Tag: love

Be Yourself

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

My comfort level with fighting is nil. I don’t know what to do when I express my opinion and someone gives me theirs in return, because no matter how hard I try to make my voice sound inert, people will add things into it that I don’t mean. This seems to be even more true of the last 10-20 years, where patience was destroyed one Facebook Notification at a time. God forbid you think about what you’ve done rather than ripping a relationship apart.

One of the reasons I allow myself to get so angry on this web site is that people do it to me all day, every day. I’m just processing my problems with them in a way that neither one of us has to listen to it. I don’t hear that anger until I’m reading back to myself. The difference is that I take the time to really make friends with why I’m angry. The root of the issue. A quarter to never will you actually see me pop off at someone here. Generally, by the time I’m mad here, there’s little hope for our relationship because if they don’t care about being my friend, I sure as shit won’t care about being theirs.

I am hard on myself because I ask the questions other people won’t and they get angry. For instance, I am sure that Supergrover hated it when I told her that I hated not knowing what her husband thought of me. Whether he hated me or got turned on by me created two different sets of problems. One I was willing to work on. One I am absolutely not. I will never in my lifetime look in that man’s face if he’s put her through that even once, and thus me by proxy. He doesn’t deserve to know me on that level, and neither does she if she’s not willing to warn me what I’m walking into…… and she couldn’t unless I just directly said it out loud. A man being turned on by one of his wife’s friends is not something he’ll tell his cute, perfect straight wife. No, he’ll wait till his angel is in the bathroom and suggest entrapment…… but this is all done as a joke, of course. Who wouldn’t think that suggesting I could get what I wanted by working with him wasn’t absolutely on the up and up? I didn’t think all men thought this way until they did, my beautiful girl. This is not between Michael and me. This is the dance between Frank and Idgie for all time.

I think my personal goal is just to be a bee charmer. You know Idgie would have gone on loving Ruth until she died whether Frank had fucked up and made being with her possible or not. Sure, there would be others. Just not in the same way. And she is every bit my Mary Louise Parker, apt because she kind of reminds me of Amy from “The West Wing,” too.

Being myself as a personal goal meant growing into the love I have for Supergrover (and Michael. And the kids. And the dogs. And the fish. And the books.). Growing into it meant allowing me to be me, because by asking questions without bullshit filters, most of the time I got what I needed to know and could build on it. Telling her that I had feelings for her destroyed all that , because she didn’t know how to react to me as a woman anymore. It’s cute and innocent in some ways, very hard for me in others. What’s easy is being ridiculously cute to each other online. What’s hard is knowing how much of that translates, if at all.

I am glad that she doesn’t treat me as if those feelings have to go away. They did, and we agree that they should have. They do not disappear as if they were never there, though, and it’s wonderful when she remembers that fact- she’s not my love, but has been, and is tender with me because of it. Being tender with each other is all I want out of our relationship now, and because it’s too unhealthy to interact, I’m glad I have a garden here on WordPress. I have lifted the plants, but the leftover roots season the soil. Romantic love has been allowed to attach to other feelings and the wheat separated from the chaff quite naturally. Love is a thriving aquascape of growth. The goal was just to make “in-love” feelings the chlorine you have to remove first. I never struggle with chlorine removal anymore. I have to protect life.

Things were unclear about meeting up in the real world and neither one of us knew (knows?) whether we’ll meet in the future. The reason I plan a future with her is simple. She is such a writer that she will kick herself when she thinks of how lame her last words were to me and she’ll want to say something better and so will I because I love her. Her last words to me were “obviously you’re the only person who can change.” I assured her that was not true or would ever be the case, but she disappears if I don’t say something against which she can rage. I am also trying to step away from a trauma bond, which makes your emotions play tricks on you, anyway. I waffle between wanting to cry on her like a four year old and being perfectly fine. She doesn’t deserve to come back at this point, because she’s not willing to change a damn thing. Letting her in would be a disaster, but I’ll never be strong enough to keep her out. It’s just not me. I believe everyone has a resurrection story, and I forgive them over and over. This often leads me into spending more time on a story than I really should. Not interacting has shown me how much I initiate.

It’s so hard, living in that disconnect between “it’s not personal” and “it really is personal to an enormous degree.” I always want to be the one to give her the next thing she loves to read. I don’t like it when she doesn’t provide me any reading material in return. It makes the relationship feel too one-sided, pouring emotion into someone where it’s not wanted. She doesn’t see that I love her in every color, in every dimension, and tries to say that I’m writing her as a flat character.

My boyfriend’s dog is better at context clues than that.

I set out to be a bee charmer when I realized she didn’t love her as much as I did.

The personal goals came in when I realized that I was talking about a universal problem. Women aren’t taught to love each other because they don’t know how to love themselves, especially as part of a patriarchy.

She says that I write about everything as if it’s not multifaceted in anger, as if I wouldn’t give everything to hear her tell me one of them. I feel like I am painting this journal with our emotions, and it would be great if she would also show her work. She’s doing all the algebra in her head and her teacher’s counting off points- not in judgment but because they can’t get there without showing their work.

The hardest personal goal for myself has been walking away from her in order to make my emotional life stronger. I want her in my life, but not at the steep, steep cost of always feeling terrible about myself.

She wants me to be her friend without her having to invest anything anymore, and her life is too complicated to go without investing in each other.

The second hardest is not feeling like running back toward her every time something doesn’t go right. To know that I really was meant to grow in this direction, and that she’s strong. If she sees where I’m going and wants it, she’ll pack.

The hardest personal goal is being yourself even when the one you love the most doesn’t like them.

I’m ADHD. I’ll Love Them All, Eventually.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?

I have never found anyone ADHD that didn’t get obsessed with everything a hundred dollars at a time. That’s because it takes about a hundred dollars’ worth of interest before your brain moves onto something else. The two hobbies I’ve always had are reading and writing, and I’m finally learning that it’s where my most basic need and the world’s wants combine. I am giving people solid answers in their own lives by being able to see someone else struggling with the same shit, and I know that because I’ve been read in every country in the world, sometimes because my beautiful girl has a reason to be there and I don’t. I have faith in my abilities because she believed in me before I did. That being said, if she’d ever tasted the beer I made, we might be doing something completely different together. 😉

Dana and I made beer through a kit once, a Hefeweizen. For a basic mix, it was fantastic. So, I would get into beer making again if I had the stuff, so not every hobby I’ve invested in has been a waste. In fact, I think I asked for the beer-making kit from my mother for Christmas just to see if she would buy it. When you’re a preacher’s kid, being a little devil is relative.

To her credit, she was a lot more fun when she realized I was joking 90% of the time and loosened up. Lindsay and I always thought she was funnier than us because we were acid funny all day long no problem. When my mother dropped a truth bomb, she destroyed because she picked her battles better than we did and knew when she had an entrance that couldn’t be beat.

With my mother, I enjoyed crafting because she enjoyed it. Mostly cutting up things for her bulletin board in her room, which is why I’ve enjoyed connecting with all the teachers I’ve dated as an adult, because we have that lingo in common. I’ve never been up in front of a classroom, but I’ve done the work it takes to get a classroom ready for many years. I think it would be fun to be married to a teacher because they’d naturally be as creative as me and if their specialty was English I’d never get away with anything here, either.

I could be happy every day of my life with access to an eighth grade teacher’s library. This is because I prefer YA in every subject. It takes finesse to explain adult issues without adult language, like the stark reality that kids die, and not even in wizarding worlds. Cancer can and often does take them out. John Green taught me how that plays out, not Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Concepts are built with Eric Carle, not Erik Erickson. Sesame Street, not Skinner. Tolkien and Lewis, not Dr. Spock. I know this because they are who comes along to rescue children with terrible parents.

I am not singling anyone out. We are all terrible parents and children at once point or another. Children are traumatized in all sorts of ways from things we don’t remember we’ve even said. I know that this is the case because if I take the time to remember what someone has said and why it hurt me, I will regret it if I bring it up. No one likes to have things brought up that make them feel guilty, even if it’s for the purpose of not letting me feel bad over something I needed to talk out.

I am sure that because I’m AuDHD, this comes out wrong, but it doesn’t vary no matter what I do or say. People do not like to talk about their flaws and get defensive and angry immediately. I am no exception to this, but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad that someone chose to lance a boil so we could feel closer later.

I will never get over feeling insecure in my relationship with Supergrover because I didn’t have a choice over what to do when Dana and I broke up. She could think of me as trying to help her or hurt her and “in the end, it doesn’t even matter.” She can think I was trying to make our relationship easier and freer if we wanted it in the future, or she can believe that I set out to be her friend whether she wanted me to be or not. How does that work, exactly? Explain it to me like I’m five.

I didn’t think that anything would be truly solved until I looked into her eyes, and if she really had the time and space to think about it, she would agree with me. We needed to sniff each other out with more senses than sight. We did not have enough context to know whether we were scaring the life out of each other or not, because there was no context. For instance, I think she thinks it’s cute that I ask her how famous people smell, but what I bet she doesn’t know is that I picked that up from a morning radio show in Houston; what else are you supposed to say when someone name-drops? That’s because I know she’s not trying to name-drop. It’s her real life and I have to learn to hang. She’s not being an asshole, they’re her reality and now mine.

I can choose to hang or I can choose to think she’s a name-dropping asshole. I can either learn from her how to walk in rareified air constantly, or I can’t. I don’t think I would have had as much of a lock on why it’s necessary, due to two fans, her and a date I’ll call Stephanie (mostly because that’s her name and it was several years ago, so no one in my life would remember this.

Supergrover was the kind of fan that when she met me, she treated me like she’d met Dooce, Will, and Jenny (The Bloggess). She lovebombed me into complete submission, and I did the same. We just didn’t end up being the same sexual orientation (sapiosexual rather than straight/gay); according to my notes, this was hard for me to accept. Didn’t mean I was threatening. I had been sucked into a brand new world; I was green, afraid, and trying to push her away. In trying to push her away, I only made her angry. It was not a good situation because I didn’t think. My aim was to get her to block me on everything so I wouldn’t have this constant conflict within me of feeling incapable as a friend and a wife in every way possible either one could dream up. I was falling short of he glory of God when my sweet wife realized she was being Mickey’d because I hadn’t so much fallen for another woman as the TARDIS was on our lawn, then it wasn’t. Instead of moving on with my life, she became The Raggedy Doctor, me running every time she left the e-brakes on just because she liked the sound.

It was exactly the same vibe as if I’d been tapped for a tour with Beyonce, and I really, really mean it. Beyonce was three years behind me at HSPVA.

  • I would not think of her as a celebrity when I met her, because as a junior I would have been unimpressed by freshman. Therefore, I really would be capable of meeting Jay-Z and Eminem and not get rattled because to me, it’s just my homegirl’s husband and his friends.
  • The power imbalance would be the same because I would never want to hurt her in the press with my own writing….. therefore, you can take a guess on any given day who is more powerful in our relationship and she knows it. She reacts to it by not telling me anything and thinking it’s better that way. I am an anxious alpha dog, and my reactions to Supergrover have always reflected it when I could really rival Jay in my loyalty.
  • Actually, I can MORE THAN prove my loyalty over Jay, who is not a bad person but has done bad things…… and I would never treat Michael as if he is that person because I’ve never found that he’s ever done anything wrong. He cannot say the same thing about me. I can’t complain when my acting crazy was to act like the person they thought I was rather than the person I really am because saying “all this scares me” was apparently just too big a job. It’s the difference between thinking you have a problem with your next door neighbor and finding out you have a problem with Eminem on both sides of the equation for different reasons. She’s on the level, and I spit bars.
  • It would be every bit the same as sleeping with Eminem’s girlfriend and finding out just how much people can hate you in the audience. The audience will kill you if you lat them. I have no doubt that the reaction in the press if there was any interest (there wouldn’t be, anyway, because she’s famous among other people who don’t care who she is, and neither would the press. It’s just an analogy. No one
  • I would never want her to think I was running away because of something she did, so I thought acting like an asshole was better and so did she. I can say that of a relationship with Beyonce. The same rareified air that takes a while to grow into. Treating everyone like their most childlike selves not to reveal them and having some issue with something I can’t talk about here.
  • Because I’m an intel fan and she’s not, she won’t get that I mean this with all my heart. We need to rekindle our friendship because Will and Francie are caught up in Sidney’s bullshit without a clue. Left outside in front of the bank, but I’ll go into Credit Dauphine when she does.
  • Where she fails is only seeing me as Will season one, just like Beyonce would if I got into it with her.

So, if I couldn’t read her like a magazine, I would think she was a narcissist. This is not the case. We could go back to lovebombing each other at any time, because that shit is genuine. The purest on earth because I love her mind with such passion and she loves mine that way when we’re talking about intellectually diving deep.

With Supergrover and Beyonce, it is and would be hard to tell between avoiding something because it’s hard and avoiding something because you’re too busy…… and not expressing it clearly yourself because you can’t even choose. Additionally, why wouldn’t learning how to love Beyonce take over your hobbies if one of them was writing? Wouldn’t you have something to say about it? That it’s amazing and problematic?

Just because it takes a long time to turn over in my mind doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give a limb to make everything right in the end. What if Beyonce never acknowledged that her rooms were different than mine? I hope she’d know that it didn’t mean anything between us, because she’s still an annoying freshman.

Our biggest problem in life is that I treat her like she’s Beyonce and I know it. She doesn’t treat me like I’m Wil, Dooce, and Jenny anymore, and shouldn’t forget why it’s important. It’s what makes us work on all cylinders…… because Beyonce left HSPVA, and Supergrover and I both like being classically trained.

I Already Have

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What would you do if you lost all your possessions?

My house, the United Methodist parsonage in Naples, Texas, burned down to the ground on December 20, 1990.

It was a child’s Christmas in wails. Presents were given that year that would have been cool had they not been distorted by smoke or water damage, and I only know that looking back. Alternatively, we got presents that we knew were collected five minutes ago, and knew enough to be grateful because we had an awareness that of course no one has our lists anymore. Lindsay and I were grateful for any normalcy at all. The the first few hours, I internalized absolutely everything because I was the only one home. My parents and sister weren’t there. So, I did what I always did in that situation. I became a very tiny hostess to the fire department….. so sorry I was inconveniencing them. There were church members in my neighborhood that were all flocking to the middle of the street and I just started doing everything through an out of body experience. Too much pain to stay connected. In order to emote where people could understand me, I had to put my feelings away. My trauma reflexes do not all come from emotional abuse as a teen, but those reflexes were built on someone who’d already developed those reflexes independently.

I learn a lot about trauma using myself as a case study, because I’m looking back far enough into the past that I write like I’m someone else’s little girl. It’s a lot easier to parent yourself when you see yourself now as a different person…… because when you do all the work, you realize that you are indeed the same person and uncovering all your trauma allows you to reclaim the childlike parts of yourself that were stolen. I also use myself as a case study because even if I had an MD and a PhD, I would still never be as sure about someone else’s history as I am about my own. Patients lie, and about the stupidest shit because they think doctors are judgmental (they’re not, and you have no idea what you’re doing when you leave something out, capiche?). Doctors are, for the most part, judgmental like our last letter in Myers-Briggs is J, not judgmental like an asshole. A doctor is just as much of a geek as a computer programmer. Don’t hold back the tools that let them “if, then.” My dad was a pastor and my grandmother worked in a blood lab. I’ve been steeped in the languages of ministry and medicine since I was born, so it’s entirely possible for me to lose my shit and be completely fine in the same exact moment.

My computer had melted into my desk. My hangers had melted onto and into my clothes. When it all started, I’d been the only one home in my pajamas, getting ready for a district-wide church dance and even had a date.

I was wearing pantyhose and curlers with a Snoopy nightgown when I rang the doorbell next door. I was in preacher’s kid trauma victim mode, the first time I’d ever experienced trauma in its true sense. My house was burning down in front of my eyes and I was the only one of the four of us who knew it. My mother and sister were shopping. My father was delivering communion to shut-ins. It was all me.

All. Me.

I had just turned 12 three months earlier. My grandfather wouldn’t have known what to do in this situation, it was so unique. Age couldn’t line up to experience here because what happened was rare. The other thing is that I would not have felt as alone today. This was at least 10 years before I had a cell phone (because I’m that old, not “we didn’t buy one”) and every contact programmed into it so I wasn’t dependent on my memory for the numbers. In that kind of situation, you’re glad emergency services only have three numbers to remember.

If I’d had my current cell phone, I could have called my mother and sister at the shops. I could have called my dad while he was visiting the elderly. I could have called my grandparents because they only lived about a half hour away. My cell phone now is not handy to me because it can call out. It’s handy because without it, I wouldn’t know who to call.

(As an aside, aren’t cell phones a miracle? I have been impressed with being able to walk around and talk on the phone anywhere since our mobile was in a black bag.)

I am certain that I assured Doris nothing was wrong, it was no big deal, but I had to call the fire department. And would it be okay if I waited with you? I was doing all those things you do when you’re a preacher’s kid, assuring everyone around me that everything was under control.

So, in short, I learned two lessons. The first is that stuff doesn’t matter. The only thing I lost that were precious to me were photographs, and even those don’t matter anymore because any I have that are precious are also on Facebook or WordPress, so they’re backed up. There is no material thing I could lose that would hurt me, really. What hurt me was the second lesson.

Even when things are fucked six ways to Sunday, the reflex to make everyone else more comfortable is intact.

It’s something you don’t find until you lose everything else. You don’t find it until all the bullshit is stripped away and realize you’re pretending to be fine. The reality break from trauma makes it where you live and reflect. You have a binge-purge relationship with feelings because when they come up, you are too overwhelmed. It’s a continual cycle.

It was a brand new ball game when I realized that an anxious attachment is just an avoidant attachment style in disguise. I’ve just been avoiding me.

Invincible and Impervious

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

I wrote something about Supergrover that made me realize I was saying it about her, but later something I identified within myself as well. I often find that most of Supergrover is me, but I don’t know that for sure. That I know I’m describing her, but I don’t know that I’m describing me until I read and reflect. This is not a gossip column, this is self-help. I know that she laughs and cries with me over this from a distance. We both participated. We both lost something. We both love each other and we always will. But whether there are more words to add to our story together is up for grabs. My heartbreak is not losing my relationship with someone that has power, as if she’s a cool accessory so I can name drop (I can’t, anyway, so this would be useless to me). I told her at last interaction that I had no problem going on and busting her up because I had so much anger that needed to resolve. I’ve been in this much anxiety since 2015. She says she has forgiven me and also been unwilling to discuss a path forward by avoiding talking about it. I know that she’s told me it depends on the future overall, but she won’t help us get there.

I once told her that this blog was a record of every twist and turn it took to give her a hug, meaning to be sweet and I think it was, but I’m not sure. Do you see what I mean? If someone has been creeped out enough that they ask a real person in my life if they need a restraining order, my rejection sensitivity dysphoria will go apeshit that someone thinks I’m trying to threaten them to that degree. And then to come back to me later and be unwilling to reassure me that we’re okay for years? It’s confusing as fuck to want to take care of someone and not be certain how. This is someone I have pined over like a teen romance from the 90s. Once you’ve felt that for someone, it’s always there in the smallest part of you. I can move on from wanting to be her partner. That was easy. But I cannot move on from trying to be affectionate to the extent that I can.

In the first couple of years, a line like “a record of every twist and turn it took to give you a hug” would have made her tear up a little because she would have thought I meant it platonically. Because I was direct in just asking her if she was capable of falling in love with someone intellectually because my heart ached too much not to know, now I don’t know if she’s moved on enough to accept that I mean those things platoncally again. That she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop and I’m playing her when I never want to hurt her for anything in the world. It would be a disaster. Not only would it alienate me from her, there were a very specific set of circumstances that led to those feelings like a WWII-era sweetheart, and trust me when I say it’s a bigger range than she’ll accept. I took on a project when I married her, and not that I mean it like a bitchy mean girl. I meant that in order to be her friend, I had homework. She didn’t think about what I do and when she told me who she was in real life (her name didn’t mean anything, just mutual friends so I admire her because of the company she keeps. Different playing field in terms of context to understand her, not context to write about her. If you come to this blog and it’s not there one day, know I did it for love. I’m not trying to goad her and provoke her because I’m trying to have content here. I’m saying that her shit has consequences, and it hurts me she doesn’t recognize that.

That because I talk about my everyday issues she changed the game and left me hanging. I knew this was a possibility from week one because she said something that really, really hurt me and had a cold response. She had a cold response to my grief over my mother dying and had the audacity to tell me she knew she was being a dickhead. It was basically along the lines of “why do you think I don’t understand. Why are you so special?” Because I think you think it’s weird that I’m still grieving and you have no idea what you’re in for. She said it around the anniversary of my mother’s death, and it was fresh. What we know is “fresh” is like the first three or four years. That’s because everyone could die around you and you won’t feel it like your parents’ deaths. You learn to live around something you thought you never could. In retrospect, she was a bad friend with moments of glory, but all anxious/avoidant attachments have this pattern. You binge/purge for all time until you realize it’s something a relationship can’t sustain. But what i was binging is not for normal people. Just imagine Kathy Griffin dating Steve Wozniak, but we’re not dating because it’s better for me to be the one that’d be there for her next husband should a thing like that come to pass.

I relaxed into it because of something she said. That you should stay with someone if you love them even if there’s no promise of sex anymore. She didn’t mean it in a negative way at all, she meant that a relationship is worth it if you love someone. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel that way before, I did. I just knew she knew what I was dealing with. That once all those feelings of wanting to be her romantic partner went away and learned the immensity of our bond, platonic marriage made sense to me and I began searching for images in media that represented those relationships. Not the couple from “The Notebook.” Jay and Silent Bob. The Doctor and Martha Jones. Aziraphale and Crowley season one, not two. An angel and a demon as platonic loves is my favorite quote on earth, even though Crowley isn’t an atheist. The quote is just the same idea as an angel and a demon committing for eons.

A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.

Pete Rollins

I am just not really sure she knew when I changed messages, and tired of not knowing because sometimes she showed that she did and it made me glow from the inside. That when I stare at her pictures now, it’s because I’m trying to feel her presence in the room when she’s not there. It’s so much better than wanting something I can’t have, because that attachment isn’t secure. Where we fail is assuring each other this is the case and acting like it’s not true. The assurance that she’s next to me is as brillian as when people talk about seeing Christ or heaven in a hallucination, and she doesn’t accept that she has that vibe by nature, not turner. That everyone else will focus on her nature while I don’t give a shit about her professional accomplishment when in the outside world, that’s all people would see and would judge her as infinitely superior to everyone else. I promise that whatever the straight girl equivalent of internailzed homophobia is, she’s felt it. Her profession’s got a bad rap among the fans and sometimes voters, historically. Nothing about that rap is bad, you just feel it as pressure like a preacher’s kid.

On top of that, she’s drop dead gorgeous so when she enters a room, people sit up a little more because they respect her before she talks. Her words, like mine, have a devastating effect on both of us. I told her once that she should propose to Michael like Chandler and Monica, both getting on both knees and meeting in the middle. She loved that image, and didn’t get that I needed her to do it, too, because whether or not we get along, we have business and always will, because she fucked us both in the end. I’m not angry at her because I led us here at first and she finished the job. She doesn’t see the wall of bullshit I walked into, and instead of taking responsibility like she has a child now (in terms of the level to which I can understand her without doing the homework, and the feelings you can’t understand when you try when the busier person will not tell you what they think of those feelings when it’s vitally important to our friendship. I need solid communication again, because she said she wanted it and it created a situation where it’s too dangerous to let go, because it was thoughtless to believe I wouldn’t need her if she’s looked at it from the perspective that my career might be important to me. I know she never wants to tank it because she was my first patron. She will come back eventually and read all these entries obsessively (hopefully with a third, dispassionate eye because she’s judgmental so I know I can explain until she understands. I do not mean judgmental like an asshole. Judgmental like “that’s the way she processes emotions because her last Meyer’s-Briggs is J. It’s the way we call each other out on the carpet when she’s not trying to please me and it makes our friendship all the better for it because we’re constantly speaking the same language).

Therefore, I am trying to make the case for platonic marriage, not judging her. I am neurodivergent and on the spectrum between autism and ADHD with overexplaining as a basic need. You cannot imagine how much crossover there is between me and Kathy Griffin dating Steve Wozniak. It’s impossible to date a person who needs to process their feelings and it ends up being onstage. It’s hard for Supergrover to like me now, but she has a thick enough skin to let me be as I am. She loves it when my admiration runs deep. I know she does. She loves that when I look into the smallest place inside me, I see my love for her. What she doesn’t love is when I get angry and call her out on her bullshit because she thinks that’s my focus. It’s her filter. She’s one of the great loves of my life because I’ve felt those feelings and they went away, like lesbians who have that bond and their partner moves on. I can’t learn to love her like a straight woman, but I can do this. It is hell on earth that she does not see what she’s done, and how devastating it is when she nopes out. She entered a contract (a Massey pre-nup without the clause to defeat it) when we signed it by choice and now can’t deal with the consequences. I call her on her shit and she doesn’t like it and knows it’s just as essential as I do. What I cannot get her to see is that I am not berating her for her opinions and judging her as a person. Her worth is precious to me, beloved Disciple, and a good description because she loves my writing and there’s a little bit of power imbalance, in retrospect.

Sometimes I wonder what Jesus would think of his story after he died, because we’ll never know it whether he was bodily resurrected or not. I don’t need magic Jesus. Anyway. I wonder what he would think of his weird little sect actually accomplishing something by committee, a first on many levels.

The immensity of feeling like she’s always going to feel wronged because I did it once weighs on me, because she only treats me like she forgives me on the surface. It’s having faith and throwing it away over and over, spaghetti code without having some together. Never debugging the code and versioning like Microsoft (the idea that you keep advancing the operating system without taking out the code that breaks for older hardware and software. I am writing a really identifiable story because there wasn’t a pandemic in 2015. They didn’t have empathy for an all-Internet relationship because they didn’t have the context of living on the Internet before it. I didn’t have a problem with keeping up that disconnect because I’d done it all of my adult life. I can feel my emotions without being in the room, but I’ve been in powerful rooms when she’s e-mailed me from them. It’s a lot. She’s a lot. But I’m capable if she’ll see it. I don’t think of this as public excoriation. I think of it as explaining my feelings to myself and others as a survival manual. There are consequences, not all of them good. It’s a gospel, a written account.

In the Bible there is no argument for God, only people’s reactions to them. I hope that I am coming across from this perspective. That I am not interested in being that person that makes her participate in anything because I’m obsessed with her, it’s that she made me responsible for something I didn’t ask for and I’m not even mad about it, but I need her and she doesn’t have time. it’s a straight up problem that could be solved in 10 mutes, because I wouldn’t feel the need to constantly explain why I’m not an asshole and she wouldn’t feel guilty about it and push me away. But she loves lines where it’s clear my love runs deep. Really deep. So far, her favorite line I’ve written about her is that she was a mother lion who carried me through the mountains, who has no trouble with tough love as it’s required. She doesn’t respect the authority I feel when my mother lion comes out as well. That it is not a case of loving someone in one direction like she’s been doing. She has the right to walk away, and it’s a pain I know she never meant to inflict.

I said that the things that make her invulnerable and impervious at work were killing her in terms of strength coming to her through her vulnerability instead. The issue on which I’ve changed my mind is that we are actually two separate people. If you knew her real life story, even she would realize that with my childhood, I totally grew up into her adulthood if she was looking at making those connections. That her people skills are built on my people skills and vice versa, because my inner child is older than hers and her adult voice is older than mine. Oh, my God do I ever become Lindsay’s childhood nightmare of older sister oppression. Supergrover has never been an older sister and I am willing to bet that her little sisters would be enjoying this if they knew it existed.

I am willing to say it’s just projection, but I think she’d agree that the things that make her piss excellence at work are killing her on the home front, because those two worlds are drastically different. She can be soft, feminine, flirty, whatever…….. at home. At work, there are rules, and breaking them when they just don’t make sense. Rule following gets me nowhere in my line of work, and i realized that from living in hers. But please know that I’m not slamming her in the slightest. If I got excited enough to go to the moon, I’m betting I’d have a strict set of rules to follow for something incredible. That’s my story here- that nothing is bad, nothing is even hard when we’re both clear.

She is my beautiful girll.

I’m Not Sure I Don’t Pay Attention to All of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What details of your life could you pay more attention to?

By writing to and for myself, I pay attention to my life in minute detail. It is literally my job if I want to sell books later. Brene Brown has nothing on me, I swear to Christ. I am betting that we process much the same way in terms of throwing everything out on the table and seeing what it looks like. I don’t know if she’s a natural INFJ, but I do know she’s a professor in a profession to which INFJs naturally gravitate, so even if my letters aren’t hers, we’d be simpatico. I know that, because we’ve spent some time together informally.

Editor’s Note: If I sound like an ass because I keep mentioning it, it’s not because I’m trying to name drop. The answer is twofold. My audience is growing every day. Every single day. That means if you read every day, you’re in the know. Other people aren’t. Secondly, the more times I say Brene Brown, the higher I’ll be in Google rankings for searching her because it has indexed how many times I’ve said it and how many people have clicked on my link because of it. It’s not personal. It’s trying to use her platform to introduce myself to new readers, and not only is a good way to find my target audience, I know for a fact that this is not something she’d care about in the slightest.

I just taught her how to use Microsoft Word, but now that it’s so essential I know I did ACTUALLY help her in her career.

She taught me that it’s okay to throw emotional bombs on the table and look at them, because if you don’t stay silent, there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll resolve the conflict. If you keep silent about your needs, those odds fade to zero either way.

The hardest part is developing the strength to say what you need out loud, because I call them emotional bombs for a reason. If you express a need, people who have low self-esteem will see it as an attack. You’re screwed either way, because either that person’s going to get mad at you and walk away, or they won’t. If you are in any way an anxious person, you’ll put off that conversation for eons. You don’t want to chance it. If you say you need something and they get angry, it might lead to the relationship ending. You have to learn to care nothing about that. This is because stating your needs clearly and walking away when they’re not being met is your only choice. People don’t change because they’re not willing to do the work. You are mostly the age you got married, because that’s when you set up your new family patterns and they repeat. In a lot of ways, people divorce to grow up….. particularly couples who get married at 20 and stay together until they’re 40.

This is why I’m not married and just dating. I do not want to stagnate. If it happens that I find a partner, I still want someone that wants their own space, even if we live together. I want to normalize it not being weird if I’m holed up in my office and they’re not holed up with me. I’m dating one of the biggest extroverts I’ve ever met, and I love it because I can pay complete attention to my own life while he’s off doing his thing, because he knows that partying is his jam and not mine and that’s perfectly okay. I don’t need him as a possession.

Supergrover, Cora, and Bryn are the one I treat like possessions in terms of being a seriously pissed off mama bear. Come after my girls and I will end you, if combat is limited a really mean letter.

I write differently when I want to work things out, I will only say that.

Healing an anxious attachment style is built on learning to believe someone the first time. It is also learning to believe when they’re lying to themselves. Learning to tell when actions and words don’t match, correcting the story that you’re telling yourself. If someone is unwilling to help you correct that story, they should be uninvited to participate. You also can’t hold anything over their heads. You just have to wait it out. Life is long.

If you are thinking of someone else’s needs all the time, you are doing immense harm to yourself if you have low self esteem . You’re making decisions based on your own echo chamber and trying to read someone else’s mind. Those two things will put you in an asylum if you let them.

The hardest part about throwing an emotional bomb over your shoulder is that you have to walk away and see if they come back.

You have to pick yourself up out of rejection sensitivity dysphoria to be able to even trust that they will. So you wait. And you get more unhappy. By the time you do express needs, you’re mad as a wet cat backed into a corner claws extended.

Your conversations will be a mix of “well, that probably sounded better in my head” and “well, that escalated quickly.”

I realized that I had to stop interacting with Supergrover because it was killing me. She was the person that when she talked, my self esteem went up and down. It wasn’t the message, it was the medium. She has lived inside me for 10 years. Her signal is the purest, because her voice is the only one that is always in my echo chamber because our e-mails are all mixed together in my head. Who knows who said what after a while? It’s one story. It just got to where we were alternating between tennis and fencing. We take turns having the high ground, but I can be angry and still think “as you wish” all day. (I like The Princess Bride, despite the fact that it has kissing in it.) That’s because it’s not her worth going up and down.

I threw that bomb knowing she was emotionally incapable according to past behavior, but she can do something about the present.

One of the things that will stick with me is that she said she could do nothing about the past. But she could do something about the present. She didn’t realize that I was saying it as well, in heels and backwards.

It’s the reason we complete each other when everything is going well. Her IQ is higher than mine. My EQ is the highest of anyone I’ve ever met considering how much people tell me how frightening and intense I am.

Dave Chappelle (incidentally also from Silver Spring) once wrote a skit for Chappelle Show called “The Ni**er Family.” It was absolutely hysterical and I laughed until I cried. But Dave said it was a mistake, and the why stopped me in my tracks.

He said:

Everyone was just cracking up in the audience….. but then I noticed this one guy. And the way he laughed, I knew he was not laughing in the way I intended.

It changed his entire career because he left the show and really did the homework on himself. We do not agree on trans issues and never will, but I’m not going to take away from his success or be less proud that he rose from the ash of what he burned down. But the only reason he could do that is that he, Jesus, and I all know the same thing.

The resurrection didn’t happen on the cross.

Jesus went into the garden of Gethsemene the same way The War Doctor wrestled with The Moment on Doctor Who, the bomb that developed a consciousness you had to argue with to get it to go off. There are no records of his prayers there, but here’s what Dave, Jesus, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt: Jesus did not forgive everyone else for their indiscretions without first forgiving himself.

Evensong

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I found a quote that made me feel better about moving on from Supergrover (if that’s what she ultimately wants, I don’t know). That’s because it made me know that we won’t move on. We’ll absorb:

The two worst days in falling in love with a writer are realizing they’re writing about you………….. and realizing when they’ve stopped.

Supergrover didn’t fall in love with me as a woman, but she did with me as an author. She absorbed me like she absorbs every writer she’s ever read…. completely. I know she’ll never forget words I’ve said in anger, but she’ll also never forget how much I love her, either. That’s because I have learned through writing to you that she lives in my ink. As long as I write, a thread of her will be somewhere. There will be other women, other stories, none of them her. None of them even close. She cannot be convicted of a crime by a jury of her peers. She doesn’t have any peers, like Meryl Streep….. except comparatively Streep is a swamp witch. Nothing makes my face light up more than hers. Nothing. I doubt anything ever will. I do not say this in a sad way. it is the truth. I will never meet anyone like her ever again. Our connection means she cannot go away, so I’m not going to make her. She can sit here until she’s ready to go on her own. I’m at peace, and when she comes to me in dreams we have the conversations I would have liked to have had in person. I bring her a new book every time. New books make her smile at me. I would do anything to have her keep doing that. Even when she’s smiling at me in a photo, I feel light and warmth.

If she thinks I’m painting her as a villain, it’s not because I have any need. She is made of industrial light and magic in a film George Lucas could never dream up. I have had negative thoughts about this relationship as I’ve worked through whether our patterns work for me, things she’s unwilling to discuss. At no time has that made my love for her smaller in any way. I can choose to limit interaction to protect myself and have this space to get angry on my own….. but as the anger leaves me, you’ll see joy as well.

A lot of it has been stopping being an apologist. Trying to make my emotions look smaller so that they’d be more acceptable. For instance, I played off what hearing her voice did to me because it would not have been a proportionate response. I’m flowery and romantic with language, anyway, so she starts talking and there are bells ringing in my head… not church bells, just that her voice was musical and I wanted more. I could have listened to her talk for hours about nothing or everything, and I minimized it. I’ll never get that moment back.

I should have told her a lot of things, and i didn’t. But more than what I wish I’d said, I wish I’d heard. I wish I’d heard how my words affected her and in more than just broad strokes, because I know it wasn’t all bad or good. I have e-mails where she’s just copied and pasted what she’s liked, and I wish I had more of those. I have taken so much hell for the things she hasn’t liked, and there are a lot of them.

Alternatively, I love her anger. I never want to see it because it’s scary, but it walks the pain/pleasure line quite effectively. We rile each other up and seeing her fire is impressive. You just can’t put it out. She has to sneeze angry fire until it reduces to sparks on its own. You stand there with a blanket, because making fire takes a lot out of a dragon. You give her a shoulder to sleep on because when she gets that angry, she’s about to pass out. When she does, I’ll be still til she wakes. Never wake a sleeping dragon. This has been written many times.

I don’t need to be her husband/wife/partner because I am none of those things and also permanently etched into her mind. Affixed on her heart. She cannot forget me even if she tries very, very hard………

So I know she does indeed know how it feels to be me.

I am a writer, lost in a book.

She is a reader who doesn’t know whether she’s reading a story that’s finished, because the author isn’t sure, either. We will chase each other through time. If love is as certain an energy in the universe as novelists think, she and I will keep finding each other. Love never gets destroyed, it just changes. In our next lives, we may not even be female. But because we’re writers, we would recognize each other anywhere. There’s slim chance I wouldn’t recognize her, even in a different face. She can put on all the Halloween makeup she wants, but I’ll remove it in three punctuation marks.

Opening up to each other the way we did was just as vulnerable as rushing into an affair. We will never see each other without our clothes, but we have been naked emotionally more than once. I absolutely think that’s harder to find in a relationship.

I did indeed get my romcom with someone who absolutely knows it, whether she accepts that she’s my shite in nining armor or not. I will always be the Keeley to her Rebecca, because I didn’t settle for fine. I got hit by fucking lightning. She’s the gift you get from the universe for being an extraordinarily good person and somehow the universe still sent her to me. My heart is big enough to accept the package that comes with her. She is too big a gift to be mine alone.

On this evensong, I am reflecting upon the fact that I never want the second day to come for either one of us………

I can fall asleep easy knowing it never will. Neither of us will ever forget this time in our lives, when the story was us. It has already been written.

This is the Thursday of Our Discontent

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how I did it.

But I have a guess.

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

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

Pack a lunch, son.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping on the Lights

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

It’s a metaphor for my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Supergrover,

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

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

Editor’s Note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Note:

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

Honestly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite word?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honestly.

This Might Be Short…. Or Not

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six letters, though.

SMDH.

Right Now- 0500

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite time of day?

Most of my audience is overseas, so they actually wake me up most days now. That’s because my watch starts getting notifications before my alarm goes off, generally regarding the entry from the day before. I sometimes start writing right away, sometimes I go downstairs to grab a cup of coffee first. But this audience is my first thought of the day because the Pavolvian urge to grab my tablet and keyboard when someone likes an entry is ingrained. I’ve been on WordPress a lot longer than I’ve done Facebook, but it’s that kind of vibe.

This morning, I wrote out the title of the entry, then promptly decided I needed something to drink and by the time I got back around to picking this back up, hours had gone by. It’s ADHD in a nutshell. Every new promise in the morning must be followed, even ahead of the five promises you’ve already said you’d explore. I have a lot of new beginnings because I have trouble finding middles and ends. ADHD is particularly talented at making you feel like a dumbass. and being a writer is a way to cope. Having a record of what’s happening is a way to keep track of progress… or not. Writing is such a wonderful tool to give yourself therapy when you can’t afford it or can’t get a doctor right away. Even when you do get a doctor, they still can’t spend more than an hour a week with you. Getting better takes so much more effort than that.

People wait to do therapy until they’re in a couple, and I had a thought about that. “If you don’t have time to fix yourself, why do you think you have time to fix someone else?” I’d rather be healthy before I get in a relationship because it keeps conflict to a minimum. I don’t have a problem saying what I mean and meaning what I say. I can give what I require.

I don’t have time for people who don’t have time to fix themselves, because it makes them want to fix me. If there are problems in our relationship, it’s not always going to be 100% my fault. I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who is so defensive that they think it is because they cannot acknowledge their own humanity.

It’s good now that I know what I’m looking for, because maybe I can avoid that trap in the future. I seem to enjoy people who don’t emote, probably because I don’t want to deal with it….. while also being frustrated that they can’t deal with my emotions, either.

Looking for healthy patterns in which we both have each other’s backs is very important, as well as taking all the lessons I’ve learned over the last 10 years and not making the same mistakes. I have a clean slate in this regard. I am no longer holding onto the past as if I can make it better for the future. I am realizing that those are going to be two very different things and the trick is not to be threatened.

I am threatened by everything, to a certain extent. I already know I don’t fit in most places, and I am sometimes fearless, sometimes a wallflower. I make room for all of those moods, but I don’t expect everyone else to do so…… which is mostly why I write my reflections here. Then, they’re just an open secret because if the people involved want to see how their characters are playing out, they’re welcome. But they’re not required, and I will write them out just as easily as I wrote them in.

The writing reflects life, not the other way around. When I talk about knowing where I’m going on this web site, I’m talking about knowing what emotional changes I have to make within myself because so many times I’ve reread things I’ve written and thought, “that probably sounded better in my head.”

I’m still reeling that my beautiful girl thought I wrote her as a flat character, when I can see every emotion I’ve ever had about her in these pages, more in the words you don’t read.

The urge to write about her has faded except for batting cleanup.

I never could get through to her that her good parts and her bad parts come together to make her the purest person I’ve ever met. That I didn’t hate her for what she’d done, I made my life bigger to accommodate her. That I was in it for the long haul if she was, because I had prepared.

She thought I was saying that I wished our relationship never happened, and I cry at that thought even now. In trying to make it better, I made it worse.

That doesn’t mean my thought process was wrong, it means that she didn’t get the intended message. I’m not sure how it got turned into the complete opposite, but that’s not my call. I don’t have to love it, I just have to live it.

What does feel good is knowing two things. The first is that I cannot un-know or un-say anything. It might lead her to look at my writing in a different way when temperatures aren’t running so high. I do love her in a way I cannot even understand, it runs so deep. But I will have that whether I have her or not, so I have not lost anything in the transaction.

I told her that I poured my love into the character because I could not pour it into her. She has said too many times that she does not accept it. She doesn’t really accept that I have a different reality than her, so I cannot expect her to understand her way around the whole problem. I cannot even do that.

But what I can do is make sure that she knows I was never coming from a place of destruction. That we had to be in the shit for a little while to create something new that we both would enjoy. Like, why should she be the only one that gets to make fun of me and Michael? I am sure that all three of us could make each other laugh with witty retorts.

I just don’t hold out hope for that dream anymore. I told her that if she started acting like she actually forgave me, then she’d be allowed back into my circle. If not, I will know I just chose the pattern I love the most. That it was always about trying to find someone to please. I know that is true on my end, and she has a choice to make as to whether she tells me how she feels or not. So far, the answer is “not,” but I do not think this is a permanent state. Mostly because life is long and it isn’t over. I know that if I’ve been able to keep up these wild and crazy feelings for 10 years, it has never been a game to me. I do not believe it has always been a game for her. I believe as she does that no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. We just have different ways of getting there and cannot seem to jump into the chasm where objective truth is found.

But there’s another part of our relationship that has nothing to do with her at all. Over the last 10 years, she has not only become my real friend, but the one that puts me in the mood to write. When I say she’s my muse, it’s that she’s the one that when she says it’s a good line, I can take it to the bank and cash it. She’s gotten me published professionally by being my editor for the last five years. She’s told me that she’ll edit my book if I wanted, and I know it was a bad career move to walk away from that, but there was so much more to it than that.

It’s because editing my book is her love language, and that part of our relationship is as strong as epoxy. That glue holds us tight. Where we fail is speaking in my love language, because communication is a two-way street. She thinks that I’m the only arbiter of what friendship is and isn’t. I don’t think of it as that at all. I think that I lay out my thoughts and feelings and she thinks she can’t argue with me, get me to see things differently, change me as easily with her words as I change her with mine. I just didn’t think it was fair that we always spoke the way it meant the most to her, and not the most to me.

I think she thought that I needed her to do something so far out of her comfort level that she just didn’t have time and didn’t want to try. The opposite was true. Could you just change how you talk to me when we do interact? I am tired of you thinking that I am goading and provoking you when I am asking for your input? You think I’m asking for too much when you don’t understand the question.

Because she lives in my ink and talks inside my head, echoing in my chest, she’s part of my lifeblood now. I can feel her words coursing through me when I receive them, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re sweet or angry. They are all small pieces of artwork in a tapestry…. or one of those landscape photos made up of individual faces.

She has a beautiful face. It’s the one I look to for love, and have for years. I cannot do that if she doesn’t want it, so my work now is to take everything I’ve written about her and look at what I do want from it and what I want to leave.

What I know is that you can’t change anyone else with your own words, and you need to be prepared for relationships not fulfilling you and not worrying so much about getting out of them. Yes, everything feels new, but in a good way. A life where I am free of past mistakes in their entirety, and not because I wanted it that way.

As Kristina Mahr has said, “I took the tags off this love before I knew I was sure I wanted it. No, that’s not right. I took the tags off this love before I was sure you knew you wanted it.” I know for sure that even if my beautiful girl was interested in women, we would make horrible partners to each other. We cannot even make our love languages work with deep female friendship. I do think we could make friendship work, but because we have distance from each other. I can’t tell a partner to go home, but I can tell her. 😉

That’s because she would understand implicitly that we are both interested in socializing until the battery is dead. Please leave by nine. A group of people is a “no thanks.” We joke that I am the president of Overthinkers Anonymous, and she is the VP because president is a public-facing office. I still can’t get over that one, it’s so funny.

My last witty retort to this was “what a day. Need to find a meeting except there’s only one chapter and it’s really only us. We’re not friendly, Bob.” I said her real name, but “we’re not friendly, Bob” is a quote from my favorite Robin Williams movie, “RV.” You just have to see it to believe it.

Anyway, if you are also a member I will be holding a drive in late September. We’ll pass the hat for dues and coffee. No Folgers, and I get to make it before every meeting. “Leslie, you have one job.”

The point in all of this is that I learned a lot, and God I love her more than anyone or anything on earth, mostly because I’ve had 10 years to get used to the idea. She knows she’s it for me, in some sense, because even when she’s not in my life, she still lives in my ink.

I will look forward to the day when I can take all these life lessons and pour them into someone who wants them…. including her, but she has to show up. I’ve learned to celebrate the people who do. It’s why I think of Bryn and Zac as my partners in crime, both of them, because they serve different roles and I’m happy this way. Maybe it will change, maybe it won’t, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

I feel that it’s important to take guilt off of everyone when they don’t show up, and just do my own thing. I cannot make other people’s calls for them, especially on the telephone.

I’m not friendly, Bob.

Live, Laugh, Love

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 11 Comments

What’s your favorite recipe?

Anyone who actually knows me knows two things. The first is that I don’t have any recipes, and the second is how much contempt I have for the phrase in the title because it is emotional shorthand for a whole mood…. the Karen special.

However, I do cook well. I can’t give you recipes, but I can tell you how I do things and you can cook like I do- I became a professional cook by tasting every step of the way. That’s why we don’t use measurements. We add until the gods have let us know that they are sated.

So much depends on what kind of technology I’m using. Cooking over a fire is different than gas and electric ovens/grills. You also cannot ignore the part of cooking that involves feel, because I get why we need to wear gloves. I believe others underestimate why it’s important not to wear them and just wash your hands constantly. A grilled steak or chicken breast will have a certain feel to it. Wearing gloves dampens our ability to detect it. Moreover, an open flame grill often made mine catch on fire and fuse to my skin. On an open flame, you really have no choice but to touch it because you cannot be certain that the heat is equal everywhere you place it.

To combat not trying to touch things, we risk presentation because we’ll have to cut something open to make sure it’s done in the middle. I do not want anyone to get served pork or chicken medium rare.

These are all of the things that run through a cook’s mind before we even start thinking about ingredients. You don’t buy the ingredients for the technology, you work with what you have.

I saute most things. I even prefer it to the microwave and toaster, because I would rather toast bread in the skillet with butter. I make a mean cheese toastie (grilled cheese). 😉

I start with lots of butter and herbs in a skillet on very low heat. Most of the time, it’s Montreal Chicken Seasoning or herbs de Provence. While that’s warming up, I butter some bread and add hot sauce, pico de gallo, or black pepper, along with two thick slices of cheese. I set the sandwich in the pan and it takes time. You don’t want the toast to be black and the cheese to be unmelted. Putting the lid on the pan for a few minutes during cooking will help the cheese melt with steam, but you don’t want to leave it on too long or the sandwich will be soggy. Low and slow is the name of the game. You can use softer cheeses to speed it up, like Gouda or Jack. You cannot increase the heat. You’ll know it’s time to flip when you see the edge of the bread turn the color toast you like. I prefer to get it very, very brown- almost black- because I think char stands up well to cheese.

To really up your game, make caramelized onions beforehand. Caramelized onions take a lot longer than you think. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever achieved perfection in under 45 minutes. That’s because caramelization is a process. If you help it along too much, they’ll have charred edges and not done enough in the middle. You have to put more butter than you think you need into a pan with way more onions than you think you’ll need (just like 20 pounds of spinach is almost enough to feed one person after cooking it) and just leave it on low heat. Don’t stir it as much as you think you need to, because the caramelization happens when onion touches metal. Think about how often you’re interrupting that when you turn things over.

Touching the metal is what cooks mean when they say “respect first contact.” That means put it on the grill and step back. Do not adjust, do not do anything. The process of caramelization has already started and moving it will rip the crust that has begun to develop immediately. If you respect first contact, the caramelization process will have created a crust so thick that the meat will lift off the grill on its own….. same for pancakes. I know to flip mine when I can lift up the skillet and the pancake slides around independently. I still use a spatula to flip, though, because generally there’s so much hot butter that it would splash in my face. Besides, I like to make my pancakes really thick and it would ruin them to be flipped with that much violence. I save that kind of movement for foods that can take it, like eggs.

Eggs are there for you when no one else is. I swear it. You can add an egg to anything and instant meal.

Eggs are another food where it’s best to respect first contact, but hold the butter to a manageable level. You want enough to coat the pan, but not enough to splash in your face if you’re trying to be me, the home version.

You can flip an egg in any frying pan, but I find that the smaller ones are easier. Not the ones marked “egg pan.” Those are so tiny it’s like playing with Barbie cookware. I mean the smallest normal-sized frying pan because it feels balanced in my hand. If you’re 6’6 and 280, you’re going to have a different favorite. Choose the one you like based on how it feels to you.

When I say respect first contact, I mean that the same thing will happen with eggs that happen with meat and pancakes. They’ll stick to the metal and develop a crust, lifting independently. When you can move the egg in the pan on its own, it’s safe to flip. How long you leave it after it has flipped determines whether it is over easy, over medium, etc.

I find that flipping eggs is infinitely easier than trying to guess when sunny side up is ready. It helps to put the lid on the pan for those, too, because it ensures that the bottom and the top cook evenly.

With scrambled eggs, I tend to respect first contact and break them up very little. I also undercook them a tiny, tiny, tiny amount so that they remain cheesy in texture. Very important sidenote: eggs don’t need anything. They don’t get fluffier with water or milk. You can add volume, but the flavor will thin out to an enormous degree. I would go with a drip of cold water before I’d add milk, but I wouldn’t do either unless I was almost out of eggs and needed to make them stretch.

Cooking is all about learning how to make things stretch, and not even from a financial perspective. It’s also learning how to make use of what you’ve already bought, because you had a creative idea for something…. where you rise to the level is forgetting everything you know and just looking into the pantry.

I always keep pancake mix on hand, as well as cheese, bread, butter, pasta, and the occasional frozen pizza, with which I almost certainly will make double cheese and double jalapeno before I bake it.

Everything I make has a ton of calories for two reasons. The first is that I don’t eat often and I walk everywhere I go. The second is that my stomach needs some help if I’m going to go balls to the wall with Scoville every day in search of relief from hideous allergies. I pad my stomach with the butter and cheese no matter whether it’s dairy or plant-based. A not dog with vegan cream cheese and kim-chi hot enough to blow your head off is just as tasty as beef or pork franks.

Another thing I do is buy spring mix when it’s on sale so that I can do warm salads. My favorite is to saute spring mix, carrots, Brussels sprouts, and kale in a combination of olive and sesame oils. Sometimes I add nuts, seeds, dried fruit if there’s no added sugar, etc. When the veggies have cooked for a little while and I can tell the stems are getting soft, I hit the pan with rice wine vinegar and close the lid.

When the veggies are entirely wilted, I push them to the sides of the pan and crack two eggs in the middle.

It’s done when the yolks are just starting to get hard. I like them best when the texture is gelatinous, not runny.

The egg and the rice wine vinegar play off each other extraordinarily well.

But recognize that there are certain things at home you cannot do well and pay the people that do it. For instance, I have no shame in admitting that it would cost me hundreds to do rotisserie chicken the way I’d really like to do it, or I could just go to Don Pollo. I don’t have to buy their sides, I can just add their chicken to what I do know how to cook well at home…. or, at least, I would if I did that kind of thing. The last time I went to Don Pollo was years and years ago, and I still remember the taste of the black beans and pico because it was served cold, like Cowboy Caviar (Texas black-eyed pea relish). I loved it because they’d taken the time to dice the jalapenos, so they were perfectly deseeded and none of them were bitter.

The other thing they have at Don Pollo that I could not do at home is fried yucca. It’s delicious and I wouldn’t even attempt it because I don’t want to own a deep fryer. I want them to own a deep fryer. 😉

If we’re talking about my personal favorite foods, let’s play the chef’s game. You’re on death row. What’s your last meal? There are no stipulations to this game. The food can come from anywhere.

I would start with bone marrow and crostini, paired with a simple red table wine.

Next, a salad filled with vegetables. Please do not fool around with an iceberg wedge and some bleu cheese. Put your back into it. I want a bright yuzu vinegar with some cracked black pepper. Heritage tomatoes. Romaine. Real food and not restaurant filler.

If John Kinkaid was going to outlive me, he’d know that as my chef, my last meal would be his. He could surprise and delight me, but I already know what he would make.

It would be a vegetable jambalaya and a Purple Haze from Abita.

Because it’s the end of the night, and I’m about to clock out.

You’re Supposed to Plan Them?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you plan your goals?

I am only now learning what is within my control and what is not. It’s only been within the last year that I’ve allowed myself to have opinions. They’re not always the correct ones, but it beats searching for the right words- not because I would like to use them, but because they are the ones that will keep others from reacting. I tried so hard to need nothing that resentment built over time. 45 years, in fact. Having all of that anger rush out had consequences, but I knew what I was putting into motion.

Relationships changed when I wouldn’t let anyone run game on me anymore. Either be up front or get out. I do not want to read your mind, nor do I want to be infantilized because of my CP or bipolar disorder. It’s my job to take care of me, and I will take input, but I don’t need coddling. I need empathy, though. Caring that I’m neurodivergent goes a long way. So does compassion for my physical limitations. But if you cannot do those things, don’t be mad when I close the door behind you. I won’t lock it. I’ll give you room to grow. But I won’t let you come back until you prove to me that you can do those things. The people who aren’t my friends do it enough.

I just don’t want that temperature in my life anymore. I don’t want to live with rage, even if it is appropriately directed. No adult likes to feel parented or that other people are frightened by their emotions to the point they feel unlovable. This is not a limited to me problem. Most ADHD/Autistic people feel this way. Our emotions are too convoluted for them to make sense most of the time. As I was telling Bryn earlier, I have never met an ADHD person that could plan a goal for shit, so what am I going to write about today?

I’m going to write about how much it sucks to be neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. We are struggling to be heard and understood. We will explain until dark when the street lights are on and Mama’s callin.’ It’s an intrinsic trait with ADHD/Autism. My particular need to expound upon everything I’ve already said once is generally a reply to someone hearing my words and don’t have any idea what dog I’m walking.

It’s Oliver, btw.

So, I’ll just ruminate until people say they get it or walk off. But even when they walk off I want to keep explaining because up until now, I cared deeply and desperately about what people thought of me, and I extended that kind of energy to everyone I met instead of keeping it to the friends I loved the most. That way, I was sure to disappoint everyone all at the same time because I was so overextended.

I have made Zac, Bryn, and Oliver my entire world because that’s as much as I can handle right now. I have so much to think about that it’s incapacitating at times, so I need to be mostly single and just focus on what’s right in front of me. It’s all ADHD/Autistic people really know.

Life with no executive function leaves me absolutely brilliant in some ways, feeling like I continually fail other people all the time because my software is different and there is a huge chasm that people dismiss all the time. Even my CP is problematic because my case is so slight it’s not as noticeable as, say, RJ Mitte. Therefore, people see me as normal when I have no balance and floppy muscles. I trip through life because I can’t not.

Very few people explain the logic behind things, and that’s all I really want to know. If I can’t figure out something on my own, I will tire and confuse my friends and family… and I know it. That’s the worst part. To know you are capable of handing out that exhaustion is devastating because you can’t change the way you were made. People alternate treating me like I have the smarts of all my favorite authors and then they spend time with me and all that goes out the window…. because when people are in adoration mode, they act completely differently once they see how my mind actually works.

I think that’s why I like the book shop at the Spy Museum so much. They don’t care if I sit on the floor and get obsessed with a subject and pull out 10 books and not buy any of them. It’s the same at the library, when I used to go. I don’t have to anymore because I can borrow them with an app on my phone (Libby), cutting out all the social interaction necessary to maintain isolation.

My self-esteem has been that low my whole life. That I have to get up the energy to even leave my house because everything becomes a Dorothy Parker quote within minutes.

What fresh hell is this?

That wasn’t terrible. That was fancy terrible….. with raisins in it.

Sometimes I’m the one that thinks them, sometimes it’s another person in reaction to me.

I can’t make anything better unless people tell me what’s wrong, and even that is a common problem. Because I do most of my communication in writing, people constantly write themselves off as “not a good enough writer to compete with me.”

First of all, you’re probably not. It’s not because you’re dumb. It’s because I’m a blogger and you’re not. I didn’t get to be a good writer overnight. I got to be a good writer by taking a knife and slicing it into a vein, bleeding out over my keyboard day after day after day after day after day.

Secondly, me being a writer is a pitiful excuse to shut down two-way communication, or extraordinary if you don’t want to be in relationship with me. That’s because it doesn’t matter to me how you communicate and what your natural style might be. It’s that you think that completely shutting down your emotions is okay. That our relationship will survive despite neither of us getting our needs met.

Zac, Bryn, and I are all good writers. Therefore, no one shuts down. And if we need to switch mediums for a conversation, we do it. Bryn calls me even when she can see I’m still typing. 😉

Because I live an hour and a half from Zac (whether I was caught in traffic or taking the train), Facebook Messenger is the most awesome thing ever invented. He sends me a picture of himself every morning so that I can see how he is before he leaves for work. I don’t have to guess, I can see it in his face.

Removing all the barriers to communication with those closest to me has been a godsend.

I don’t know if it’s the best way to plan a goal, but for ADHD/Autism, it is 90% of the time “accidentally on purpose.” I’m not sure that I could do anything differently, so I’m not a Monday morning quarterback in the way most people think. My mind moves too fast to retain all the information I need. It’s one of the reasons you’ve started getting entries every day. It’s not for me to show off. It’s for me to have a place to go when I need information about my own life. Seriously, how many of you can pick a year out of thin air and remember everything about it?

I can’t.

But my goal is being able to look it up.

It’s a plan.

What Constitutes an Emergency?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Create an emergency preparedness plan.

I consider logistics to be a nightmare scenario, and other people’s emotions to be much easier. I saw a meme the other day that made me laugh- it said “my ability to read the room is why I stay home.” While this is true, I made an agreement to be there for certain people. I can’t just wall off at will.

Yesterday Bryn was stuck by the side of the road because her car overheated. I could have done so much more had I been there physically, but I was able to be a calming presence. Had I been there, I would have tried to replace the radiator on the side of the road, because I saw someone do it once (not on her make and model, of course). Surely I’m qualified. 😛

I told her there probably wasn’t anything she could do but wait it out, but that when she got it started again, she could turn on the heater full blast- unfortunately venting the heat from the engine onto her in summer, but she’d make it farther. I was pleased she thought I knew enough about cars to call me, but I told her that in my experience, this was a call to her dad and not me. This is because her dad actually knows cars and I stood next to a mechanic for weekend warrior study…. and that was almost 10 years ago.

But I won’t forget that I was her first call in an emergency.

I knew something had happened because Bryn used Facebook Messenger to call and I was making a sandwich and thought, “I’ll call her back, I’ll be done in a minute.” Then, my phone rang. I knew something was up if Bryn was actually going to use the telephone. It was good that she did, because I could pick up the call on my watch. I warned her that she was on speaker and proceeded to impart the very, very, very little wisdom I had….. which is mostly that the radiator isn’t a hard fix depending on the car. It’s the labor that will kill you.

Again, that’s also make and model specific. I had a Nissan Pickup, a 1989 so I could work on it myself. I didn’t want to have to deal with a computer. I wanted to be able to fix everything in the parking lot of an Auto Zone if I needed, which I did….. my radiator and starter would tell you what a ride that was…… I think it’s funny that I don’t even drive now, but I’m still a gearhead.

I was right; Bryn’s dad did come and help her out, but the car still died again four blocks from her house. Crisis averted except how to get the car home and fixed. Four blocks to walk isn’t that bad. Plus, it’s the Pacific Northwest. This time of year it’s not really dark until 2200.

It was good just talking to her, because at the very least I felt like I was there even though I really wasn’t. I had to turn to reason for this one, because I felt so bad. My reasoning is that even if I was still there, I didn’t live close enough to be of much help. I would have left the house immediately, but it still would have taken almost an hour to get to her.

It makes me happy to occasionally be Bryn’s shite in nining armor, because it shows me that I’m not useless in an emergency, I have impostor syndrome. That I am weak and disabled and all the things, so I must defer to a real adult. Clearly, I need it.

I ride the line between needing someone and biting off more than I can chew in terms of independence. I don’t have to be married/have a girlfriend. Infrastructure is what I’m talking about. My adultier adult might be my landlord or my housemate. Zac is the same role to me that I am for Bryn. I would definitely call him, but I wouldn’t expect him to physically pack up and come get me unless my life was on the line. Asking a Virginian to come to Maryland is just not done. Virginia is a whole other country from here.

To ask me what I’d do in a true emergency like an EMP or kinetic attack is futile, because the best laid plans would go to shit in half a second. I know I would call Bryn, though, because she’d be there……. even if she couldn’t do anything.

I Don’t Even Want to Be Here Today

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you know the television show I’ve referenced in the title, we’d probably be good friends. It’s one of the kids on The Magic School Bus. At least once in every episode, something goes so wrong that he says “I didn’t even want to be here today.” I’m riffing, because it is now. Things didn’t start out great and devolve, they just started. I feel like the tap is dry and I’m picking through recycling, because reading my thoughts creates others I haven’t written down. I am not sure that I’ve had a thought in my head for the last 45 days that hasn’t ended up here.

It’s kind of like training for a marathon. I am building the skills I need to craft pages by using my own thoughts instead of fiction. However, in reading this blog, you have to know that of course it’s fiction. Of course it is. It’s not because I’m not telling my own truth, either. It’s that when I sit down to write, no one is here with me to say that I’m wrong.

I’m writing my observations. When people look at my stuff and say “that’s not true,” it is 100% always the case that it’s a piece of information they had and I didn’t. It may not have been malicious on their part not to tell me something, but they don’t get to take me to the mat over it, either. It is a losing game, always, and I will isolate to accommodate it. I would rather be alone than be chastised for writing about a situation in which they didn’t give me all the facts and then beat my ass for not being able to divine them. This pattern is not limited to Supergrover, but she’s the person it has happened with the most recently, so I am spiraling the fuck out. I knew I would. That’s because psychobiology is eating my lunch.

I’m feeling the panic of letting a trauma bond release and the longer it goes on the more I know this is the right choice for me, but that doesn’t lessen my thoughts and physical symptoms. Too much adrenaline is a bad thing; it’s what creates the panicked feeling when searching for dopamine. I do not think this is a limited to a me problem, because I cannot tell you how many times over the years I’ve gotten a letter from Supergrover that said “I vowed I wouldn’t respond, but.” We both have searched for the friendship we lost at different times, and it has affected both of us greatly, though not in the same ways.

Dealing with our relationship publicly is good and bad. The good? Everyone can read it. The bad? Everyone can read it. If I write about it here, there’s a hundred percent chance she’ll see it because she can tell me she won’t read all day long and it will be true for two weeks tops. If I liked Instagram, I’d feel the same way about her. We’re genuinely interested in each other and have problems with communication issues, so instead of working on the issues, we go scorched earth. Interested is relative. Maybe she loves me, maybe it’s schadenfreude…..and what I have to ask myself is does it matter?

No. It doesn’t. That’s because it feels like getting my own legend- a Santa Claus, a Tooth Fairy, an Easter Bunny- that visits in the night and leaves gifts. I do not underestimate presence as a gift, and in fact her presence means more to me than anything she could give me materially. It’s kind of fun never knowing what’s going to jog her mind, but I don’t write toward it.

I write toward her because no one else has written books about her, therefore I’m writing what I need to read. She came here looking for facts when I hadn’t recorded any. I recorded the way I felt, which is completely separate from her own memories. I couldn’t incorporate two stories because I only had two years’ worth of feelings for a 10-year relationship because she wasn’t updating me on anything. So, I write based on what I know, and she reads based on what she knows. Those are not the same “knows.”

The alternative is keeping those memories to myself and not putting them into the repository where I keep all the others. I don’t want there to be a real blog and a fake one. To me, that’s what not writing about my life means, that there’s some sort of dark magic journal where all the blackest secrets go, and you’re just getting the public layer. I cannot manage that, so I won’t. Where our issues lie is that she needs privacy and protection, and she is also my real life friend. I need guidance, she’s a brick wall. That does not work for me.

She was the person who needed privacy and protection after I’d already started writing about her, and it was a good coping mechanism for both of us at that time.

After a while, as we got deeper and deeper into our issues with each other, it wasn’t good for either one of us and I just stopped cold turkey. Now that 10 years have gone by, it’s a different ball game. A lot of the people who would take issue with the things I’ve said either don’t read it or know they don’t have a right to say anything to either one of us. Time is a beautiful thing. No one has a right to care anymore except us. 10 years ago, I knew it would be true. That I’d get here. That no one would care because it was too long ago.

I also cannot write her story according to her, because I have not heard it. The relationship is turbulent because she berates me for not reading her mind and telling our story accurately according to the picture in her mind. Her relationship with me is all in her head.

I wonder what adventures I’ve been on when I wasn’t even there.

She doesn’t know I would have wanted to hear she was angry, or sad, or depressed, or anxious, or, or, or………… She doesn’t have mental health issues per se, but I’m talking about feeling depressed or anxious stuck in a moment you can’t get out of……..

Recognizing the patterns was important. Choosing not to continue was growth. If the pattern breaks, we can be healthy again. But it won’t. That’s because I’m nothing if not loquacious and she’s nothing if not stubborn. Doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It means that I’ve grown.

I hope to God I’m wrong about everything, but I cannot hope for more. I have done all I can do. The rest is just being sad about it.

Did I mention that I don’t even want to be here today? Here is relative. In my head, it’s not so great. Downstairs? Caffeine.