Isn’t There Already?

February 14, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?

I think this is kind of a weird prompt for me now, because since WordPress actually gave me the statistic that I wrote 614,000 words in 2023, there are six autobiographies about me already. And that’s just one year.

I did start an autobiography once, but I didn’t take it seriously enough. My own doctors, dad, and stepmom told me that using the work of Susan Barry to induce stereopsis on myself wouldn’t work. I tried for a few weeks, and the only thing I noticed the whole time that was actually in 3D was that I could see both sides of my nose at once. I called the book “Staring at Myself.”

That being said, I might go after it again because I don’t see how it’s impossible yet. That’s because there’s been a couple of movies with 3D effects that did work on me. One at EPCOT Center (Muppets 4D) and one at Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but I don’t remember what ride. That means I can’t see red/blue stereopsis, but if it comes in a different form, then it’s open to me.

In both instances I saw a 3D movie, I cried. I was a freshman or sophomore in high school at EPCOT, and I can’t remember the year for WWHP, but not so long ago. Within the last 10 years, at least.

What I do know is that it was before JK Rowling burned down her legacy by bullying trans kids over the Internet. Trans kids know horrible people all the time, but not generally people who’ve written a book about full acceptance first.

Otherwise, Lindsay and I might not have been so keen to go there. We loved the rest of the park, too, because we got to go on rides with themes like “ET,” “Jurassic Park,” and “The Simpsons.” I also got my picture taken in SpongeBob’s pineapple house.

“Why don’t you just buy a ticket to see the places you love on TV?”

“How’m I gonna get a ticket to Bikini Bottom?”

We did the MGM thing because we’d already done Disney before- just not together. I’d been on a high school trip with my orchestra, and I don’t remember when Lindsay went, but both of us have been to Disney World. I don’t believe anyone in our family has been to Disneyland. I hear good things, though.

I’m a daredevil and I love roller coasters. Therefore, going to a different Disney park sounds great. At some point, I hope to make it to Six Flags here. Kathleen and Dana have both planned trips with me to King’s Dominion, and neither panned out.

But there’s so much hope because at least now I live in the general area again. My trip with Dana was based on her parents living in the general area as well. I remember the first time I saw a picture of her here after we broke up was hilarious because I was so fake indignant that she was wearing my “Regular Show” belt. She loved that belt, so there was no actual ire. She stole it from me almost as soon as I bought it.

Because there are no pictures of me actually wearing it, I will tell you it looked better on me and you cannot prove otherwise. 😛

These are all the funny things that should go in my book about myself, and I’m trying to drag those things out of myself as well. Because this can’t be therapy all the time. It will sound like I’m a morose person, when I’m not. I use this space to work out what makes me happy and what doesn’t, so I can surround myself with those things.

I am sharp and funny in person, because I know myself so well. Again, I wrote six books about myself last year. If I didn’t learn anything about myself, I wasn’t paying attention. But so many entries are built on analyzing what I’ve said before to work it out in my own head makes me feel secure in my connections. They can’t rattle me the way they used to, because I might not know what to do in a conflict, but I do know where my heart/conscience lie. There are so many unknowns working with other people, but there’s a benefit to knowing what you’ll tolerate and what you won’t.

The moment I realized it was over with Supergrover was the moment she said that she wanted me to find people who brought good things into my life and didn’t give me issues. To me, that said that she was never going to resolve any conflicts with me and this would be our life. Her avoidance and my need to clear things up ad nauseam until we died.

While we actually needed to lean on each other because every time I’ve stepped over the line, she’s had to contact me to tell me to back it up. I finally got it through her head not to do that anymore, because she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t push me away and then critique me. It made me think that she was interested in resolving things every single time. My heart would be full of hope, and it was dashed every single time.

I take responsibility for being angry about that, and not using the appropriate words for nearly anything. Doesn’t make my side of the story untrue. They were my experiences of her, not her experiences of me. She fucked me up. Just slaughtered me emotionally, then threw a bomb over her shoulder and walked away.

She has the right to do that; she doesn’t have the right to say I should be happy about that.

My crush on her gave her a good excuse to walk away when she absolutely couldn’t, because she needed a clear connection to me in order to say the things she needed to say without me jumping to any conclusions that weren’t there.

But she wouldn’t talk about that.

Too scary.

Go find other friends.

I hate her for it. Just fucking hate her. But not all day, every day. She’s not worth the energy anymore, because there’s no percentage in it. She doesn’t get the right to rattle me out of my skin because I’m bad at transitions. She can’t drop in and out like a Disneyland dad.

And that’s because of her side of the story, not mine. She can blame everything she wants on me. To her, I can be the biggest judgmental dickhead on earth and I don’t give a flying fuck. This is because if she’s angry and bitter and all of those things, she’s sitting in them because she won’t resolve it, not because not talking about it leads to anything good.

So, she can go be bitter and angry all on her own, because she’s the type person that would rather be bitter and angry about something until she died rather than be open about her feelings. If we’d had even one knock-down drag-out in person that could have lasted long enough to put all our issues on the table and come to resolution in the end, we’d both be a lot happier, jointly and severally.

But, she went on the attack in order not to be vulnerable, and then she told me that she never would. It was a message I couldn’t ignore, because over time the dropping in and out became a cat and mouse game that she insisted wasn’t there. That’s because her dopamine doesn’t go up and down when she talks to me, so she doesn’t feel like a Disneyland dad, and can’t imagine feeling that way in empathy towards me, so she thinks nothing of dropping in when to me, it’s everything. And that’s as much as I’ll ever be able to say about it.

She absolutely took her turn in fucking up my life to a degree I’ll never get back. So, to blame everything that went wrong in our relationship on me is ridiculously unfair, but it is what it is.

I looked absolutely insane to the whole goddamn world because people could only understand my side of the story. I wasn’t allowed to tell absolutely any of hers. Therefore, I just had to look crazy and not give a shit that I did, all the while dying inside because of the perception of me, because it didn’t matter what the perception of me was. It couldn’t.

So, she’s sitting with the guilt of fucking up my life while also unwilling to open up about it. Telling me to go find new friends was just the shitty icing on top of an already shitty cake because her side of the story is not something I can share. So, I can’t talk to her and I can’t talk to anyone else.

Fuck her and the horse she rode in on, and I can only say that now, after having had 10 years to think about it. I owned my shit in front of her and in front of an audience of thousands (legitimately), and a lot of those people were close to me. Still couldn’t talk about it. She pushed me into a corner and just left me there.

Both sides of our story are problematic to each other, yet being in love with someone when it is absolutely inconvenient doesn’t happen logically…. however, it is universal. I could talk about that because it transcended race, culture, creed, everything. Some people may not understand divorce or polyamory, but everyone can understand having feelings that they need to get rid of because they’re threatening or dangerous to your relationship. I do not believe that when you get married, you also become blind.

I also didn’t bullshit Dana in the slightest. I didn’t say things like, “she’s really pretty,” because if I had to list the 10 things about our relationship that make it amazing, it wouldn’t be on the list. It wouldn’t even be in the top twenty.

But it’s still on the list. 😉

I feel like a troll most of the time, so it doesn’t suck that if she stood next to me, it would make me look better by 150%, easily. She also makes beautiful babies, so standing next to them wouldn’t suck, either. I would say the same about her husband, except I don’t know what he looks like.

However, because I do know her, I bet he’s a god- because through her, I’ve found that it’s possible to be both brilliant and the best looking person in the room (just trust me, we’re all trolls next to her). I’ve always imagined that they thought each other was the greatest thing since sliced bread for a long time, and I am overjoyed that she found her person.

I’m just bad at transitions.

Who isn’t when you’re talking about something that is “highly illogical?” I told my heart every day how fucking ridiculous it was and to stop feeling 18 all the time. But if you knew her like I did, it would have been just as impossible for you as it was for me.

What I laid out in front of Dana was not the whole “she’s gorgeous” bit, and Dana knew it. She said that because our relationship was writing, it was more serious because we’d seen each other’s souls.

Her soul and inner world is the first time I’ve ever met anyone who could match me feeling for feeling in terms of not being able to share things, and needing a place to vent where we were both anonymous.

Except she chose the wrong person to open up to for logical reasons, not emotional. The reason I needed her was more important than the reason I needed Dana, but that didn’t become clear to me until Dana smashed my glasses into my face.

Otherwise, I would still be dealing with Dana’s jealousy for Supergrover and me to need ironclad privacy. What wife wouldn’t be jealous of that in a lesbian relationship, especially when I irrationally caught feelings over it. Just because Supergrover didn’t return my feelings didn’t make it less problematic. It made it more, because Dana realized that Supergrover would always be more important than her, and she had to let me go…. but not until we’d had a knock-down drag-out about it.

Supergrover bears no responsibility in why I got hit. Dana and I were not fighting about her, but the amount of time I was willing to devote to both of them and it was so off in the beginning. We hadn’t learned a middle ground, and so she was this specter in our lives, there when she wasn’t there.

I didn’t give up my relationship with Dana for her, but realistically, yes I did. I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell me how I should spend my time, and Supergrover made it where it was impossible for it not to be her as first priority ever again.

And I do mean ever.

So, in a lot of ways, Dana made my decision for me very clear. At that point, I needed Supergrover because I was in so much pain from the fight, both physically and emotionally.

So, she was my first priority for the next 10 years with her participating in the relationship, and for the rest of my life without….. without being able to talk about it with anyone else, either. It’s too private, too us.

The “too us” is what I miss the most.

The closest I can come to describing what happened is “accidental polyamory, but ok……” And even that’s a euphemism for everything I can’t say.

What I’m actually married to and not her personally. Why I wish I could be in the inner circle that her husband is, because of course there are certain times when you want your partner to know something that your friends don’t, and that’s ok. It’s not my place to go through the same emotional experience as him.

However, in her absence, we both love her so much that I wish we could lean on each other. And by now, we’ve both loved her that much for a long time without ever meeting each other. It’s weird, and it’s not. Supergrover has the right to keep as much private as she wants, but that doesn’t mean it helps our relationship.

She does not want to help our relationship, and she hasn’t made the connection that it’s not possible. That we have to have something sustainable and drama-free…. which is exactly what she wants, just without the discomfort of actually addressing anything, ever.

It’s not the right relationship for me, but it has to be. So, fuck all of it, because I don’t know what to do now. I can’t think about it because it’s too painful. I can’t write about it at all, I just have to sit in it…. and you cannot imagine how much I mean I can’t write about it. It’s killing me every day. She has listened to my story over and over, calling me a dictator when I am standing up for myself and just telling her my feelings straight out in hopes of her doing the same.

It worked in the beginning. It doesn’t work now. That’s because she thinks that our only problem is that I’m in love with her. First of all, no I’m not. Second of all, the other problem is not mine. Not mine to carry, not mine to handle, not mine to own. But, she can run from her impressions all she wants. Doesn’t make them accurate.

That’s because she has never once asked me any questions about anything I’ve ever written. She’s never responded with her own story when I’ve laid out mine, because it was easier to get mad and say “you’re just throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shitstorm to begin, aren’t you?”

No, I’m trying to explain the process of letting go of the wrong things while keeping the right ones. I explain an exhausting, autistic amount for a neurotypical, and she’s a jock and a childhood trauma victim, having learned to cut off her emotions from a very young age to protect herself first and then to accomplish a goal.

I love her the way I love Zac, just platonically and not romantically. That’s because I can’t be specific, but they both have a hard shell and a vulnerable place just for me.

In fact, this weekend Zac and I had all the conversations that are just as uncomfortable as the ones I would or could have with Supergrover on different issues…. but not all of them, because they both have a hard shell and a vulnerability that comes out because I ask for it.

A few weeks ago, one of Zac’s young friends (I think she’s a tween, or about to be) overheard an adult conversation and asked him what a safe word was. I can’t imagine how much of the table died inside except Zac. He is the ultimate person to ask any question about anything, because he’s neurodivergent so he’s good at conversations that need explanations, and we’re kind of kids ourselves so we both can explain very adult things in kids’ terms.

He told her that a safe word was something that was only between people who really trusted each other, and it was either the word to stop or shorthand for “tell me the truth.” The friend said, “I think we should have a safe word, then.” He said, “okay. What do you want it to be?” She said, “lemons.”

He’s also seen Ted Lasso, but is not familiar with it so I didn’t know if he’d remember “Oklahoma.” So, in several discussions this weekend, I said, “Oklahoma. Lemons.” We got more done in becoming closer in 24 hours than I have in years with other people. I’m not poking at Supergrover. I know a lot of people with a hard shell and won’t get vulnerable I make it clear that you being emotionally unavailable is a dealbreaker for me.

I am sorry that seems threatening at first to either Supergrover or Zac, and yet it will never not be true. The difference is that Zac is emotionally mature enough to recognize that his emotional availability is feeding our relationship, and we’re comfortable with it because from the first moment we started talking, we sort of made this “no bullshit” pact.

You have to when you realize that you’ve actually asked out one of your friend’s boyfriends…. or, more accurately, who is a mutual friend with Zac, me, and another person that’s not important enough to mention except that I didn’t want her to know anything about my life anymore, and I didn’t want the mutual friend to say anything.

I should have just contacted the friend and said, “keep it tight,” but I didn’t because I don’t know shit about polyamory. But first, I didn’t know how important it is for everyone in a polycule to know each other, even if they don’t get along because a few times a year, it’s important for us all to support Zac and not have it be about us. We don’t have to get along, we just have to treat each other with respect.

I asked Zac to keep it tight when I shouldn’t have. I hope for my sake he didn’t, because he knew I didn’t know shit- and he would have been smart enough to tell his partner the reason I didn’t want them to know at first. But now, I do want everyone to know me because I’m here to support Zac, just like them.

On the other hand, I didn’t know if it was appropriate to contact the friend, either, because I don’t know how Zac operates with his other partners, just how he operates with me. I didn’t know if it would be breaking a rule somehow.

Although I did call “lemons” with him on some of that stuff because I don’t need to know about his partners. I need to know how he’s feeling. For instance, if he’s feeling low about another relationship, I don’t want to suggest we do anything intense. He can suggest it, but I won’t. By intense I mean going out and doing the thing after we’re already tired.

Our commitment is drill weekends so he’s worked seven days in a row. I know that by the time he gets home from drill, he’s usually into an introvert night. Since I only have housemates and not other partners, I don’t get a lot of affection. I want a kind of night where he’s tired and only wants to hold me. I sleep with him even though I’ve said that I wouldn’t sleep with a partner again because it’s harder for me to go deep enough to sleep well.

But again, it’s about wanting more contact comfort and it’s not every single night. I have decided that I need to start taking sleeping pills at his house, though, because he moves and snores A LOT. If I don’t fall asleep first, I won’t. It’s kind of funny. He dreams like Oliver, who is a dog. When he’s in REM, he kicks like he’s chasing rabbits.

This is uncomfortable because he’s also an octopus. But everything that’s uncomfortable is also everything I love about being with him…. which is why I tease him lovingly.

I hope he doesn’t mind me poking a little fun at him, because our relationship feels so free and easy when it’s back and forth like that. He teases me in person rather than in writing, though. I don’t know why that is. Maybe he’s just not thinking about teasing when he’s writing, but I always am. He’s never let me know that something has cut too deep, but I hope he knows it’s not like I’m afraid of him telling me that. I want to take care of him.

If your partner is really your partner, they want to know the things that bother you…… especially when we see you trying so hard for us. Someone who doesn’t see that isn’t your partner, and staying together becomes harder and harder the longer someone feels unheard. And I am totally talking about my history in relationships here. It’s universally relatable, and luckily, something I don’t struggle with now.

I think part of feeling unheard went into my relationship with Supergrover as well, because basically as soon as we got to Houston one of my mutual friends with Dana who’d known us for a long time in Portland told me to my face that Dana was stepping all over me.

Supergrover treated me like I was important when she’s the one with the big-shot schedule. That dopamine will stay with me for the rest of my life, because for as uncomfortable as I made her by falling in love with her and being open about that, it freed me from a relationship in which my needs went unmet because Dana thought she had a lock on being right. She comes by it honestly…

For as much as it hurt Supergrover to hear that I didn’t just love her, I was in love with her, I needed it to change me. I was never looking to change her. She told me in the beginning that she was stunned and amazed at my emotional bravery. She didn’t like it when I was emotionally brave with her, because it was something she lacked- yet wanted it from me. She wanted to be friends with someone who had what she lacked, but didn’t do much to bridge the gap so that both of us could feel safe and secure in our connection.

Absolutely all of the times she contacted me to resolve something on my blog, the conversation continued long enough for me to need things from her again, and to ask for them. But the moment I did, everything she said came across as “only I am allowed to need things.” She was like, “we can’t just be people out here who respond to your work?”

Of course they can.

But she can’t.

That’s because she thinks she can get friendly with me again without me ever being able to bring up the dark side of our relationship so I’m not carrying that shit in a bag all day. I’m not so much angry as lost, confused, and sitting in accurate memories of my own stories while not knowing hers to be able to know how I feel about it.

I told her directly that I thought she was hiding something, and that something was “we’re not really friends.” That’s because I loved the hell out of her thoughtful gifts and encouraging words as long as we never talked about our relationship.

That being said, if you have a real conflict, you’re just covering it up. You’re not actively making each other feel more trusting/trusted. I don’t want someone who can only do the surface-level things after they’ve emotionally vampired me because then they’ve made it clear that they’re not interested in my inner landscape, but I better be ready for theirs.

Saying Supergrover and I weren’t really friends probably stung because she was never tracking with me. Our love languages are not the same (she’s action, I’m words), and I do not lightly move past any problem in order to gloss over it. I do not have many relationships because I want to be able to go deep with very few people than have shallow relationships with a whole bunch. When we stopped exploring each other, that should have been the end of it right there. But it wasn’t because she didn’t give me a choice.

I could make her submit, but it wouldn’t make me any happier, it would just show that I was an asshole on a bigger scale. It also wouldn’t change things between us for the better, it would kill anything there is left. If I have hope for anything, it’s that she really is busy right now and that she will eventually stop licking her wounds long enough to resolve things rather than her feeling trapped because I do.

I have always been a White Hat at heart, and I’ll never give that up. She will always be my brave, crazy and wild friend whether she returns that affection or not.

I just know that our conflict has to be resolved to go forwards because otherwise, I will not be happy in a relationship with her. It’s a detente we’ve got going, because I’m never going to be happy with Christmas and Easter friendship and she’s never going to open up.

All I can do is try to move on when I can’t.

I open myself up to it by being vulnerable and letting a power imbalance stand whether it’s me who caused it or them; even when I can read clearly that I’m not doing the right thing in not walking away. In this case, I was absolutely doing the wrong thing because I didn’t have any other choice. And she knew it.

I want to have accurate memories of my perceptions, but how can my perceptions be accurate when all I can talk about is how emotionally avoidant someone is and not how we solved a conflict?

She’s seen Ted Lasso, but she would have made something up around “Oklahoma,” too. And by “make it up,” I mean words that don’t mean anything except kicking the can down the road. Synergize, logistics, etc. rather than “I am so mad at you right now because you said X and it made me feel Y.” And then I could explain why I said it and she could tell me whether she agreed with her assumption or not.

She could correct me when I was wrong, and I could figure out how I felt about it on my own. This is so much about my output and her lack of input so that she always knew what was up with me and I had to guess what was up with her; God help me if I was wrong.

My curiosity became a problem because it wasn’t curiosity anymore.

And that’s a summary of the autobiography I wrote last year.

Maybe it’s not “Stories That Are All True,” because I only meant that the lessons were universal and not the facts, just like the Bible.

And that was offensive to Supergrover, too, because she assumed that the title was all about “this is my story and I’m always right. The facts are all accurate and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.”

I am not a dictator. She’s not brave enough, and saying I’m emotionally bombing her is her only move. If you only have one move, I will learn the diagonals, the Ls, the rank and the file.

For me, I feel like I’ve reached the end of the game.

Checkmate.

Maybe that should have been the title last year. It would have worked.

You also won’t get anywhere by telling me my memory is fallible, which Dana constantly did.

My blog is all about my memories, and I go back and look at what happened when because I’m my favorite author. I have to believe in myself when no one else does. Therefore, it used to irritate the shit out of me when I could see every goddamn day that my memory is pretty fucking great. She accused me of not remembering things right all the time, and would start telling my story “correctly.” Who treats a blogger like that? Not only did I write in the moment so the story was accurate, the experience of writing the piece does just as much to reinforce my memory as going back and reading it.

However, not one of my partners has ever asked me to look up what happened or thought about the fact that my memory can’t be that bad. That it wasn’t just having written the piece, but going back and reading it over and over and over to see what I can learn from that experience to write the next day.

More and more often, especially because she was drunk more and more often, she’d interrupt me constantly when I was telling a story to “tell it right” for, in her mind, comedic effect. She was The Dana Lanagan Show™ more and more often because alcohol limited her ability to see she was hurting/embarrassing me and also the ability to control THE VOLUME OF HER VOICE.

So, that’s why I say that falling in love with Supergrover was the best thing that could have happened to me and not the worst. Everything happens for a reason, and that cloud had a larger silver lining than I ever saw coming. It was not continuing down the road of life with an alcoholic because I’d learned to people please in childhood and I would have stayed with her and justified her drinking for far too long. I don’t give up on relationships, which is why I’ve loved Supergrover so long and excused her emotional unavailability for 10 whole ass years.

Try Not to Panic

February 10, 2024February 10, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even when he’s snoring.

Edit an Entry

January 31, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?

The reason I’m most scared to edit an entry is that it takes a lot of bravery to be vulnerable with people on this scale. If I sit with a piece, over time I start judging it. I lose courage and back out on publishing. I write very fast and hit “Post.” Then, I don’t own it anymore. I’m not the judge of whether it’s good or not.

Plus, getting into the routine of writing every day means that I don’t dwell over past entries unless I have said something that crosses over from personal to professional (for someone else). My perceptions of their feelings are fair game; their jobs are not. So, I’ll go back and change something if they’ll tell me what I need to alter.

For instance, I had to keep that story tight about Kamala Harris for a month so that by the time I told you my sister had a meeting with her, it had been old news for quite a while.

I think the other reason it’s hard to edit entries is that it would be easier after the fact, but I’ve moved on to a new thing…. because it’s easier than sitting in some of those feelings again.

I don’t ever want to go back and edit anything, because I’m a good editor….. for someone else. I need the same thrashing with a red pen I’d give someone else, but I write too fast and furious to put someone else on a deadline like that.

There is one funny thing from yesterday that I didn’t notice until I reread… “I seem to have two audiences locked up…” and proceeded to only describe one of them.

The other is the people interested in cooking and what goes on in a professional kitchen. It gives me a different writing voice, one I like. It’s more confident than I am, because I’m hearing Anthony Bourdain in my head and not me. I’m definitely borrowing style without trying to imitate him, because all line cooks and chefs sound the same.

I think that I have so many long time readers because people do become invested in my weird little life, one that I adore because I chose it.

I don’t think that I chose wisely a lot of the time over the last 10 years, but I’m hoping the next will be easier having literally edited my life. I’ve been broken in ways I never thought I would be, and I’ve survived. Not always happily, but what didn’t make for a great time did make a good story- good or bad, it’s what happened according to me.

I underestimated how much crying there is in writing, and perhaps this is unique to me in some ways because fiction writers are always crying over someone else’s feelings. When I’m writing, I’m pulling things out of me that I haven’t thought about in years. Not everything is happy.

Not everything is sad, either.

What I can say is that it would be miserable going back and editing everything I’ve said about Supergrover, because editing came at a cost….. but no, it didn’t. That’s because I should have realized a long time ago that she was never going to open up to me and I was wasting a lot of time and energy with hope.

However, there are several good options as to why she’s not talking right now, so I don’t want to be a dick and say we’ll never speak again because I’m sure we won’t. I’ve been sure several times before, and it hasn’t lasted that long. But what I don’t want her, or anyone else, to be able to say is that I was the only one who exhibited toxic behavior. That withholding information was just as bad as giving too much. That we were both hotheaded and angry. That we’re both first children, and not used to being wrong. We’ve got each other’s numbers. For every action, there’s been a reaction. Sometimes it’s mine that’s blown out of proportion. Sometimes it’s hers.

No one won anything here. We both participated, and it became toxic because of a cycle perpetuated by both of us. I want to show that more than anything because I don’t have the want or need to blame her for anything.

Writing is about what I’m going to do. Editing it is dragging up the past. It makes the ghosts rise from their graves, and I’m eager to avoid that part of it. With an editor, they’d be reading my words without having memories attached to them.

So, in order to get me to edit my own work, I’m not exactly sure what it would take. It would be cutting my brain off from my heart…. something that writing stream-of-consciousness never does.

The Point at Which the Dream Changes

January 29, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

One of my readers, Susan, really got to me in one of my latest entries. In saying this, I mean that it made me think, not that it wounded me in any way. I turned it over and over in my head, because in order to understand why I’m okay with Zac having multiple relationships and me being unsure about whether I will in turn is not because I am scared of managing multiple relationships in person.

I am AuDHD. When I am with someone, I am truly present and in the moment. What I am not good at is getting back to people and being responsible about the feeding and upkeep of a relationship. But Zac being poly takes the pressure off me because he has a lot of the same thought processes as me. He hasn’t defined “neurodivergent,” but in my case……

As Zac’s roommate would say, “the ’tism is real.”

I do not know that when I am not with that person, I would remember to keep them in the loop. This is something that Zac and I have in common, because we understand each other on a truly deep level. We say “how dare you attack me like this?” a lot.

But the point is that neither Zac nor I feel possessive of each other in a way that would impede on our other relationships, because we’re both the kind of people with no executive function.

But in order to understand how I got here, you’d have to understand a journey that started when I was very, very young.

In my childhood, I was told that someday a man would come and he’d be everything I’d ever want. As it turns out, this was true. Even though we broke up, I wouldn’t trade my relationship with Ryan for anything in the world. We took a break for a while to give each other space, but that lasted all of a few years. Now, the chord that runs between us is major in terms of music and close in terms of geometry.

Our schedules haven’t lined up to see each other, but that hasn’t stopped us from chatting online or on the phone when he’s on his way to work. It’s been a while, but it doesn’t matter. We pick up right where we left off, because we both have such tender feelings about each other when we tap into our memories.

I do think that we were both really going through something and needed the experiences of being with the other people in our lives, especially because now Ryan is a father, his son in on the jokes in which I share. What I do not think for a moment is that I didn’t get that fantasy while it lasted.

At the same time I was dating Ryan, I was dealing with all the problems that my emotional abuser put in my head, because I’m autistic and turning those problems into solutions becomes a full-time job. I drifted from Ryan because even if she didn’t mean to do it, she still opened the door to my sexuality by giving me her college journal. It doesn’t matter whether she just didn’t proof it or whether it was on purpose because the effect was the same.

She became a monotropic thought process because I realized that for as many red flags as this woman had, I was on board.

This is not what I think now, but at the time I realized that I was good at active listening, good at pattern recognition on things she didn’t see, and genuinely made her feel better about herself. Nothing about her opening up to me physically was threatening because my excuse was that for a lot of history, our age difference wouldn’t have mattered a damn.

I did not realize it was emotional abuse until I was 36 years old.

Therefore, one of the reasons my relationship with Ryan was so incredibly perfect is that because we met at summer camp, I was away from this woman long enough to connect with someone else in a major way.

Therefore, I spent a lot of time with Ryan before the emotionally abusive relationship overshadowed everything else. If I use the same murder board as Zac’s friends, where my yellow strings are just as important as my red, I’ve been poly since I was 14 years old.

I never had a relationship after Ryan where I could make someone else my first priority, because even though I wasn’t with this person all the time, the monotropic thought processes didn’t go away in her absence. I have a feeling I’m giving a lot of clarity to a lot of people right now……….

So, when I dated my first girlfriend, she was there in the shadows. I’ve never had a relationship where someone isn’t lurking in the shadows, affecting my thought processes to the point where I’m taking my eye off the ball.

I lost being married to it, because when the emotional abuser went away, what I missed most about her were the years we were separated and writing letters to each other. It did a lot to heal the fact that she wasn’t in love with me, but definitely did want me as a yellow string (when it was convenient).

That’s because when we were only writing letters to each other, I had a secret world, an inner landscape to whom I’ve given very few people access. I don’t judge people by how well we get along in bed, but by how well we get along out of it. That’s why my platonic relationships are so important to me. I do not need the safety and security of a full-time boyfriend because I’m trying to be my own person. However, I do know that there is someone in my corner that I could call in any kind of jam. He might not be able to do anything about it, but he would to the best of his ability; I know that because of how I’ve seen him treat his friends over the last year.

Editor’s Note:

To Zac-

I see you. I take in a lot. They’re confused. We are not.…….. xoxo

Here’s where I also stopped believing in monogamy. So many women advertised it on their dating profiles that when I was looking for a partner, I didn’t know what any of the hell all that meant….. then, as I was doing the reading on polyamory, I started learning about AuDHD. Through the combination of all those subreddits, I could listen to other people’s experiences without replying.

I have found so many people that have been on my same pipeline, which runs thusly:

INFJ
ADHD
Coming out as queer
Autism (as a comorbidity)
Nonbinary
Polyamorous

There is a huge crossover between being queer (either through sexual orientation or gender) and neurodivergent. It’s not a circle, but the Venn Diagram is solid.

There is a huge crossover between being autistic and being INFJ, the personality that’s already a thousand years old when they’re born.

There’s a huge crossover between the number of autistic and queer people who have decided gender is not a thing.

And we all recognize that getting our neurodivergent brain is never going to happen, so we adjust our expectations on what can be expected of us in a relationship.

It hasn’t been my outlook on relationships for my whole life. I was single for five years when I met Zac, single for seven before I actually asked him out, and after a year am finally comfortable with how polyamory works and I’m a fan.

However, I would never have thought about it if I was hurting another relationship to do so. For instance, I wouldn’t have asked Dana to open our relationship because it would have hurt both of us…… we both would have felt like we were losing something with each other, not gaining…….. and when we were with other partners, they didn’t like us at all because we really only talked to each other, like we were the main characters instead of our girlfriends.

Part of this is true, part of it is that for a lot of our relationship, we weren’t in the same city; it was a big deal when she called, which added to our partners’ ire. I don’t blame them. But Dana and I would have been better off as friends from the beginning, because we were great at that. Once we dragged our whole family into it, things began to get messy.

I would have given anything at one point for that relationship to last the rest of my life. Just so many things went wrong so fast that staying monogamous was the least of my worries. I had to get out for my safety, and even if we’d had counseling, when you get hit by someone, you don’t take the chance it happens twice.

I’m never going to be one of those people who likes putting all their eggs in one basket anymore, because what I’ve learned is that it’s better for you to have more than one person to fall on. Your entire world doesn’t walk out the door at once. I still feel this way about Supergrover, because the way I wrote to her was so regimented that it feels like a bit of a loss….. not so much because of her, but because I’m having to reroute a lot of impulses. In some ways, I’ll never give those up,because I see things that remind me of her all the time.

Polyamory is a system adjusted to me, rather than me having to fit into yet another system in which I have to social mask my way through it. It’s easier not to social mask in front of Zac because since we’re both neurodivergent, he’ll always have empathy even if he can’t have sympathy.

He said something to me that meant a lot, which is that our relationship is not “cutesy.” I don’t want that type of relationship because it leads to “acting as if.” I’d rather have emotional bravery and he’s shown me he has it.

So, in short, it’s not that I never wanted a marriage that lasted decades. I could have pictured it with Ryan, Meagan, and Dana. It just didn’t work out that way. I think it ultimately turned out better than I could have imagined. In no world would I have gotten the space to write what I needed to write out of someone jealous, because they simply would have tried to sabotage my writing time because spending time together is obviously the most important thing in my life, and any time away from each other means that I need room to cheat.

That leads to the millions upon millions of partners justifying why it was right to go through someone’s phone. I feel like if you can’t trust your partner to the point where you feel you need to go through their phone, your intuition has already given you an answer…… and doesn’t make you judge, jury, and executioner when you have no moral leg to stand on invading someone’s privacy.

You don’t have to confirm how someone else feels. You have to confirm how you feel in therapy, because you’re not going to change someone else.

I have done too much trying to change people in the past by writing about them, and not because changing people works. People have to want to change from the inside out, and sometimes hearing how I really feel about something puts new light on what their behavior is doing to me, and it creates an understanding that wasn’t there before.

In a relationship, I find it’s more helpful to lead from the back. That if I lay out my insecurities first, you’re more likely to open up to me in return because I’ve made it look not so scary.

Here’s where things get tricky, though. The first is that I make it look easy. In order to lay out my vulnerabilities first, I had to learn how to do that over years. It is not something I learned on the fly, it is something I’ve learned over my whole life.

I’ve always been an observer to human behavior, and I remind myself of Dominick Dunne when he used to write columns for Vanity Fair, covering the trials of the “rich, and the very, very rich.” In some ways, I feel like I’m trying to be Rachel Maddow, weaving my experiences in and out so that my emotional connections and how they come together are as researched as my intelligence special interest turned up an autistic amount.

This is because it’s one thing to get a soundbite from someone, and rare to get an essay, particularly one that goes through an entire range of emotions about one person. Understanding that range of emotion in a person is very important to communication with them, because it gives them more context on me than I will ever have on them.

However, just like with my readers, I have a bubble with them, too. Just like I invite my readers to be vulnerable in the comments, I invite my friends to be vulnerable by opening up to them in person (as well as I can without stumbling over my words because it’s verbal). People tell me things and both love and hate it. I do not stop writing about someone when I’ve said something that they haven’t liked. I’ve stopped writing about them altogether because they’ve proven that they aren’t supportive of me as a writer, because doing that doesn’t look like only being adored. You’ll get your moments, I promise you. But you won’t get all of them, because no one can.

We are divine in our messiness, not in our ability to keep things under control.

All of my thought processes combine to make me “messy,” and honestly one of the things I started wondering when I started exploring poly was whether it was actually fair to be this intense all the time around one person. No one can be my everything because they’ve all burned out under that plan.

But again, I believed the fairy tale. In some ways, I got it.

But there came a point when the dream just changed.

I’m Racing Against the Clock

January 17, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?

In order for this to count today, I have to have it in by midnight. It’s 11:09 PM. So, if there’s a Monty Python ending, it’s because I’ve realized it’s 12:59.

Love this week came in one screenshot:

First of all, I didn’t even know I was building suspense (in my fiction entry, “Words Are Hard, Part I“). The entry is called that because the box of writing prompts that Zac got me for Christmas are packaged as a game called “Words Are Hard,” and that’s the first prompt I picked up that really spoke to me.

Rebecca has been living in my head for ten years now, as have Gregory, Leila, and Kermit. I just wasn’t sure what direction to go with them, so I came up with what I hope was intelligent fiction, because it can’t be accurate enough to be fiction about intelligence.

JL Henry is a relatively new friend of mine, introduced to me by Tyler Moore. They’re both accomplished novelists, and they run a podcast called “The Quill Drivers;” they’ve both been amazing about teaching me tips and tricks to get readership….. and with readership comes the possibility of Facebook paying me. I’ve thought they should for years, but no one asked me.

The blessing of my life was when Tyler said, “join my writing group.” I said, “I’m not a fiction writer. Are there other bloggers?” He said there weren’t many, but writing is writing. And now I have a whole box of cards and a Facebook group called “The Writer’s Forum” that will beat me like a red headed stepchild when I need it.

It’s solid growth in the direction I need to go, and it meant leaving behind some beautiful things. I am in the position of finding the next beautiful, starting with Zac and his box of ~~torture devices~~ writing prompts.

For my readers that have already heard that story, you haven’t heard that I feel loved because my “date” for dinner with my sister got snowed out, so we planned a staycation over Valentine’s Day. So, this year the love I’ll give is the kind you want to give someone you’ve known and loved since before they were born.

Let me tell you. Methodist Hospital never knew what hit it.

You May Be Entitled to Compensation…. Probably

January 6, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ringing It In

December 31, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I know it’s popular to go out on New Year’s Eve, but tonight I am actually sitting in the dark, with the noise turned down to zero except for the fireworks (oy with the fireworks already). It’s a combination of a lot of factors. The first is that Zac is off on a mini-vacation, I have a headache that might have prevented me from going out, anyway, and I’d like to close out the year with something good.

My last post of 2023 lets me say two things. The first is that long ago, I said that I was writing my love story with Supergrover, not that it was mutual, but that it was mine. Over 10 years, we grew to accept each other; I couldn’t imagine my life without her and I didn’t right up until I wasn’t given a choice. I couldn’t let her get away with letting me feel so bad all the time. I wasn’t guessing right, and I was getting punished all the time for not being able to read her mind. It began to outweigh her mama wolverine claws coming out when other people hurt me, because she was closer and more important to me than absolutely any of the others.

I would have been much happier if for once, she turned the wolverine claws on herself. I could acknowledge when I was the problem. She couldn’t. She’d tell me she was licking her wounds, but not what they were. So, I listened to all of her pain without her being specific enough for me to change anything. She lumped it all together, as if she wasn’t my Evelyn, my everything everywhere all at once. She overfocused on the negative and ignored the positive, because I don’t think she believed my feelings could run that deep. But it’s okay. It’s what I meant by “she’ll never know what she lost,” because she got under my skin. I mean, absolutely set me on fire. I used it to become a better writer, and if I do sell books in the future, absolutely every dollar has been inspired by her in one way or another.

I don’t have to write about her at all to write about her, because she’d come across even better in fiction than she would in real life. She’s one of the few personalities I’ve met that could walk onto a procedural and act like she owned the place. If you’re one of her closest friends, they’ll never find the body.

Sometimes I worry about the things she keeps in her safe, the place in her heart where I reside; it’s not just me, though. I genuinely care about Michael and the rest of her whole famn damily. They’ve got someone out there loving them that they can receive whether they return it or not.

I said in “All the Things You Never Knew” that it was our love story and how it grew to accommodate both of us….. and I desperately hope that will continue, but in a very faraway, dreamlike state. I think I’m still in shock that when I laid out everything I was dealing with, she told me to go find new friends. After 10 years, if you can’t lay it down, we don’t have a future until you get yourself together. I do not have time for her if she does not have time for me.

The problem is not that I didn’t want the friendship she had to offer. It’s that our problems are too wide and deep to continue that dynamic without resolving the monster conflict that lies underneath. So, if I wrote 614,000 words this year and multiply that by 10, I have written at least 60 books that all have a thread of her running through it. And that’s not including the long e-mails that I’ve crafted especially for her. It’s a lot, and I’m sure it’s overwhelming.

But she’s a lot.

I would never have been changed to this degree by someone who couldn’t think faster than me. I don’t think my thoughts are better or worse, but AuDHD moves fast and furious with someone who’s a special interest. I wanted to resolve this conflict, and I got overwhelmed with talking to a brick wall. That didn’t mean I didn’t want her care, connection…… it meant I wanted more of it and was jumping up and down for attention by not doing it, then popping off with rage the longer I resented it.

But our anger feeds the other’s to an enormous degree, so we’re magnetic and repel as often as we attract. I feel sad because I only wanted to be on the fridge. Whether she chooses to be my yellow string or not, she only has to grab onto it, because I will deal with anyone’s red flags as long as they have a commitment to dealing with them on their own. If I have to learn conflict resolution, why don’t you (plural, true in every conflict everywhere and not a slam).

Here’s healthy for you.

I was really missing Zac, so I asked him if he had any time in the next couple of weeks. I just need to decompress and I love being at his house just as much as I love being with him. What I really love is when he works from home, but whether he’s there or not it’s very quiet. When he works from home, it’s still quiet. His office is kitty corner to his bedroom, so all I hear is him typing, and occasionally taking a call- but that’s rare because most things in intelligence are done in writing. But to be clear, I don’t know what’s classified and what’s not, so I tune everything out or close the door. I love that we’ve reached the stage where it doesn’t matter whether he’s home or not, I’m welcome and I know it, constantly.

So, he proposed a couple of dates, and I said “either work for me.” He said, “we’ll see.” I responded by saying “I don’t understand.” He didn’t get back to me and I was still thinking about it, so I said, “this unsettles me. You gave me a couple of dates, so I thought you already had them cleared, and you haven’t expressed lack of interest before, so it confused me.” I’m paraphrasing, because I told him that it came off as lack of interest, not that he actually meant it.

He responded by saying that no, it had nothing to do with lack of interest, just that now he didn’t know which days were good for him. Matter solved immediately, no bullshit. I didn’t give into my anxiety and start tiptoeing around him because I thought he was put off by me. It clears up a lot when instead of sitting in your bad dreams, you just ask if you’re right first.

It also helps when you believe everyone the first time, because after that it’s your anxiety to manage. Their actions will tell you whether they’re hiding something, and so will your intuition. But you can’t go on that until you just plain confront the situation, because perception is not reality.

What I’ve written a book about is how not confronting a situation made it a whole lot worse. I wonder all the time what would have happened if we’d just been big people and met up to really resolve everything. But if she was uncomfortable about that, all I asked is that she be more like Zac- you don’t have to manage my anxiety, but could you at least lay down the law all the time so that I’m not shooting in the dark as to how to love you so that you feel it?

60 books.

And whether it comes back around to writing another book or not depends on the coauthor, because contrary to popular opinion, I am not a dictator. I don’t wish for good communication because I live in this faraway land. It’s necessary for every relationship on earth. I am not special, and neither is anyone else in this regard.

So, in all of these volumes, it brings me to the second thing that the last post of 2023 allows me to say. Another author noticed me, a very good one, and recommended that everyone get involved with reading me. She also said that there was a tremendous depth to my work, and it made every tear worth it.

I can assure you, there’s been at least 614,000.

We Have Covered This

December 24, 2023December 24, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Who are the biggest influences in your life?

I laughed to myself when I wrote that title, because everyone I write about is a big influence. I can’t think of anyone that has affected me more in both good ways and bad than going back over my years and seeing what happened.

Zac is my biggest influence right now, because for Christmas he got me a box of cards with fiction challenges on them. I may start a different blog for that, at his suggestion for his own site, because it would look disjointed to have fiction and non together. I will wait and see whether I’m actually prone to publishing the results first.

Speaking of Mr. Wood, I had no idea that a comment and a blog entry about me was written by him, because I absolutely didn’t see the play on words with “Mr. Would.” I was reading too fast and I saw “Mr. World.” But even if I had read it correctly, it wouldn’t have helped me, because Zac didn’t mention that he was a blogger. I am looking forward to another blogger in the house, because I need to know how it feels to be written about, and I can’t think of a person that sees more of my range of emotion.

That doesn’t make it not funny that I didn’t know that Mr. Would was actually my boyfriend. This is because I thought I was going to meet someone new in the area, and was surprised to see t hat we’d already met. We’ve been dating for a YEAR and I didn’t know he had a blog. A YEAR. YEAR, people. A YEAR.

Now I’m really laughing.

He was probably gathering intelligence to see how good an idea it was to tell me he was a blogger, and that just makes me laugh harder because of course I’m kidding. I have the same philosophy as Bryn. “Write what you want, we’ll work it out.” He actually took me to the mat over traveling, and that’s what made me think I had a superfan on my hands. He said that I didn’t include places I’d said I’d wanted to go before, and was surprised I didn’t mention them again. So, I have this entire ass blog entry written about me by MY BOYFRIEND, and all I got was a pingback.

No, it is AS IF he listens to me, and I could cry when I think about that intensity. I know I am valued because when I say something, he remembers it. I have never been in a relationship with someone so much like me, with the possible exception of Dana. The thing is, though, she would adore Zac as well because he’s like both of us. Neurodivergent and also in the military. Neither Dana nor I have served, but her dad was a Marine and she speaks acronym. I definitely have a type, and it doesn’t have to do with looks. It has to do with the way someone thinks.

So I’m sitting there reading like, “does he memorize my shit?!”

The only reason I didn’t think of Zac at all is that this has happened before. I know I’ve mentioned it, but for new readers there was Stephanie (at least, I think that was her name, it was years ago). Stephanie invited me for coffee through a dating site (the miracle is that I said yes). I sent her my URL because I separate the children from the adults fast. If you can’t handle that I’m a writer, we’re not going to have much in coommon.

Stephanie proceeded to read back four years’ worth of entries, and then pretended like my blog was law and I couldn’t change. It was an hour’s worth of “now you’re saying this, but four years ago, you said….”

I’d gotten divorced, moved to DC, and my mother died in relatively quick procession. But of course no one changes because of anything as simple as that.

But right now, I can’t dwell on anything in my real life, because tonight is not about me. Jesus is one of the biggest influences in my life, and it’s almost time. Mary can sense it. Her water is about to break. Right now? This very moment? I’m just waiting for the baby.

Tonight Luke will come out in his scrubs, and announce that he’s here. The baby that will one day change the world. Tonight is the night that the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin, we can touch the face of God.

The miracle is not that Jesus was a virgin birth, but that he survived at all. Can you really imagine being a baby and lying that close to cow shit? Can you imagine delivering your son in a barn? It was so long ago that they didn’t know about germs, so it probably wasn’t as scary for Mary because she didn’t know what could happen, but we do.

If your baby got that close to death, don’t you think they’re divine?

On this Christmas Eve, know that it doesn’t take a miracle to make someone a child of God. We were all born innocent, and we make the decision to resurrect ourselves all the time. It’s the message we’re missing in the middle of the mess.

Whether or not tonight means that The Messiah is being born is irrelevant to me, because this is not a story about magic. This is a story about mystery.

Jesus survived, and the odds were stacked against him. So, in remembrance, I’m mentally gathering the layette. I’m buying everyone blue bubble gum cigars. I’m writing the announcement for the newspaper. It’s all I can do, this waiting.

My area is by the Pepsi machine.

Thinking and Its Implications

December 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I think out loud by writing, and I don’t consider others’ feelings when I’m writing if the relationship is so long gone and irreparable that it doesn’t matter what my feelings are anymore. It’s why I dive into memories vs. writing about my current life. It is easier to write about people once they’re gone, because what I have noticed is that according to the people around me, I am only a good writer when I say nice things.

It is a truism that when you’re a blogger, people love when you say glowing things about them and hate you when you call it like you see it from both ends of the spectrum. If I am going to describe life as it is from my own perspective, you’re looking at my painting. But for the people in my life, it’s a mirror. Bryn likes it when I write about her because she likes the mirror I hold up. She gets that not everything is going to be sunshine and roses all the time, but it will be both ends of the spectrum for the rest of our lives. She’s so much a part of my journey now because her philosophy is “say what you want. We’ll work it out.” Zac has basically said the same thing, I just can’t get specific about where he works or anything like that. I say that because he said that to me, not because I actually want to write about Zac at work.

The only notable things about Zac working in an intelligence agency are that he has access to the best gift shops and he has seen the seal on the floor at Langley and I haven’t because God is unfair. After that, it’s more fun to talk about “our home life.” Tomorrow I’m going to his house for date night, and then the next night is his Solstice Party. I think I’m going to help him get ready (he took the day off work), and see how it goes. I might feel like going to a party, I might leave before it really gets going. I have a love/hate relationship with parties, because it’s way too much sensory overload and yet necessary to meet people. You forget how important socialization is when you go too long without it.

I need to move forward and have more life on which to reflect, because I’ve mined what I need to mine about this chapter. It feels over, because I’ll always accept Supergrover back into my life, but I will not seek her out. It needs to stop mattering to me, and it can, because I don’t have to carry my feelings around with me. They’re already here.

She could have gone radio silent for any number of reasons, but I have a wait and see attitude about all of it. It has never been true that she’s stopped reading, and it’s never been true that she doesn’t have feelings for me. She does, they’re just very different. I am lost because I don’t know what they are, and I’m tired of being treated like a judgmental dickhead when I am expressing emotions like an adult. If someone shuts you down every single time, it’s a toxic pattern. It also means I don’t have the right to tell her to change, I have the right to need it and the right to walk away when she can’t provide it.

The easiest way to get out of a conflict is to tell someone that they’re wrong or crazy because there is no problem.

And at the same time, I thought about the implications of saying that she was more important to me than Dana, because I absolutely meant it in a way that Dana would concretely understand. It was not a value judgment, but phrase with many different meanings, none of them meaning my love for one or the other was greater, but the priority list.

Supergrover doesn’t think she has a problem with being avoidant, she things I have a problem because I think in order to have good communication, she needs to stop running from it. The reason there’s so much rage is that we both have unresolved conflicts (emotional and professional) and all our reactions about more shallow things come from that black hole.

So, if I’ve said something that made her run from me, it’s 100% something we could work out, but I won’t go back to a relationship in which I am always wrong, and then if I complain about it, all of a sudden I’m extremely impressive……… but the change in tone goes back to “you’re a dickhead” almost immediately. I was not crazy to notice this, and it’s not a bad thing to want to correct it. It’s a bad thing if nothing changes and I put up with feeling horrible not to rock the boat.

I feel like most of our problem is that I’ve written her beautifully crafted pages over the years, but I haven’t met her in person. It takes away my barriers to communication in some ways, and not in others. Her tone is so brusque it feels like she’s angry all the time. It became her tone with me because I hurt her, and it never went back to how she talked to me in the beginning. I could understand in the immediate aftermath. I can’t understand 10 years later. If this was some kind of joke, it wouldn’t have lasted 10 years.

I think about the word associations I have with her all the time, because lines she wrote run through my head and they’re funnier coming out of my mouth. I owe her a lot of royalties on a few of them.

The problem is how to extricate myself from the relationship, because it’s one that’s not inherently easy to stop myself. There are so many things that are unresolved and I am getting closure on my own. It’s not that I don’t want input, none has been provided.

My story would have been completely different if she’d been open and vulnerable, because then I wouldn’t have had to explain my reactions to you based on what I thought at the time, not what she did. She is not vulnerable, she is running the entire relationship in her own head and not telling me about it. What boundaries are in her head that she hasn’t expressed?

All of them.

This is also not a relationship where I could put toothpaste back in a tube. I didn’t shy away from telling her that, either. That I can’t be a Christmas and Easter friend, because I either have to feed our bond or ignore it and there’s no middle ground. She doesn’t feel as deeply about me as I feel about her, so it wouldn’t make sense to her why I would say something like that.

Lesbians, how easy is it to be in a relationship with the straight woman you absolutely knew was going to wreck you inside and you just decided to enjoy the trip?

It’s so stereotypical I could vomit, and it’s true. If’s every bit as hard as maintaining a relationship with an actual ex, because even though those feelings didn’t exist for them, they are very, very real for you. I put away all that crack smoking foolishness years ago, but it’s still like being in touch with an ex because it’s hard to deal with the loss in priority when our “honeymoon phase” was so explosive. I don’t think I’ve ever had bigger NRE, because her energy is bigger than most people’s. Remembering that kind of dopamine and trying to to maintain a relationship that’s a shadow of its former self is something I’m no longer willing to entertain.

It still feels like a breakup because even though she was never my romantic partner, the loss of response is palpable. She’s unique, and I pride myself that no one will ever love her like I do because the situation was so weird and wonderful that it couldn’t be duplicated in a million years. No one will ever love me like she does, either. It’s just irreconcilable differences, because there was no mediation.

I had to work for a long time to forgive myself for walking into that entire wall of bullshit. The entire course of my life would have changed and I self-sabotaged. I want to get back to my Mama Wolverine, but I want her to hear me when my claws come out, too. I’m younger, smaller, and slower, but I would not hesitate to bite the ankles of her enemies. 😉

Not that she is not capable of being a badass on her own, it’s just my protective nature kicking in just like hers does when I’m butt hurt over something. I suppose now it’s just time to take those feelings away, and feel like “somewhere out there,” that love is being returned. I choose to believe that it is, both because I don’t want to live in enmity and because I know that not telling me her story is not personal. It’s controlling in a relationship not to tell someone your feelings, because then you can blame them for not doing what you wanted. It’s scary to show up to a conversation and say, “I don’t know, either, and this is difficult. I’m willing to work on it. I don’t have the answers, but I showed up.”

It’s the kind of thinking that causes the correct implications.

This Should Be Short, and Yet It’s Not

November 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Name your top three pet peeves.

Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.

Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.

The prompt today is about pet peeves.

My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine years….. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.

Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.

Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.

My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.

If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.

Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. 😉 If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.

I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basically….. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.

Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.

She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.

The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at all…. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.

I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. 😉

I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to make…. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.

That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look good……. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrue…. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.

That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for me…. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.

For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.

The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrong….. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.

It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole story….. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.

She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adam…. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.

Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.

The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. 😉

I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotional…. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.

Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.

So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.

She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.

My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did before……. but not entirely.

“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls

Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.

All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with her…. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.

The last pet peeve is that she’s funnier than me.

In Another Life, Hood to Coast in One Day

November 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Beach or mountains? Which do you prefer? Why?

I seem to have fixed my keyboard issues except for the “a” key. Sometimes it works, sometimes the repeat rate makes me insane because it slows my typing speed to a crawl. Even though I type very fast, I will not sit there and actively look at a typo. So, I did what you do in a tech situation for peripherals. If something breaks, buy a new one. The old one will fix itself immediately. Definitely worked on my Apple Pencil, and it was only $100 for that pro tip…. and you just got it for free.

I accept tips.

If you’re a consistent reader, you just laughed as hard as I did. I hope that when she bought her next Big Gulp with it, she got something good. I love sugar free now, buat as a kid, it was always a suicide…. which is basically a Long Island Iced Tea for a nine-year-old. It’s what we in the US call it when you fill your cup with a little bit of every soda on tap. It’s one of those drinks you remember fondly, and then you go have one out of nostalgia and realize why you stopped.

All of this is background information on why I prefer the mountains to the beach. In the mountains, I can both ski and write. I love to swim, I do not like the beach. I am not afraid of being stung or bitten as I have already been stung by Portuguese men of war. MEN. Apologies to Dana for not getting her out of the way fast enough when she said, “hey. What’s that floating breast implant?”

The funniest part of that incident was a scuba diver telling us to go to a convenience store and buy some chewing tobacco to soak up the stingers. Just mix it with water and make a paste. We needed more soda anyway. Sold. Dana insisted on calling my doctor stepmother. I said, “Dana, if I call her, she’s just going to say that we’re idiots for not believing the subject matter expert in front of us.” So Dana says she’ll call her. I could hear the whole thing and she wasn’t on mute….. The shit eating grin on my face at “ARE YOU CRAZY?” was legendary.

I see into people. I know I do…..

I walked away tremendously satisfied, but it was just another instance of how Dana stepped all over me. I didn’t see it until one of my closest friends pointed it out. That I’d taken on a tremendous amount of responsibility and he was the one that suggested that Dana bring me flowers the night I got home from my first day at work. That she was really thoughtless toward me so much more than I realized. This is not someone who pined for me. This was someone who drove with his girlfriend to help me move- he drove my truck from Portland to Houston with all our stuff, and then I gave it to him as payment.

It was so cool. When I first got it, he gave me a bumper number like the military. He asked me what I wanted, and without blinking I said, “11” (Matt Smith, my favorite Doctor). Then, he spray painted a Dalek on the door- and not even a minimalist symbol, either. It was a whole mood.

In short, this was not a play for me. It was “stop being blind.”

Seven years and I just thought she was loud and boisterous. It didn’t occur to me that especially after she got her DUI, I don’t know if she was drinking more or if she was just angry and felt guilty all the time, but the constant superiority over her memory being infallible and mine being crap didn’t earn her any favors.

I write about memories all the time, and I’m very good at it. I know this because my family says I remember those memories accurately, and you cannot feel good writing about your family until they tell you that. My mother had a very, very good memory and I got it from her. I hate it. I really, really hate it. This is because when I get into an argument with someone close to me- Dana, Supergrover, Meagan, whomever- I am very good about saying “this is a pattern and we need to change it…. and here are the six times it has happened before.” It’s not noticing. It’s not caring. It’s “throwing things back in my face.” Meanwhile, they’re moving the goalpost further away from accomplishing anything. Everything becomes all about my behavior and not attacking the problem together.

Sometimes I just want to be bad at remembering things. It’s not always pleasant. I don’t just remember the good things. It makes my writing better and my feelings disparate. Just like being nonbinary, it’s a spectrum. I have laughed and felt weird the whole time I’m writing…. yet this is not for me later today. This is for me in five years.

You get it today, but I won’t understand it fully until I’ve read it without context. What was happening in the room while I was writing. I don’t remember every entry, but I do remember the hard ones. “Go Tell the Bees” has been the hardest on me in years. Even though it wasn’t all the closure I needed, I did cry all the way through it, which meant several hours of gut-wrenching pain. I dragged it out of me, and I love it so much now that time has passed. In the moment, I published it and walked away. I later recorded it, and had to pause when it became too much.

Even last night when I read the prompt about beach vs. mountains, I thought about what our trip to Coos Bay would have looked like.

I realized after I’d fallen down on the job of trying to be the most perfect friend who ever friended that there was a big difference in my personality and my illness. That I didn’t give two shits about Michael. I’m in a solo-poly relationship, so obviously jealousy is such a problem for me. It was never anything about that. All my social masks failed at once and I was stumbling around, grasping at straws. But we’ve come a long way in 10 years. The last picture she sent me was so incredibly sweet.

I said, “I haven’t had a recent pic of you in a long time. Send me one? Nothing fancy, just want to match a name to a face. Don’t make it weird.” It is a goddamn portrait, the most beautiful picture I’ve ever seen of anyone because in that moment, she just turned the camera around on her front porch, and the way she’s smiling, I know she knows she’s looking at me and no one else. I’ve always loved pictures of her, but I’ve never had one where I just flat out asked and therefore I knew she was thinking of me. She said she must be getting soft in her old age if she was willing to send a pic to anyone, and my heart “grew three sizes that day.” It was a moment I’ll never forget, because she recognized it was a moment, too.

My allergies may or may not be acting up right now….. mostly because even though I love the mountains, I’d never go there ever again for one moonlit walk in our jeans and sweatpants, the uniform of Coos Bay…….. which is in the state where we started and created our own.

Presently, Yes

November 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

Do you trust your instincts?

Janie told me this morning that every lid had a pot, and that I’d move on from having an ill-fitting one. I loved that, because it was an easy way to say you and your beautiful girl are not compatible without saying either of us are bad people. The conclusion she came to at the end was the correct one- I choose to love her whether Supergrover returns my feelings or not- and in my mind, she’s just a memory. I have no reason to believe that I am worth anything in her eyes anymore, because she cannot admit that she is fallible in any real way, cannot take responsibility for fucking anything ever, and blames fuck all on me…… because she can. I acknowledge that I hurt her. Deeply. What she will not acknowledge is that she hurt me, too, and has made it clear that only she deserves things to go back to normal.

I have been jumping up and down for attention by being understanding of all her time issues and endearing quirks, but she thinks I’m jumping up and down for attention when I’m angry because she doesn’t see why I should be angry when her emotions are always locked down. If they weren’t, she’d be passionate about something, too. If she can’t have emotions for the length of a paragraph, and frankly, it would take a lot for me to believe that she can, she doesn’t deserve my friendship. It’s not because being cut off from her emotions is a bad thing. It’s because it leads her to treat me “like a girl.”

She’s butch as FUCK on the inside, possibly more two-spirited than I am due to all her social masking. I also know a thousand women just like her, because that’s what we do to women in Washington. We take college kids like Hillary Rodham and turn them into fucking robots. Washington women have to prove they can run with the boys, and if you want to be powerful, you’re going to be subjected to a litany of dick-measuring contests. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been to Home Depot three different times to get a longer tape measure.

The paragraph above is probably a paragraph she will hate because she does not see how she’s been vetted and how it benefits her to social mask men…. or, she would definitely see that, she would just take exception to the words I used to describe the process because she’s not queer. She doesn’t see the gender spectrum like I do. And that’s okay. This is not trying to force her into thinking my way, because clearly I’m going to think them with or without her consent.

Supergrover is just the last woman in a long line where I made everything all about them. Everything. When they were upset, I’d cower. This was different because this time I actually did something wrong and regretted it, which should have made me run from her and didn’t because I was so afraid, caught in a Catch-22 I didn’t see coming. We don’t have a secure attachment anymore, and every time I’ve tried to say “we have horrible communication,” she’s changed the subject. It was the closure that I missed.

I am only now learning how to trust my instincts. And my instinct is telling me that she will never become less of a problem in my life because I’m never going to be less of a writer. I gave her a choice- work with me or get out of my fucking way.

I’ll miss her.

The Secret Lives of Puppets, by TJ Klune

November 18, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What book are you reading right now?

I can’t tell you anything about this book, really, because I just started it last night. It’s not as fast a read as “House in the Cerulean Sea” or “Under the Whispering Door.” However, I am encountering my first ace character and we are not dissimilar. When I’m not thinking about it, it’s not important. Obviously. There were seven years between Dana and Zac because I was delusional. I wish I could put it better than that, but it was ridiculous to think I could make a mistake like that because it would be something she’d struggle to forgive. That being said, she also made a mistake I’m struggling to forgive, because it changed the course of my life in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for myself knowing so much now that I didn’t then. What is important to me is that I have absolutely no problem with the entire world knowing I was straight up out of my fuckin’ mind, because that’s what made the mistake possible. I was in autistic meltdown and taking it out on her.

Then, I literally got burnout for seven years.

My executive function cratered because I felt so horrible. This is what I mean about her having a husband that can spoil her in a way I would’ve wanted, because I owe her a lot more than he does. She should have gotten all the best parts of me, and she didn’t. People can and do change, but not without a backbreaking amount of emotional work. I loved her so hard, I was willing to sit in the pain of rejection until it didn’t hurt anymore; I wanted us both to forgive each other and move on. I wrote her long letters into the night explaining my feelings to that end.

When they didn’t work, I had to stop the pattern of me needing her so much without her securing our attachment. It felt creepy because at the time I didn’t know I was autistic. I didn’t know I was a monotropic thinker and that every time I fall in love that woman becomes my entire special interest. Additionally, I didn’t love her because she was perfect, I loved us in our imperfections because I felt so powerful virtually “standing next to her.” I was a fool, but it was worth it and it always will be.

I don’t know why she wants me to carry the weight of her indecision, but I don’t have to love it. I just have to live it. It is perfectly ok to stop a toxic cycle and cry myself to sleep until it gets better. 10 years is not nothing, and everyone can tell I’ll never get over it because I won’t shut up about it. One of the friends I consider to be the most precious in my mind gave me that line…. “Leslie, you don’t have to love it. You just have to live it.” After that, I called her “the poet laureate of Skidmore Street.” What I do know is that “It Gets Better.” I don’t ruminate over the women in my past as much as I do Dana and Supergrover because they’re the most recent. The immediate reaction is that she’s my Achilles’ Heel. Over time, this will relax. I just have to let it happen because she seems bound and determined to let it.

This may not be the entire reason, but part of it is that my beautiful girl is so goddamn stubborn. She vows not to respond and does. We have done it to each other so much that it doesn’t mean anything anymore and I’ve stopped trying to make it. What I know for sure is that it could go either way based on past history and I’m prepared for every eventuality. That’s what I meant about being able to see living together (the spinster in the attic) to never speaking again. It’s a wide spectrum because we are as people. We are both so brilliant and so stupid about this. I thought yesterday about writing to her, “I wish you’d take it in that I love you like most people love babies…. that wild, crazy love no matter what their future holds.” I realized that’s how most autistic people I’ve met love others. I hope she sees that I’m trying to social mask the right way, but sometimes things are going to get lost in translation. Neurotypical and neurodivergent are two different languages. She’s speaking Hebrew, and it’s all Greek to me (little Biblical humor for you there). Autistic rage and burnout are tangible, they’re so loud. I don’t mean to be rude or avoidant. I am trying to cope with as much as I can handle, which as it turns out is a smaller amount than I’ve been led to believe.

I have covered my social masking until now. Writing is the only way I knew it existed. Being disconnected from Supergrover’s facial expressions while I talked cost me dearly, but writing letters to each other all the time drew me in, because you can’t social mask if you’re not adjusting at every eye twitch. I have said this before, but virtually it’s easy to go a long way down the wrong road very fast.

I have said that we looked before we leapt, but it wasn’t a bad move. It just needs to be managed, and I’m the only one that wants to manage it. It is unfathomable to me that she doesn’t see my point, so I’m done worrying what she thinks if she’s ignoring all my warning signs. That I am trying to tell her something without telling her something. But I can’t hold it over her head that she’s obstinate. I just have to wait it out and wear the wound on my skin until it becomes healthy, stronger scar tissue.

It’s not hard not knowing how she feels. It’s hard not knowing her reactions to what I write. At the same time, she wasn’t here when she was here, only once telling me I was too close to the hard out and making me afraid I’d ever do it again. I’ve seen her warning rattle enough for a lifetime. She has never seen mine, but mine is not about biting her. It’s about trying not to bite her. I am sure that I have made mistakes that I would absolutely regret in publishing anything, much less about this. But I don’t get to feel regret if you don’t tell me you were hurt and why.

Only strangers respond to my writing because it’s not personal. I respect that and like it very, very much because it means that I can be off in my own little world with my own silly observations and no one cares. The only time my friends respond to my writing, really, is when they’re so angry that they can’t see straight. Every deep, intimate, positive portrayal goes out the window because no one can see their own bullshit or respect that I did and have an opinion about it. This has been true since 2003.

There are only two exceptions to this. Bryn tells me when I’ve written something beautiful, and I love when she loves how I’ve portrayed her. She is the 3D character that sees she’s a 3D character. If we got in a fight, she wouldn’t give two shits what I said here, because talking it out personally is more important. She actually would say “what can I do to ease your mind about that?” The same is true of Supergrover, or was until 2014. After that, I was rightfully “PNG’d back to Langley” (slang at CIA for being demoted to a desk jockey- persona non grata).

I just hate it because we used to be Jack and Greer.

“The Secret Lives of Puppets” touches on this because since the protagonist is ace, the story revolves around deep platonic relationships. Sometimes, the universe sends you the book you need to read at the time you need the words most. Finding this book was a godsend in terms of learning about myself. That I focus on deep relationships whether they’re romantic or not. In fact, in this book, the “puppets” are mostly androids and robots.

Using androids and puppets doesn’t mean that I didn’t already pick up the message that friendship is valuable… and being a writer may not make our friendship continue, but it does make it immortal. She will live in me for a lifetime, and after we pass, our words to each other will still be here.

If people know me at all, they know that I might be a mess sometimes, but I love my friends and want to make all of us live forever.

………even without new dialogue.

Laughing So Hard You Must Send Help

November 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I made pasta with pesto. It was an entire box of spaghetti, so I just ate as much as I wanted and put the rest away. Pasta acts as a sponge and gets dry overnight in the fridge, so rather than eating too-dry pasta, I just made a second sauce. You can do that with pasta, and it tastes better than reheating the same thing. Tomorrow, I might add diced tomatoes.

Today, it was Alfredo. I browned some pumpkin seeds in salted butter, adding garlic powder and black pepper. Then, I added flour. The flour sauteed for a few seconds as I got out my whisk and milk (it’s important to have the heat very low for roux. Gives you more time to catch a mistake). I do not know how much flour. I whisk in milk slowly. I don’t know how much of that, either. If I add too much, it will take longer because I will have to wait for the sauce to reduce before I can add the Parmesan-Romano.

I am a professional cook and do everything by feel and palate. It’s not “being a snob,” it’s 10 years of experience at work, my entire adult life at home. A roux just a 1:1 Tbsp. ratio flour/butter and a half cup of milk being exact, but you can break the rules if you know how to follow them. If I know what the sauce is supposed to look like, I can change gears on the fly, where butter is clutch and flour is accelerator. Some people measure. I guesstimate accurately, and there are very few mistakes in flavor I cannot fix; I really only throw things away if they’re burnt, or, God forbid there’s blood on it now (accidents happen).

I am telling you what to do because I know what I’m doing, not because this is some kind of food magic only I possess… and that’s actually the point of this entry. When I was cooking, I was thinking about one of my last entries in which I talked about running a kitchen at home, and today I was thinking that relationships are so telling by how you work in one. If you are in a relationship, dinner is always a two-man job. I know that this is impossible every single night, I just think that whoever is home should participate. Both “stations” suck, so trade off.

One person is mostly the cook, one person is mostly on dish. There is a chef and a sous, because it’s easier for one person to manage the recipe and assign parts out. The most essential thing that a sous can do is be available. Chop the onions. Grate the cheese. Most importantly, wash every pot and pan as they’re done using it. There are some things where you can cook and clean at the same time, like if I have a rice cooker going and I want sausage to go on top or whatever. Those things are going to be done at such different times that I can handle it.

But having a pot washer is invaluable with pasta because the pasta goes into the collander, then back into the pot. You pour the sauce from the saute pan into the pasta pot so you can mix/reheat. The other person washes the saute pan and the collander, because the person mixing pasta has gone on to plating. Once the food is plated, one person can carry everything out while the other washes the pasta pot.

When the pasta pot is clean, the only thing left is putting plates and silverware into the dishwasher.

It takes teamwork to run a kitchen that smoothly, but it will change your life on days where you eat all three meals at home. Plus, it’s easier for me to social mask around all that stuff. Being in a partnership reminds me to do things like eat.

I look forward to cooking with Zac one day, because he does like it. He buys all kinds of interesting things for me to discover when I’m housesitting, like blocks of haloumi cheese that I seared with za’atar (that was so good I ate most of it right out of the pan). That being said, when we’ve gotten together we’ve either gone out or to Trader Joe’s, where inevitably there will be something new and different we must buy immediately.

My favorite meal we’ve eaten together is Korean fried chicken. I do like the flavor of southern fried chicken, but not like I love this. I could eat soy garlic or spicy chicken every day for the rest of my life (just not exclusively). Most people eat chicken, veggies, and rice in some combination most days. If you have a close, deep, personal relationship with Popeyes, Korean fried chicken will be up there on your list, too. It’s also almost as good to take off the skin if you have to avoid high-fat, because the marinade is just as good as the sauce. Plus, cooking it on the bone will yield better results than taking out the skin and bones beforehand (morbid, yet true). There’s a reason drums and flats are more popular than boneless. Not the same playing field.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I do like chicken nuggets. I just don’t like McNuggets. I think they taste fake. I do like grocery store chicken, like Dino Nuggets. They’re great with a little salt, pepper, and garlic before you put them in the oven. Season them just like you would patties for a chicken sandwich- ditto for vegetarian or vegan Quorn. Quorn nuggets and patties are my go-to at home.

This is because I also like to buy my own wing sauce rather than buying nuggets that are just “Buffalo flavored.” :::stares in Morningstar Farms::: Right now my favorite wing sauce is ghost pepper and tastes more on the Sriracha end of the spectrum than Buffalo. I pair it with Daiya bleu cheese most of the time. If I have time, I’ll make it. Cream dressings are one of the few things that it’s easier for me to make than buy because the ingredients are so cheap. Even if I was a millionaire, it would not make sense to me to pay for mayo I was going to use in a dressing. I would only use the dressing for one night. I would need the preservatives in pre-made mayo.

Thinking about the jobs you have in the kitchen requires both understanding what they want to eat. The thing that my ex-wife and I learned in a restaurant was how to divide up a recipe without thinking, at home or at work (she was my first chef… which is cute to the point of nausea). If she was grilling, I was making sides. If people were coming over and it was a bigger operation, we were both making sides and rotating who went out to flip the bird in front of the neighbors. 😉

The thing that made our relationship work in the kitchen is that I liked making sides and Dana liked grilling, but if she didn’t feel like it, I could grill and she could make sides. Both jobs were important, and we were both outstanding cooks. It was nice to both be competent so we didn’t have to do anything, we chose which jobs we wanted.

In our professional kitchen, I liked making things like eggs, pancakes, and oatmeal. She also liked eggs, but liked being on the meat side of the griddle- I can only assume because she was a butcher (butcher than what?).

When my father got the job in the Heights, my mother met another piano player and they used to do four handed duets together. I loved how all four parts fit together, and there’s not a better description in my mind now that Dana and I were always a two-handed duet and oh, dear God I just heard it.

I can’t top that. I’m dead.

Show Mode -or- Fixed Point in Time

November 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

My isolation is thinking about The Gospel of Billy Joel:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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