I’ve been prescribed Klonopin for the last 10 years and it has worked spectacularly well. When I got out of the hospital, they gave my sister all my drugs back and she gave them back to me. I’d been taking the Klonopin prn until I ran out, and was ok not getting it refilled because my nurse practitioner said I couldn’t have them anymore. Apparently, there’s a lot of risk that the hospital sees that I don’t, because no one in my life has ever been shy about prescribing it. At Sinai, there’s a whole worksheet on why they don’t prescribe benzos for anxiety, because it causes your muscles to relax, your reflexes to slow down, and a whole host of other things I did not know.

So again, fine. Getting off the dope is probably a good thing. With drugs, you always have to weigh the pros and cons. Right now, I’m wondering if I really want to go back on Lexapro and Lamictal, knowing how Lamictal destroys my stomach and wondering if that’s worth the few extra IQ points I think I’d get back. I’m just not the same writer, nor the same person. I cannot decide if this is better or worse. I do think that being without anti-anxiety medication is ultimately worse, so I was not feeling so hot when my nurse practitioner told me that I could start a new protocol on our next visit, and I got no new prescriptions. Apparently, “starting a new protocol” meant “I forgot to ask for your records from your old doctor.” I didn’t get any new drugs. I only got a lecture on smoking weed (again…. and the lecture is “it’s legal, we can’t stop you…. but we won’t think very highly of you, either) and why I wouldn’t be prescribed anything until the next visit.

They are making sure I suffer through this as much as possible, but it doesn’t seem like suffering to them because it isn’t happening to them. My nurse practitioner doesn’t have to live in my brain with its constant refrigerator whine that makes me want to stick an ice pick through my forehead just to stop the noise. My doctor doesn’t have to live with the ghost of Aada breathing on the back of her neck, because she’s out there somewhere…. probably still a fan because no one breaks up with my blog and not reading me is more dangerous than just toughing it out.

But at least once in my life, I’ve shown her a good time. I’m not sure I would have told me that, though. She already thinks I have a big head. Now it won’t fit through the door. It sort of makes up for the shitty time I’m having now.

Sort of.

That’s because if I gave Aada a good time, there’s literally no telling how many departments in the United States government have had a good time with us. I just didn’t know it was her. I still don’t.

I’m assuming a lot, but it is a very educated guess. No one can hide all their punctuation flaws while they’re typing with one hand.

I Don’t Know, and That’s Okay

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is your career plan?
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Right now, I’m in a group for people with mental health issues and am trying to recover from a years-long friendship in which I was slowly isolated from everyone else. Or, as I told her, “what you failed to take in is that I did not marry you. I married the government.” My wife was first on the list of casualties during this “affair,” because this woman does not know what kind of effect she has one people. She’s already her. But none of what I’m saying should be interpreted as negative, because I don’t have any choice but to forgive myself for the mistakes I made. I am sure that she is doing the same, far and away from me. No one walked away with clean hands except for my ex-wife… or she would have had she not hit me. Hitting me was the apex of her frustration, and I was smart enough to only let it happen once…. This is not to say that the hot water we were in had not been heating for quite some time.

Aada told me she’d never betray me, but her betrayal was letting me in on things she shouldn’t and expecting me to carry it like she did. I will never do anything like she does if I can help it. I walked away having told her that every conversation was like being signed up to be hit with a baseball bat and for the love of God, see a psychiatrist. Her general distrust of doctors in general left me on high alert, all the time. That’s because she didn’t get kick the dog syndrome at work or with her family, but it had to go somewhere.

I’m also not chiding her, because I think we were both guilty of doing it to each other. Our little bubble was far and away from the rest of our lives, so we both tended to take out our frustrations on the one we “didn’t know.” We were pen pals for 12 years. “Didn’t know” is a stretch. She’s the only person that spans and bridges Portland to Baltimore, my constant companion in a world of change. Through the way the Internet works, it felt like she was closer than the beat of my heart…. with which she took issue.

That’s because I talk a lot when I don’t have to speak.

It would seem to her like I acted like a victim in all this if I didn’t say that I was so crazy about her that it led to some pretty serious sexual harassment, for which I spent a number of years apologizing and she spent a number of years learning to trust afterwards. I don’t know what she thought, but for me the Internet is not real life. I was lost in Fantasyland and creating my own reality based on the manipulations someone else handed me when I was a child.

I learned from it and promised to do better, proud of myself that I accomplished that goal. And in fact, the only thing she’s ever done that really hurt was returning a present I sent to her house, because I was trying to show good faith. It was a six-pack of glass Coke bottles during the “Share a Coke with…” campaign the first time around that had her real name on it, plus the nickname she gave her husband, and the names of her kids and her dog as well. The reason that this is important is that Aada is a Finnish name. There is nowhere in the US you could have purchased that Coke bottle at random. It was at a time when I really didn’t have money for presents, and I was heartbroken. I cried big alligator tears that basically centered around ruining everything I touch.

My rejection sensitivity dysphoria didn’t pick up that she didn’t want me in her real life. She only wanted me in this liminal space between waking and dreaming. I could have dealt with it if she’d been truthful, but she danced around the topic for years, giving me no clear answer. My one regret is that I didn’t pin her to one. Because the truth is that she didn’t want to meet me at the spy museum, because she’d lied about knowing Jonna & Tony Mendez… not that she was opposed to neutral turf and good kahvi.

But I took “I don’t want to go to the spy museum with you” as “you are a worm for even asking if I wanted to do anything with you.” Rejection after rejection built up, because I didn’t want to overstep boundaries and I also didn’t want to treat her as a weird Internet apparition, either. It never occurred to me that in fact, “internet apparition” was the job in my life she wanted. She’s not wrong for that. I’m not wrong for wanting her to be real with me. It just sucks.

I chose to be a jackass, but that wasn’t the sum total of me. I could tell how far we’d come when she did agree to meet me once and she said, “it can’t possibly be as good as your imagination.” I blushed so hard I thought my face was going to fall off. That just won’t happen now because I betrayed her and thought I hadn’t. I am certain that she is ready to be done with me; that is okay. It’s not her journey now. It is entirely mine. If she sees my point of view, she’s welcome to be in my life. If she doesn’t, she’s welcome never to contact me again. I accept that the way we work is in Newtonian precision. There is a cause for every effect, both spoken and not.

Mostly now what I miss is the idea of her. The idea of being close to her and her husband because I was never trying to isolate her from him. I wanted us to have mutual friends because there was no safety net for either one of us. She couldn’t call Bryn, I couldn’t call (other) Michael. We had a skewed view of what the other did for a living, because my writing wasn’t valuable to her once she was in it. I think she’s my favorite character because my words don’t flow as easily when I’m not thinking about her. I am branching out to be more inclusive, but no one gives you more heat, passion, and drive for writing than someone reading you who’s actually a better writer than you are.

You’d know it if she’d let her e-mail to me stand, but she didn’t. She loved reading The War Daniel’s takedown, though. What she wanted was to be special in a way other people aren’t, in a way that didn’t seem genuine to who I am. She flamed me just as hard as he did. The situation was not different except that I should have edited out something I left in, and choked when I realized what I’d done. I wasn’t alone, though. Michael said that I hadn’t done any damage, but let’s take it down just to ensure she’s safe.

While I was deleting the entry, I got an e-mail from Aada that she forwarded me saying that I’d broken Medium’s laws on publishing people’s words without their consent, a thinly veiled threat that if I left it up she’d sue me. My attitude at the time was “bring it.” I didn’t publish your words to hurt you and I took them down before I even got this shitty e-mail. It sucked because she said she blocked me. I reacted like I’d been hit by a two by four and spent the night crying……… and less than 12 hours later, I got an e-mail from her. Just seeing her name in my inbox made me nauseous. It has for years because I never know what kind of e-mail it’s going to be. She says the same about me, I’m sure.

She did not understand neurodivergence and attributed a lot to me that wasn’t there. Once I started unmasking and tapping into the ancient wisdom of the autists about pattern recognition, I saw autism everywhere and realized I’d been reading her wrong. That she may not be autistic, but there’s some kind of neurodivergence going on in there. You don’t have to be born with neurodivergence, PTSD will give it to you….. free. No one chooses autism and PTSD as a special interest like someone who is trying to figure out if they have it or not, so telling her that I’d been reading her wrong came across as rude.

As a result, I cannot base my career on Aada not liking what I have to say, but I can’t not think that way, either. Our stories are inextricably interrelated because our story together is one of pain, and then triumph. My blog entries are going to be collated into a book, and she’s the star of most of them. But she’s not a hero because she decided to go save the whole world at once. She’s my hero, which is much quieter and comes with a lot less adoration, but it’s genuine.

Alternatively, I wrote a cover letter for her company that “sounds like a fever dream” because I thought they’d be more interested in what I’d like to do in the future than what I’ve done in the past. A resume is for your past. A cover letter is for your dreams. It was the “where do you see yourself in 10 years” that I really wanted to write, telling them all about The Sinners’ Table and Lanagan Media Group as possible partnerships. Michael was right. It sounds like a fever dream, but those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.

I heard that somewhere.

Alternatively, I have a great case for both SSI and SSDI. It’s nice to have that to fall back on, and I wish that someone had told me about SSI when I was 16 or 17. I could have prepared not to go into the workforce and stayed in school all the way until my doctorate without having to worry about money, plus it taking years for people to find my books. It just wouldn’t have occurred to them because my compensatory skills used to be extraordinary. When you meet me, it is not immediately apparent that I’m disabled. AuDHD is a bitch to catch, and I was diagnosed with bipolar. I do not think this is wrong, necessarily. I just think that bipolar disorder is a common comorbidity of autism, and so is cerebral palsy.

When I was a baby, I looked developmentally delayed. Exhausting every bit of my energy toward “looking normal” changed that, because it’s what the people around me needed. As I grew, my intelligence covered up the fact that I could have used support services from a very early age. Now we know that early intervention is key, but I was born in 1977. Every chance I had at support services was denied and I was streamlined. I do not fault my parents for this, because in that day and age the curriculum would have been too easy for me.

I am the type of writer who gets lost in their mind to such a degree that my house could be broken into and I wouldn’t notice until the thief was nearly in the same room.

Ask me how I know this………..

I’m wondering if there are ways to apply for funding from the Gates Foundation, because I am fully on board with their humanitarian missions, particularly overseas because I’m an American and I’d like to travel. Yet the US is where I am needed currently, because Baltimore is falling apart in some places. We’d have to do pop-ups so that all our equipment was gone in a flash to keep it from getting stolen…. or spend money I don’t have on a building in a nicer area that won’t do any good. It’s pointless to bring light to a place that already has a source.

It’s at this point that I realize my brain is racing over things that seem impossible and check out, asking Copilot “if you were a human, what Tootsie Pop flavor would you try first?” (“Blue Raspberry seems kind of….. electric.”) Taking a brain break with Copilot always leads to new and fun discoveries, like realizing I wished that Smith’s and Tootsie would collaborate on a lollipop that has Smith’s licorice drops and chocolate in the middle. And that I’m surprised there isn’t a coffee-flavored Tootsie Pop because coffee-flavored hard candy is popular as you leave a restaurant in some places.

With my background in food and beverage, I am positive that I could make candy that appeals to adults, the people least likely to eat it. This is the problem in my work life as well. I have a ton of ideas for people who would never use them.

I just have to remember that I made my choices in life and I have to stand in them.

I am sure that most people will rebel at “licorice Tootsie Pop,” but I’m not here for everyone. I’m here for the ones who’d last two licks before taking a bite.

All of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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Managing you was like having a golden retriever work for you. Excellent at fetching dead birds but ….squirrel. -Randy, my actual former boss- it’s the most accurate thing I’ve ever read about my career.

There are so many things I haven’t tried, and one day is about the stamina I have for 110% effort. It’s also not enough time for me to develop compensatory skills, so me doing a job for one day would not reveal my weaknesses. It would not reveal my strengths, either. The one possible job I could think of that might fit me is field officer at CIA. With only one day, I’d have enough time to talk to people, but not enough time to do all the paperwork that ends up out of order and on the wrong desk…. either late or with coffee stains on the top because I never left the office to prevent something being late.

Staying at the office until something is done might be the one quality I could contribute.

I’m reading The Hunt for Red October currently, and what I love about it is the anachronism and the advanced technology. For instance, the new computer for the submarine fleet is “the size of a small desk” and also 64-bit architecture. That did not become available to businesses until the 1990s and consumers outside of the business realm until 2003. The hardback was published in 1984. It has allowed me to dream bigger as to what is now possible in computers just based on that information alone.

I’d like to be a submarine commander for a day because I would like to see whether my predictions have come true… that tech on a boat now is wilder than anything I could dream. That’s because “most enlisted men don’t know how to steer the ship.” One day is enough to know I’d be both great and terrible at my job…… mostly because I’m great and terrible at my job no matter what it is.

Autism sucks.

So do ADHD and CP, but autism is the driving force behind meltdown and burnout to the degree that I have it. Most people with ADHD alone have the same issues as me, but the mark of autism is severity for a lot of symptoms. This is not true in all cases, but for the majority of them, the canary in the coal mine is the degree of the deficit. Executive dysfunction makes it hard to regulate yourself, and coworkers do not have time to help you. I know that I can be trained with occupational therapy, but the only advice I’ve ever been given in my career is to grovel………. until now.

I had to figure out this meme:

This does not mean that autistic people cannot work. It means that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. Autism has never stopped me from working, but ableism sure has. There was no way for me to perform as efficiently or as fast in the kitchen as an able-bodied person, and no allowances were ever made for it. Dana and Kinkaid constantly covered my lack, but I didn’t figure that out until I was on my own. They both taught me how to cook, but neither one were there to trade me jobs I could do. It was sink or swim. I couldn’t carry a full bucket of mop water up three flights of stairs, nor did I have enough strength in my upper body to work a potato press. Therefore, making French fries was a large part of being a dishwasher when there were no dishes to wash. This gave everyone ample opportunity to see me struggle and call me lazy.

You get called lazy a lot when most of your energy goes toward keeping yourself alive. You cannot see it today, but you can clearly see my deficits in this video announcing my birth. It was made by my grandfather while I was in the NICU and in the days afterward, but the phone call is not real. My mother went into labor five weeks early according to my grandfather and eight weeks early according to her. There was no time.

John-Michael Kinkaid called me a lot of things, but lazy was never one of them. I know that I am capable of working with a chef to find the jobs I can do, but I am not capable of changing myself so that I don’t have cerebral palsy anymore. This lying there, looking at everything and soaking it in, is the classic picture of an autistic kid with CP.

A few years ago, I attended a party at my sister’s house. We were reviewing the drone footage in which I didn’t know I was being filmed and was shocked to find out that I did not move a muscle for three hours. I am not a different person than I was in this video. I have never changed. My entire strength as a human is sitting there and soaking up what other people say…. and in fact, I am frustrated with my medication protocol because drugs for mental health are known for seemingly lowering your IQ points. It goes away once you get off the medication, but I did not have this problem with the last set of drugs.

What makes me think I’m AuDHD and not bipolar is that I was stable on Lexapro for 20+ years. Bipolar and SSRIs do not mix. I also have a strange hum in my brain from lack of serotonin now, and there’s nothing to be done for it except grit my teeth until 11:00 AM, my first psych appointment in years. I haven’t needed it because being stable meant my GP could refill my drugs.

How is today different from all other days?

Today is the day that hopefully determines more of my future than my current hand. At this point, I only have the hole cards. By noon, I should at least have the flop. Thinking about the turn and the river is getting ahead of myself, because right now it feels like fourth street and fifth street are perpendicular. My strategy in poker has always been to fold early and often, because letting a good hand go is better than losing my bankroll.

Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.

I could sit at any poker table in the world and have a good shot and not because I know a lot about poker. That can be trained. So, perhaps a job I’d love for a day is “card shark.” What I mean is that someone can teach me the rules. You don’t play poker by knowing the rules, though. You have enough soft skills, as Michael McDermott accurately points out in “Rounders,” and you can read the whole room blind. You don’t play the cards, you play the man.

In this way, being a poker player is not that different from being a field officer or a cook…. and in fact, in most countries “field officers,” “waitstaff,” and “cooks” are the same job, because front of house and back of house employees at a restaurant are the least likely to get “made.” There is no reason to notice any of us, and all intelligence agencies exploit that fact.

In a perfect world, culinary school in Vaasa would lead to a job at Supo, the Finnish intelligence agency. I know I have the skills to make it because I have it on good authority that I am excellent at fact-finding. This is because I do get social cues, but I do not get fake ones. I pick up on the way you carry yourself, your “I’m fine” ringing hollow. I become confused and dig deeper, and that’s when I become rude and intrusive according to other people. It’s not because I’m actively trying to be obstinate. It’s that I am not participating in the lie that you’re fine.

HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?

For instance, I wouldn’t like to be a therapist or a psychiatrist for a day… but I would like to help people understand why social masking isn’t helpful. Wait… that was a lie. I would love to be a psychiatrist because then I could nerd out on crazy med pharmacology without digging deep into other people’s problems. It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that in order to be a good therapist, I would need to resolve all my own issues first. Otherwise, I would be capable of letting someone else get their crazy spatter all over me without being able to walk it off, and my boundaries would not be as firm as they need to be in order to keep crazy spatter from getting on my clients.

I just don’t think I have the stomach for medical school, and I mean that literally. One of the things that autism does for me is heightens my awareness of bad smells. I vomit early and often. I wouldn’t last 15 minutes at The Body Farm. However, I am assuming that if I can only have the job for the day, it’s like The Matrix. I would absorb every skill I needed as if by magic… including the secrets held by dead bodies without the inconvenience of having to work on them.

The problem with having a job for more than one day is all the ableism I’d have to endure. I mentioned what it looked like in the kitchen. In an IT help desk, it looks like winning two awards for customer service and then being fired because you “can’t remember to write things down.” This has never been true. The autistic brain does not have the ability to process someone’s voice, compile the scripts needed for an appropriate response, and write down what the person is saying at the same time. And in fact, most of the problem is that I don’t process people’s voices well. I seem to do fine with Internet chat and e-mail, but conversations are land mines. I will not remember because my retention and recall with people’s voices is so poor… unless there is a musical quality to their voices that sets what they’re saying to a beat.

I just don’t remember whole pieces of text. For instance, I do not retain lyrics to an entire opera, just the bits and pieces that resonated with my soul. I cannot tell you everything Chandler Bing and Joe Quincy ever said, but fragments remain. It is the same with Lorelai Gilmore. It is most acute with CJ Cregg and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s not always what they say, but the way they say it.

What’s with the quite?

Aaron Sorkin single-handedly changed the language we use around the government by not using articles in the script. For instance, you do not work at the CIA, you are “at CIA.” You do not work at the State Department, you are “at State.” Or, at least, this is the answer that Michael came up with, because he moved here before I did and saw the change in vernacular up front.

But it’s amazing how the change in speech pattern allowed me to retain so much more, because when something is written in neurodivergent patois, I am more likely to recall it.

Just like I’ll remember Randy saying that I was his first neurodivergent employee and he would have handled everything differently, and I will remember saying that at the time, I didn’t know I was neurodivergent and would have handled everything differently, too.

So maybe the job I really want for a day is just being his admin assistant again. Except now he’s retired.

It’s the thought that counts.