Tag: love

The River

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What brings you peace?

As I went down in the river to pray
Studyin' about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way.....

I started this morning by singing.

I am not sure that it brings my housemates peace, but that’s not my issue.

Yesterday, I got some clarity about the relationship with Supergrover that I hadn’t had before. Her reactions looked like they have for the last eight years. She dismissed everything I was saying except the worst of the worst, when it’s not important. The things I say that are positive are every bit as powerful if only she’d take them in. But she’s not looking for that from me. From me, she wants something she can rail against, or at least, that’s how it comes across to me.

Not once has she asked me why I wrote something I did.

Not once in all of this current round of fights has she picked out anything nice to say about me. Yes, I will absolutely lose my shit at times. I will also freely hand over a large amount of love. But you can’t take it if you don’t see it. I hope that I’m getting through to her, but what I have realized is that it doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be happy with a relationship that consists of me writing something and her telling me how horrible it is that I’ve said something instead of trying to comprehend it.

You can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go, and I’m done letting her bang her purse on my head. I’ve tried too hard, and it made no difference. She is allowed to think the worst of me, because I have now done enough within myself to know that her words are complete bullshit because she’s taking everything at face value and writing off the negative as something I’m doing to spite her.

I’m not describing my emotions and my life in 3D, I have been hurt in some way and must feel like I need to destroy her.

You don’t get sentences as full of love from me as mine were if I think you’re a villain in the story. She’s not the villain, but she is definitely the antagonist. Instead of talking about it, both presenting our issues and reaching a consensus, she has walled off at every turn. It’s demoralizing to an enormous degree, because to me it’s like she became a totally different person. She couldn’t see my love and attention as a good thing.

I’m tired of having my peace disturbed, and yet there’s always going to be one more thing before she goes. Always. I could be more consistently loving if I felt it back, because there would be so much less anger involved. I could stop saying that I’m done and not done, because there’s something about the relationship that’s truly worth saving. I wonder all the time how we got to this place. How many twists and turns the path has taken, all of them good in retrospect and hell on earth then.

The thing that will stick with me is that over the last eight years, I have had fewer and fewer instances of days where she was genuinely happy and willing to reciprocate the good stuff. She has no problem expressing anger, and I hate it when I’m the target based on something I wrote with absolutely no context for what I was going through when I wrote it.

Exhaustion has set in. I think of her as the past now, because she doesn’t want a future and has told me that too many times, while also reaching out. But I’m not innocent here. I’ve also called it quits and reneged. What is interesting to me is that we kept up that fight for years without truly walking away.

I had to need peace bad enough to say the relationship wasn’t worth it. That I couldn’t live with shitty communication no matter whether we were at fault or whether it was a reflex of being virtual, not having the smarts to change mediums when it was possible.

It leaves me with a sense of panic as I move forward, but that’s because everything is unfamiliar and new, not that I’m incapable.

I have said all of this before in a hundred different ways, but it’s not for her. It’s to remind me to stay strong, that my complaints were valid…. that just because it’s not important to her, that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Her life is so big that I can see why I’ve always been in last chair, but I didn’t think I had a leg to stand on until I did.

Breaking the pattern of trying to please her so that we both got what we needed was the wrong answer for the relationship, but the right answer for me. That’s because she’s not listening to me, but I am.

I cannot tell her that I love her even when she’s angry, because she wouldn’t believe it. She stole my peace. I was writing some of the best pieces to ever come out of me whether they were angry or lovesick. She’s bound and determined to treat me as if she has low self-esteem, because if she didn’t, she would believe the positive things I say.

She would believe that I think she’s absolutely gorgeous.

She would believe that I love her anger, because when she stands up for herself, I teach myself my own value.

One of the most painful aspects of our relationship is that I’ve written this set of entries more than once, and either something I say will bring her back around, and perhaps part of seeing all the negative for her is having the will to walk away when she didn’t before.

It makes it easier to walk away when you’re angry, but it doesn’t bring you peace. I think that’s a large part of why we’ve tried so hard. Neither one of us really wanted to leave things unresolved.

I let out all my anger, she keeps hers in. I don’t think it’s personal to the two of us, necessarily. I just think she keeps a lot under wraps and this is just part of it.

This is because there is an instance in our past where she didn’t tell me something because she wasn’t sure of my reaction….. but that once became all the time.

I cannot fault her for this because I made it happen, but I can say she does bear responsibility in shutting down two-way communication. She doesn’t open up, ever, just blames me that I want those things from her. Everything is not good enough for me, when I just thought it was time to fish or cut bait because I was tired of my thoughts and feelings being invalid. That I could either walk on eggshells or not have a relationship with her at all. This is not a one-sided problem. My anger management is just now coming to fruition, because I literally needed years of distance to get over what happened between us.

I changed, desperately seeking self-compassion because I knew I could not get compassion from her while she was angry. While I was changing, she wasn’t. She’s still in the same emotional place I left her, because I realized that my anger needed to tamp down on its own, and part of the anger was everything she wasn’t saying.

She didn’t take in that our agreement was stepping into a river and going with the flow. My positive emotions were getting dammed at every turn. She stood in the negative emotions, bathed in them, took them as fact.

The entry she referenced said something about her not being able to steal happiness anymore, but she didn’t ask me why I said it. I needed to stop the neurodivergent urge to explain things more and better, and if the person isn’t listening, to try and keep explaining until you’re understood. I didn’t do anything by explaining it one time, so surely six will do it.

I learned that I needed less of all of it, because I could find the things that made me unhappy. I could not find the things that gave her joy.

As I went down to the river to pray, I learned when I studied the good old way, it just wasn’t that great.

When we should have baptized each other and walked away clean.

Rose

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Doctor Who has been running in the UK since 1963, but not continuously. “Rose” is the title of the first of what is now called “New Who.” Every day, I realize that her story tells mine, because if you watch her story from beginning to end, you see mine so clearly without me actually having to say anything.

Most people don’t see what happens when the TARDIS lands on their lawn in real life. Doctor Who doesn’t even really take the companions’ families into account. I have seen the look on Mickey’s face, and I never want to see it ever again.

I didn’t run toward Supergrover because she was romantically interested in me. I ran toward her because I could not travel and stay in place. Time always moved forwards, but at different rates in all three of my lives. Doctor Who showed me characters that suffered just as much under these constraints as I did. That it got harder and harder to go back to Mickey when you were fighting alien battles on distant planets or seeing the last day on Earth.

And, just like in the show, companions get tired and want to go back to their real lives.

The Doctor hates goodbyes.

I had that moment just like Rose did, of feeling butterflies. But they never mattered. Therefore, the way I feel is that there is a thread of me in every companion. That I am definitely Rose because I fell in love with The Doctor. That I am definitely Martha because she fell in love with The Doctor and got over it. I am definitely Clara because I am The Impossible Girl. I am definitely Amy Pond because I got used to waiting on my suitcase. I am also Amy in that I’d like to have other romantic interests while we are traveling together, and that is a delicate balance. I couldn’t move on with my life while our relationship was unclear because our agreement would have changed the world. I couldn’t go to another person and say “I’m with you, but only up and to a point.” Not many partners love when the TARDIS lands, but they’re fucked because they know anyone would go. It’s not personal.

Because she physically travels and I don’t, it is very much a relationship of convenience because I don’t have to care what time it is. Maybe she’s up, maybe she’s not. Best case scenario is when I get her on a long haul flight. It’s not that it really matters, just the image of her curled up reading my words means more than she has ever imagined.

Our relationship creates responsibility for me. The companions know up front that they’re going to do things no one will understand and people just have to roll with it. They’re going to show up at the same party but forget that they need to change back into their original clothes. I made it where my life could accommodate this because it was too hard trying to manage two lives.

We had different emotional requirements. Hers was always to move forward, and it irritated her that I wrote backwards because she didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t see it as affecting her future. That the fights would continue to occur because we weren’t actively seeking common ground. At no time did that mean I wanted to stop being the one who stands there and watches her be clever.

The Doctor deserves that.

The only thing that The Doctor has is that her magic is created by real-life situations, and theirs is created by who they are. They can change things because they are Time Lords. No one asked them, they just showed up.

I am also River Song, born of the time vortex, but as a child, before she knew how her story with Amy and The Doctor would end. This is because I knew that my destiny was to be a companion, and not The Doctor’s Wife. Bonded to them by circumstance, happenstance, yet bound nonetheless. I hate to say that Supergrover missed a lot by not watching that show, but that’s not my call. 😉

That’s because she would have learned the sense of duty that being a companion requires. How there is no love greater than to lay down your life for your friends. That I didn’t make a sacrifice because of anything but it needed doing.

I heard the emergency brakes, and I grabbed my suitcase.

I thought of Michael and me as every companion combination ever, but it was humorous to picture him as Alex Kingston (River Song). That’s because everyone else has been more of a dalliance and River Song is the real deal. They are married in canon.

The problem in all my relationships has been how to explain this one. I can’t believe it’s been under my nose the whole time.

I am Jack Harkness, the relentless flirt that still does everything for everybody no matter how he feels. He can die on command. 😛

This is also me every time my beautiful girl makes me blush. I love it when my cheeks get hot because she’s struck comedy gold, and I hope to bring it out more when I write about her character. I want to be 3-dimensional in the best way possible. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know what “Flat Stanley” means, but I have taken it to mean a term of endearment because there’s no way on God’s green earth that it’s true.

But if I hold the right to give her my feelings as fact, so does she.

The fact is that because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she has no idea the capacity for love that my friendships entail. They aren’t modeled very often. Maybe Will and Francie on “Alias.” I loved the Benedict Cumberbatch film “Courier,” because it was a very good example of the kind of platonic love story I would write if I could. Friendships like that cover all sorts of genres, and I could write Shirley Maclane and Olympia Dukakis in my sleep.

Supergrover will absolutely slap Ouiser Boudreaux, and sometimes it’s me.

Doctor Who is a big enterprise I’m using to describe this relationship because it’s international. I use the love of God in equal measure, mostly because God brings many names and I think one of them is The Doctor. There aren’t really many examples of doing what needs to be done, and I’ve met two of them. It was only in retrospect that I learned I’m one of them.

If there’s anything that Supergrover did for me that means more than all the other stuff combined, she proved to me that I was capable of being a companion.

Every one has that moment where they go from freaked out to being able to hang. Supergrover just didn’t know how that presented, and I didn’t handle it well. I felt like I was in the TARDIS alone a lot of the time,

Now is the parting of the ways, but I am not stepping away. I know that if you hear the emergency brakes once, you’re likely to hear them again.

I don’t want to go.

I Don’t Admire Professions

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What profession do you admire most and why?

In the United States, we have a tendency to focus on what we do for money, even at parties. It’s not a party conversation, but we have them all the time. Washington can be soulless like that. I have had several people see me out and about with my sister. When she walks away, they ask me how much money she makes. First of all, ask her that. Second of all, she’s a Democrat. AIM LOW.

I make Washington less soulless because even though Lindsay’s crowd is political, my words are not and they need a break. You can see the table relax when my sister says, “This is Leslie. She’s a writer.” Or “she’s a cook.” The writer thing is only seen as positive when both of us make it clear I’m not a journalist. That’s a tupperware party I’m just not going to host. The difference is that if someone knows you’re a journalist, they’ll monitor everything they say because they think you’re looking for sensitive information. Bloggers don’t do that. They’re looking for a slice of real life, and politics is anything but that.

I’ll give you a for-instance in a completely fictional example that could indeed happen the longer I live here.

If Kamala Harris and I met, I would not remember the date or time. I would not remember much of what she said. But I’d remember the way her hair sparkled in the sun, whether her hugs were memorable, whether she smelled like generic soap or a perfume I’d recognize, definitely whether she was wearing Chucks or not.

I wouldn’t even say on my web site that I met Kamala Harris, most likely, because the higher you go in government salary, the less of your schedule is published. I wouldn’t want to say that I met her on a day she was supposed to be in Ukraine. In Washington, you learn to think like that no matter who your friends are, because you know you’ll have to do it for at least one person in your life, so why not do it for all of them? I doubt there would ever be a scenario in which I met a public figure at a time where they weren’t supposed to be there, but it is the nature of living in the federal city and not watching them on the news.

If I did respect a job, it would be journalism. I am very, very picky though. I figure out my favorite columnists and stick to them like glue (Shane Harris, Greg Miller). I will buy their books (I have most of David Halberstam’s, several of Rachel Maddow’s, and “The Apprentice” by Greg Miller). As I was telling Supergrover, I like to read novels, but I do not like to write them. I find that journalism jogs my brain for blogging, and I am in a rut with fiction because I am working on my own content right now. Novels will come back soon. I have just gotten into the groove. I don’t think “let’s go see what’s on the Internet today.” I think, “let’s go make the Internet today.”

Disrespect of someone’s profession comes from years and years of being tired of listening to complaints about people’s lives. If they don’t like what they do, why should I ask them? I would much rather ask them what they love. This works with anyone, because everyone has that thing. For me, it’s writing content for the web…. but not because it makes me popular. It’s that when I didn’t have any readers at all, I changed myself an entry at a time. Just because other people read my entries now doesn’t mean that it’s not all about self-improvement. I do the same thing I’ve always been doing. I wake up, think about my life for a few minutes, and the urge to write wakes up hungry.

I want to hear about that fire in other people. For Supergrover, it was also writing, She’s a blogger and writes children’s fairy tales that I hope to God one day I am old enough to understand. She writes clearly and beautifully, but what I mean is that I do not have a child’s heart anymore……… but she does. I will never carry a tenth of her little-kid wonder.

For Bryn, it’s all kinds of things. She likes cooking, gardening, making, being outside, having dogs……. all of it is creativity she pours into her relationships with animals (and dirt).

For Zac, it’s all the same stuff Bryn does on a smaller scale. He loves hiking and being outside with Oliver. The fact that what Zac does for money is my real life interest is a new thing. I am never more interested in what he has to say than when it’s about life inside his intelligence agency. His is a generic one that collects raw data from all the others, but he has the backstage pass to places like CIA and NSA.

It’s nice to know that even if I only have lawn seats, I can giggle with Zac after the show.

And yet it’s another relationship in which our interests feed each other to an enormous degree, because what I want to know isn’t even close to classified. It’s not important to me whether he has chatter on Iran, although I will definitely be listening to that if he does. It’s that he can tell me what his day to day life is like. He tells me when he’s going into a  no personal gadgets building, and because we’re both on the think it, say it plan, when I’m on a government computer and when I’m not (as in sending to his work computer). I learn what circumstances dictate being in a SCIF vs. why he’s actually there. Does that make sense? I want to know everything without knowing anything.

I’m dating the man who’s president of his queer group at the agency and it’s definitely not “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military anymore. Zac is also in the Navy Reserves, and I want to hear about every waking moment of that, too. That’s because he got to learn what it was like to walk into other countries and have people know they were talking to an intelligence officer based on past history with other people………… and being able to sniff them out so that he can deflect questions in advance.

I called him an intelligence officer, but I’m using a generic term because I don’t know military slang. He was active duty in the Navy and his job was intelligence. What that’s actually called is beyond me. Now, he works at a national intelligence agency and does his Navy stuff as a side gig. 😛

If I tell you what I love, it’s going to be reading and writing. But people vastly underestimate how much I actually write because blog entries seem like they take a very long time. If I’m going full stream of consciousness like I do on this blog every day, I type as fast as I think and generate about a page of single spaced type every two or three minutes. I have found that I am getting faster at this by writing every day, because it’s difficult to sum up a week at once. Much easier to sum up a few hours.

Even the conflict I was talking about the other day doesn’t matter now. I thought I was being told one thing, I was being told another. Once the communication freakout was over, I got back in on the ground floor of something exciting. Doesn’t mean the conflict wasn’t worth remembering in the past. Just that I’m glad it all resolved in the best way possible for all parties.

But no one takes into account just how long it takes to nurse an idea, or how long I slave over other ideas in addition to blogging.

I have also learned something important. If I want to be successful at a party, tell everyone I’m a professional cook. If I don’t, tell them I’m a writer.

So I suppose that if I admire a profession, it’s writing……. only because someone has to.

It might as well be me.

Observations, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am spread out on Zac’s bed as Oliver cuddles my feet. Zac is in New Orleans, so I’m on puppy duty. I don’t like being here while he’s not here as much as I do when he is, but Oliver is a 24 hour friend. He is just there for me and all my dog-cuddling needs.

I’m grappling with how to move on in one sense and how to stay in another. Being present and showing up, but also being sensitive to my friends’ needs as well. No one is more important, I just have to struggle with how much I’m willing to take on at any given moment. I have reached my breaking point, but it doesn’t matter that I’m here. It matters how I respond. I can’t fold into myself and be comforted by isolation. I don’t want it anymore.

I also reserve the right to stay home and lick my wounds. Balance.

I could tell you more, but I won’t. It’s sensitive and not worth the hassle of blowing everything up. I don’t want to live with it, and I don’t want to live around it.

I thought I was in on the ground floor of something, and it blew up in my face. I let someone into a sacred space, and was welcomed and rejected within hours. I don’t deal with whiplash well, and I’m spiraling out in my own head while not trying to talk about it here.

It’s the balance of being respectful and writing around things on purpose because to tell the real story would cause more harm than good. I have more experience doing this than anyone can possibly imagine. But just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean that I want to.

Living my life out loud has consequences that I care about this time. It’s what happens when you have good boundaries. You don’t let just anyone stomp all over them, but you make the agreement with people to be the one that’s willing to throw down with them when you’re in every mood known to God and man. There’s no option not to pick up the phone, because you said you’d be there. It’s not a matter of going to extremes. It’s a matter of adjusting boundaries so that everyone feels safe, even if it’s hell on earth right now.

Hell on earth is relative, because it won’t last long. It is born of confusion and grief for something I thought was solid.

I don’t want to change too much too fast, and the adrenaline of a moment comes down. It always does. It is the dance of intimacy. You get close to someone, and then you can’t handle being that intense, so you back off. That cycle runs on repeat for the length of a relationship no matter what it is. Even coworkers. Sometimes you want to be near them. Sometimes you don’t. That can vary by the day.

Life is full of those gray areas, but it’s not about whether you’re enough for someone or you’re not. It’s being clear in communication so that no one has expectations they can’t handle because they don’t know how to meet them. Figuring it out takes more time than people are willing to spend thinking about how they want to react, and not looking at their reactions after they’ve happened to make sure the decision they made was right for everyone.

Not doing it leads to nuclear fallout. It escalates prank wars, real wars, Facebook comment sections……….

No one thinks of real world consequences on Facebook.

I can say with clarity and honesty that my beautiful girl and I didn’t. Everything was a dance of intimacy that bordered on two extremes. It’s not the situation I’m talking about here, but it’s a good example of it. If Facebook messenger had been then what it is now, there would be much less of a problem. Boundaries could have been created and maintained with the button that indicates “video call.” Doing everything through writing cost us a connection and gave us another. It affected how we related to each other with HUGE differences between, as Zac would say, “meet space and meat space.”

I should have had to sit with her anger. She should have had to sit with my fear. I should have seen her eyes when we talked all that through.

Knowing that not everything can be done virtually is like breathing for me now, and I pay attention to it closer than I ever have. This is because I spend so much time in this space, the one where everything centers on writing, I am prone to forget that I need things like hugs and kisses, too.

It’s a complicated construct, and the first step to managing it is being aware. That the things you say in instant messages and e-mails matter. You are not putting on a game with someone else’s feelings. It just seems like it because the leap in someone’s head is too great. That if you feel something here, you won’t feel it in person. That’s okay.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that because I’m direct, people often bite off more than they can chew because they think they’re playing with me and they’re not. What I’m saying to you via writing is the exact same thing you’d get in person…. I would say things completely differently, but the reaction is the same. I am hearing you and adjusting everything based on what you say.

My relationship with my beautiful girl broke down because of this very dynamic. She felt threatened, like she was being scolded and there were all kinds of recriminations. In reality, I would say “this is what you’re doing that hurts me. Please adjust.” She was not direct with me in saying “this is what you’re doing that’s hurting me. Please adjust.” Instead of going toe to toe with me, she held it all in and said I was painting my feelings as fact. What I wanted her to do was paint her feelings as fact as well, because they are. I can argue logic. I can’t argue emotion. How she feels is how she feels. I think you can only paint your feelings as fact because of this.

I wanted to dive into her, it’s just that her depth was about 4 feet deep and diving requires more than that. I do not mean that she is not deep. I am talking about respecting limits on how far down I’m allowed to go and all those breathing apparatuses.

My analogy for this is that we both said things that got us to 12 feet and then we tried to take it all back and it was too late.

But I’m telling you about this relationship in order to protect another, because my beautiful girl is not the only one that deserves a hard out.

But these are just my observations.

This Thing We’ve Created and Managed

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m thinking about the -email that I got from my beautiful girl this morning. It came a few days ago, but she made a lot turn over in my head that’s just not finished. Here’s the line that got me in a good way. She said something about me deciding I was the only arbiter of the friendship/relationship. I said something bothered me, she adjusted. I was upset at last interaction that she called it “this thing we’ve created and managed,” and I felt like I’d been mortally wounded. It seemed very dismissive of what we’d built and/or destroyed.

The entire truth of our relationship rests on that slash.

Because that slash rests on our burn. We can’t sit down and “and/or our way through something.” I’ll say too much, she’ll say too little. She is content to let me think what I think, when I’m starving for her input. I’m the arbiter of our relationship because she stopped throwing down. We couldn’t move any better, stronger, or faster than the day before because when she walls off, my history is to go off like a chihuahua because her distance makes my trauma bond scream.

At the same time, she’s not responsible for treating me or bending toward me just because I’m having a moment. I have never been telling her to jump in and fix things. I’ve been telling her that if she wants a relationship with me, here’s what I need from her. If not, we can’t have a relationship because too much has happened for me to both manage those trauma bonds and the relationship concurrently. That’s because when she wants me to be close, I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with middle-of-the-road, will they or won’t they bullshit. I cannot de-escalate anything because either the trauma bond goes off or it doesn’t. There’s no middle ground. It feels very much like being an addict. If I can’t have hard drugs because I’m addicted to them, the right answer is not “just do a little bit less heroin.” There are so many layers as to why I have a trauma bond that screams, but part of it is that there’s not just one. We have the childhood trauma dump, and what I’ve come to call “the hard out.” I cannot tell you everything I know, and I cannot tell you everything she knows, either.

So, part of the reason that I paint my feelings as fact is that I am trying to talk around a lot of shit. I am weaving the tale as I see it according to the limits I’m trying to enforce, because I have a hell of a story I’m not writing at the same time I’m trying to describe my life. But whatever anyone knows outside the two of us, it’s not enough to make sense of anything that I could say if things were different.

So, I would imagine that when Supergrover thinks I’m bagging on her, she’s not getting the real story before my blog entries get published, so when she reads, she’s not taking it into account. That I am not blaming her, I am blaming the situation and circumstances because I cannot actually tell you about the situation and circumstances.

In protecting her, I have probably made things worse. But I don’t feel bad about it, because there’s no possible way that I’d be okay without being able to use this space as a tool. I write my way into and out of things all the time. She’s an easy target because she brought those circumstances into my life, but I am not taking my anger out on her. I project that anger onto the character because I have a hard out.

I am exhausted and I feel it in my bones. That I know we’ll be successful, but not based on anything that happened in the past. She’s going to have to step up, because I’ve adjusted my vision and realized the ways in which we aren’t good for each other. I have told her those things a number of times, and while she has managed to say what she doesn’t like, she’s never said what she does. I mean, even to the minimum. I know she likes Diet Coke and coffee. I know she likes Jack Daniels. I know she likes pizza. I know those things about most of America. Random factoids that have added up in all kinds of ways, but those I can talk about… because they’re not close to the hard out.

Nothing that I have written on my web site in 10 years has had the real story, and it never will. So my process is trying to find things I can write about. It’s not sordid or illicit. It’s the purest love I’ve ever known. Still can’t talk about it.

Trauma bonds are tricky because again, when you try to break them it makes you weak, like physical withdrawal. I can handle being away from her the longer it goes on, because when we’re not interacting I’m not feeding said bond milk and cookies. I’m not babying it and allowing it to grow.

And none of it is even close to her fault, because I could deal with the hard out so much better if we were collaborating. It’s not a hostage situation over here. I am not saying, “I have a trauma bond so you must accommodate me.” I am saying that both being together and apart causes different sets of problems and I need to know which one I’m working on today. Our relationship going up and down like a roller coaster was making my trauma bond feel like dopamine and depression in a continuing cycle because I could not achieve homeostasis. I don’t have a crush that’s out of control.

I never have.

What I need is more e-mails like this one, that recognize we both participated. We both need to adjust to each other and get with the program. The clue phone is ringing in terms of where we need to go to be stable and happy. Those options are two extremes, because it’s not child’s play. It’s the nature of our friendship/relationship in this thing we’ve created and managed.

Here’s what I know. When she’s really taking it in, she’s doing everything in the most wonderful way she knows how. It’s when she stops listening that there’s a problem. Here’s what I mean. She really saw me. She saw how much it bothered me for her not to call it a friendship or a relationship because it doesn’t honor what we’ve actually been through. It minimizes it to an enormous degree.

It’s the thing that proves to me that Michael and I aren’t the only ones who will come, because she loves her girl, too.

The small things are the big things.

Because I have a hard out.

The Man Who Regrets, and the Man Who Forgets

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

The title comes from a Doctor Who episode about The Moment. The Moment is a weapon that can take billions of lives, but has developed a consciousness and you have to reason with it and accept your fate before it will activate. The Moment stays with The War Doctor as he grapples with whether to blow up Gallifrey to save the universe from collapse. The Moment is with The War Doctor when he’s with Ten and Eleven. The Moment tells The War Doctor that this is who he will become if he blows everything up….. that he will live long enough to become the man who regrets, and the man who forgets.

It resonates with me today as I look back over 40 straight days of posting, because I talk a lot about regrets and remorse so I can change myself going forward. I forget to play. I forget to explore alternate universes and dream bigger. In my last entry, the alternate history was staying with Kathleen long enough to have had kids, but I didn’t change anything about the relationship itself. Everything that cost me would have continued right on being expensive.

I’m trying to get smarter about where my energy goes. I haven’t lost myself in new relationship bliss because I’ve stayed motivated to write to my heart’s content, which is far more than I thought it would take to keep it happy. I am relentless about self-discovery, and I truly do not love when other people think they’re the main character. They’re the main character when we’re interacting, but they do not have a lock on our memories together because we were having different experiences when those interactions occurred. How I perceive someone shouldn’t have bearing on how anyone else sees someone because they’re not going to get the same interaction I did. They bring a different set of experiences to the table.

Those are difficult conversations to have, which is why it’s easier for me to have partners and friends who either get it or don’t care. People who get it see everything I write about them. They lived it. They don’t have to love it. They know when our conflict is resolved in real life, it will be resolved here. That I do not have a preconceived notion of who they are and expect confirmation bias. I am a diarist, and the only reason I’m considered good at blogging is that it’s not very popular anymore. It’s easier to stand out, the way it was when both Dooce and I had 200 readers on a good day.

I absolutely tanked the blog that made me in a fit of rage. I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to deal with blowback that I do now, and I couldn’t get mad at anyone else. I self destructed.

I have been afraid I would do it again, and instead of attracting people into my life that care I write said diary, I actively avoid them.

Zac only reads something if I tell him to in any kind of urgency. The rest of the time, he just surfs because he knows that writing is my interest. He doesn’t have to make it his. It just helps that he’s also a bookworm and I wake up to “Zac has gifted you” for my Kindle. He’s introduced me to writers I never would have discovered on my own. He also knows I’ll read anything, so just send me what he likes. I don’t need him to find me things he thinks I’ll like, because I’ll dig into whatever since he likes it. I’m not being cute or coy. If Zac likes something, I probably will, too. None of that classic gender role shit, because he’s fairly femme looking for a man and I’m fairly butch looking for a woman. Christian evangelicals and queer radicals all get what they want and everyone wins.

The part about Christian Evangelicals winning was way more about being afraid to walk into just any bar holding a woman’s hand than it was about hoping they ever win anything. And how it would be twice as bad for Zac to walk into just any bar holding a man’s hand.

It’s important to me not to project heterosexual privilege, and when people can tell that Zac is queer, it means something to me. When I’m not glued to his hip, there’s an equal chance that someone is going to say something nasty to us. It’s why I don’t want to date straight men again. It would be too harsh to say never, although I’ve said it. If it happens, you’ll know something extraordinary has happened and it is a flaw I’m willing to overlook. The benefit would have to be huge.

Bryn has the same outlook that I do. Say what you want, we’ll work it out. I just collaborate with her a lot so she has a rough outline of what I’m going to talk about She reminds me of past history so I have a jumping off point to connect the past to the present. Developing our relationship is the best thing I’ve ever done for myself because I don’t have many people in my life with whom I share that much history.

It’s how I would have liked my relationship with Supergrover to go, but she didn’t like bringing up the past for frames of reference and didn’t want to collaborate with me for the future. She has just influenced every single thing I’ve written here because I was workshopping the idea with her, first. She was getting the rough drafts because I wasn’t publishing my letters to her. I was going back and taking the feelings out of them that read universal. I was taking the details that made it too personal to the two of us and casting them aside. When she cut contact with me, she was no longer that internal monologue, so she wasn’t hearing my thought process every day like she had for the last 10 years.

She didn’t like the play because I stopped giving her the brochure.

I am not comparing the two women to each other, only the reason they are both so valuable to me. My history with Bryn starts in 1997. My history with Supergrover starts in 2013. Both of them have palaces in my head because they’ve lived there long enough to create them. Bryn likes hers. Supergrover doesn’t. I am not turning one away in favor of the other. I am giving my energy to the one who needs me.

I have needed Supergrover from the moment I laid eyes on her. She needed me. I still need her, but I can’t put energy toward her because I don’t feel needed. She told me that she’s read through many lines, and I think it was probably that she thought I’d found a new toy and I’d forgotten what she meant to me, has always meant to me.

I stopped responding to her because I was willing to do anything for her and I didn’t feel a quarter of that coming back at me. It doesn’t mean that she didn’t feel it. It means that I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t get her to interpret it. I didn’t want to be the equivalent of the girlfriend who obsesses over the meaning of intended punctuation……………… anymore.

I missed laughing when she flipped me shit about things, missed having make up text after we fought, missed telling her I loved her and I missed her and that being a good thing.

That’s always what I’ve meant by “showing up.” “Loving me enough to struggle.” Lay out your thoughts, fears, dreams, hopes, secrets, lies, all of it. I used to be that place for her, and I will always be there if our differences are reconciled and celebrated. There’s no possible way I could tell our story as if it was fact. You’re not even getting the whole picture in my head because I can only write one line at once. So, not only are you not getting her side of the story, she’s not correcting anything with either one of us. Your guess as to what her story might be is absolutely as valid as mine. Other people influence her behavior to an enormous degree, but I don’t write about them because I do not have a relationship with them. Here’s a big for-instance. I learned about Michael way too late for that knowledge to be helpful. But over time, he became a useful coping mechanism. That our relationship could be virtual because theirs was on the ground. I didn’t have to worry about her- he had it handled. Remember, in my head, she’s six years old with a lot of layers to cover up that fact. I needed her to have a boyfriend. I needed her to get married. I needed her to be the country mouse to my city mouse. Knowing that I would have run to the drugstore in the middle of the night if she was sick didn’t have to eat at me because she already had someone to do that.

I wish she would just take in the enormity of the things I’ve said that I don’t regret, like “of course I’ll want to be the first one tested if you need an organ. Please.” To me, that promise is every bit as real as running to Walgreens at 0300. I didn’t do anything because she needed me to do it. I did it because I saw it needed doing.

Although before I gave her an organ, we would have had a very serious conversation about the YouTube video in which she woke up from surgery queer as a three dollar bill. Just the weirdest organ rejection side effect ever.

It has been long enough since I’ve wanted to be the person that ran to the drugstore at 0300 that I know within myself just how much I am…………

The Man Who Regrets, and The Man Who Forgets

Describing the Color Choice

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Part of the reason my entries about the woman I call “Supergrover” is because she won’t answer a lot of basic questions about herself, and yet I have access to her heart in a beautiful and unique way. I got in through the back door in the hacker sense of the word, because nothing would ever have happened between us if we hadn’t kept to staying out of each other’s real lives.

I realized a few days ago that I had burned down the entire house on mutual friends. However, I wasn’t being encouraged to do so in any way. It was my reaction to her words, always. I cannot describe what she or anyone else went through at that time in our lives, and so far I’ve been handed more confusion than answers.

The closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling secure is “someday, perhaps” and “also. Thank you.” She’s quiet when she’s sincere, and those words echo just as much as the ones that hurt me. There is no possible way that she does not come across as a 3D character, and I will not believe it. I cannot write both the entry she referenced and a letter to her husband telling him to be good to her because she wouldn’t let me be good to her as well. If I can think those thoughts, why can she only accept the dark ones as the truth? Why can she not see that I am woven into her like The Impossible Girl, the one whose DNA is spread within The Doctor’s. I got there by only being her inner monologue as well. Our similarities show in our writing. One thing touched me deeply, and she said that I portrayed her as flat as if it’s not a wheel with many spokes. I told her that if she took every entry from March until now, she’d see the many different spokes in the wheel. That I remembered every one and wrote them all down.

You cannot think someone is worth nothing and a villain if you’re willing to go toe to toe with her husband and have it out. Who does that? Someone who thinks there’s no such thing as “the friend zone.” It’s better when we’re in each other’s lives than it is to be apart. I’ve written about that pain in exquisite detail so that I don’t forget a moment of it. There was a passion and drive within me to have her in my life at whatever level she could accept me into hers, but then it became about the cost/benefit analysis of living in so much confusion. I told her it caused anger and issues that needed to be resolved. She didn’t want to resolve them. At no time did it mean that I became that person who wouldn’t safety net her through anything. I am still her red telephone, and what I know is that Bryn and Zac would not deprive me of her, because they’re always rooting for me to succeed. I just would have to balance Bryn’s needs as well, because I cannot abandon her after the ways in which she’s made me grow. We have the ability to have a very deep and meaningful relationship because we have lived in the same place. We were raised by the same “parents.” We both lived to tell the tale. She’s my partner in terms of the one I’d want you to go to if something was up with me where I couldn’t be contacted. That’s because she’s the only one I’ll talk to when I really need to reach out. She feels the same way about me.

Just because you haven’t gotten married to someone doesn’t mean that loyalty and confidentiality mean less. That my vows to my friends are less important than the ones I’d make to a partner. I look to Bryn’s face for love because I can. I would look at my beautiful girl the same way if I thought she thought it was a privilege to be let in. But that power imbalance kept both of us from really laying things on the table.

Oh, the stories we could have told. Stories that are both true and factual. I still have the picture in my head of a photo shoot I want with her, and I hope it makes her laugh if she remembers what I’m talking about. Let’s just say it involves gender role reversal and leave it at that. I’ve checked with me and her husband absolutely wants this picture, too.

To think that I want to paint her as the villain when I’ve poured out everything in terms of how I feel about her makes me lean on the memories that make me laugh.

Here’s the best one of all. In ten years, she has never sent me a voice mail of her saying her own name. I say it like it sounds. She says it the way she likes it, but I can’t correct it and I’ve been saying it wrong the whole time.

I call her all kinds of nicknames because I can’t say her fucking real one.

Now that’s describing all the colors. She’s not a villain. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life, and I don’t understand why she thinks she isn’t.

She is my red and my violet. My whites, greys, and blacks.

I paint my feelings as fact, but never once have I used PhotoShop to make it prettier, or to crop something so that the framing looks better…. like I have that good an eye naturally.

It’s all a spectrum. It’s all an ADHD mess. The temperature of our relationship centers on hot with drive to reconnect, not hot with passion. It never will. But painting my feelings as fact shouldn’t go unnoticed here, either.

I love her, and I won’t apologize for it anymore. I don’t even care if she believes it. I know it to be true, and I cannot be held together by one entry alone. I hope, for once, she’ll focus on this one.

It’s one of my favorite colors.

Whatever It Is, It Isn’t Enough

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?

I am a cook, therefore I cannot afford to eat all the places I’d really like to go. Since my sister can afford to treat me, she does. But that’s not how I spend money on food and drinks. I lay out serious cash at the grocery store, because I can make food exciting by making a dish, then making a completely new dish out of the leftovers. I buy things at grocery stores that most people just think, “it’s too much work.” I will roll sushi at home. I will soak beans overnight so that I don’t need the convenience of cans. I will wash rice. I will do all the things it takes to be an awesome prep cook so that I’m comfortable on the line at home as a solo act.

The only thing I don’t do is buy meat at the grocery anymore. It’s fine if I’m eating out at a restaurant. I just don’t like wondering if it’s going to spoil, or the whole process it takes to thaw things without cooking them. I don’t want to leave chicken in the sink with water dripping down because my housemates will either get soap in it or try to clean it up. I have had them throw away things when I went upstairs to get my phone.

I think the most money bit comes from having the “keeping up appearances” marriage first. We ate a lot of money trying to be social with our ExxonMobil friends. We went to bars and restaurants that cost a lot, but we never really got anything substantial out of them. There’s only one thing I remember from that time in my life with clarity. It was a brewpub out in Fairfax that made banana clove beer. The combination of lightly sweet banana (not artificial) with Belgian spices made my palate sing. This was before I met Dana, before I went to her mini culinary school. The palate was there, I just wasn’t putting energy in to the right direction.

Meeting Dana brought a lot of things together. The above paragraph is why we would have had a lot of fun in DC together. The thing is, though, I had to get away from her to become a better person, and I hope she feels the same way about me- that we are both wonderful people, but we do not need to be together to know that. We’ve checked.

It would have seemed less weird to the outside world if we’d moved to DC together, but the plan was always to end up here eventually. It’s an adventure we wanted to go on together, and when we split, I still had fire in the belly to do it.

It made it look to the outside world that I was chasing a girl, and I did nothing to help myself out there, but I just didn’t care. It wasn’t worth the energy to figure out how to care about so many things that were beyond my control. Getting the girl in the end would have been nice, but it wasn’t necessary. She and DC are not synonymous in that if I’d suddenly taken off to a city I knew nothing about and the only thing other people knew is that she was there, I’d allow everyone to raise eyebrows at me. Clearly that’s insane.

But when you’re presented with a move that will solve every need including getting the girl? We’re getting somewhere. That’s because there was never any pressure on the relationship to succeed. Washington is big enough to hold both of us, even at full strength.

I stopped thinking about food a few paragraphs ago because I’m still reeling after getting an e-mail from Supergrover that I don’t know what to do with. I’m just spiraling out in my little neurodivergent head because she is bound and determined to wall off and let me know she thinks I’m not that great a writer because I paint my feelings as fact and everything is all about me.

This is my web site. I don’t project feelings onto other people unless they’re interacting with me and I am trying to explain it. No one else in her life has made any move to get to know me, so what they think is all her business and none of mine….. but it would be my business if I knew what she was talking about.

I am only an authority on me and what I perceive.

What I perceive is that prepackaged food holds no nutrition, and very few people are willing to create a dish without shortcuts.

Wash the rice. Soak the beans. Dice the mirepoix.

The most expensive ingredient in food and relationships is time.

A Comprehensive Response

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I blog, therefore I am healthy.

Writing is a comprehensive response to life. That is true no matter what kind, but particularly blogging because the story moves forward every single day, because it’s a choice to post, not a responsibility. I do not feel like I have an audience to whom I owe anything. If I needed to, I’d push the red button and everything would be gone. Nothing threatens you if you don’t need something out of it. I would be giving up a lot, but I wouldn’t stop writing. It’s a huge deal to be a blogger, because people cannot predict what you’ll remember and think they can.

Someone might be totally freaked out and barking up my tree not to write about them, but what they don’t know is that if I can’t make an illustration out of them that works, I won’t. Not everyone makes a good character. Telling them that is worse than blowback, because their ego gets involved. What do you mean, I don’t make a good character?

I feel like I handle this better than most after coming out to straight people without a clue. You’ll never see a more butt hurt child than when they’ve told a gay person they don’t like them “that way” and the person says “you’re not my type.” They are horribly offended in the most hilarious of ways. It is more than physical attraction, and they’ve taken your rejection as if you think it isn’t.

My straight girl crush was because I was struggling in my marriage and it was easier to feel high as hell on new relationship energy than it was to deal at home. She is drop dead gorgeous and it didn’t mean anything to me because I wasn’t looking at her picture while I wrote. She was the equivalent of my “corporeally challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” (I went on a date with a woman from OPB/NPR… maybe two… but this is what Dana and I called her for 15 years.) I could have a crush on a straight girl because it couldn’t go anywhere. I’d get all the good stuff without all the bad except I didn’t. My trauma bond screamed with empathy because she didn’t give me a slap bracelet after the fire.

When I say that someone makes a bad character, I mean that when I write about you, the emotions fall flat on the page. If I can’t make myself feel anything, no one else will feel it, either. If you go back to my older entries, you’ll be able to tell when I’m distressed. I can, but I also have the memory of writing the piece if it’s so overwhelming it made me sob. People think I get really angry when I’m actually crying my eyes out. I am literally pouring myself out onto the page so that I have an accurate idea of how my mental and physical health are treating me. I realize when I’ve been too harsh. I realize when I’ve been too nice.

What makes Supergrover such a great character is because when I write about her I can cry. Not many people evoke emotion in me like that because I just won’t get vulnerable enough. When I write about my beautiful girl, I step into a museum with ten years’ worth of collected art. Some of it was bought and paid for. Some of it we stole in a heist. We’d push and pull and tumble and roll, but for whatever reason, we didn’t cut each other off. That’s because the museum had no easily accessible exits.

I became exhausted because bringing up conflict and it never getting resolved was eating my self-esteem for every meal.

It was very, very confusing because we’d have a fight and she’d say we were done. When I assumed she meant it, I’d try to move on and then she’d drop in. When I assumed that she was just angry af and apologized, it was perceived as me trying to get attention. She would tell me that she told me it was over and I just pushed, but I have two solid memories that stick with me.

The first was a huge fight that really was the end of it for me. Like, I am just not capable. She reads on my blog that my dad is having surgery and checks in. I was pleased, but I felt weird about it because I thought, “surely she sees why this would be problematic.” It felt like “leave me the fuck alone, but I’m going to make sure you know I’m watching.” It has never gotten any more resolved than this, because when she dropped in on me, it was fine. When I dropped in on her, she felt creeped out because she thought it was me saying “I’m always watching.” It happened again when we had another blowout and I thought maybe then I’d get a break long enough to figure out what really happened. Someone said something to her that reminded her of me, and she was back in my DMs.

Neither one of us could break the connection, just “tumbling through a freefall, no one’s going to go unscathed….. but it’s not because you held back, and it’s not how I behaved.” Now I’m humming…. “and I believe that underneath it all, you are my friend. And the way that I fell for you, I’ll never fall that way again. I still believe despite our differences that what we have’s enough” because I believe in her (and I believe in love). You know I have the ability to cry about this if I’m writing and suddenly quote Indigo Girls.

I told my friend Missy that I didn’t even listen to them for the longest because it created a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” amount of “AS IF I’M NOT WEIRD ENOUGH.” I had a stereo in my room. Their albums didn’t leave when I did for years.

Now, one of my favorite songs is “When We Were Writers.”

Writing is not what Supergrover does for a living, but she does write in her spare time to get away from work. She’s right. It’s a bubble, When I say that I can’t do something or I have to go because I’m writing, it is taken every bit as seriously as when Lindsay says, “I’m going on a run.” Nothing else is more sacred than spending time alone so you can actually hear your thoughts.

With a virtual relationship, you never have to feel alone. That’s because their physical presence has never been needed. The relationship wasn’t created that way. We’d become each other in our work, borrowing style, structure, and tone. It was quite sophisticated in retrospect. It’s amazing how much we were able to do for each other virtually, and now everyone knows it because of the pandemic. We were virtual BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

We’d trade off being The Holy and The Moly.

We both went scorched earth too much when it was infinitely possible to just be out with it and either be done or decide we have something and work toward it. My emotions were larger than hers and always have been. She absolutely knew this. But I do not think that she ever thought that she’d be reopening a wound if she reached out. My part in all this is that because my feelings were large, I ignored everything bad and just kept on believing that one day, I’d find the combination of words that would unlock her. In my mind’s eye, I’m 14. She’s six. I’m older, and I should have known better.

When you know better, you do better. Maya Angelou’s words, but true for me as well. I don’t even know if she likes Coke, but she has a unique name and I knew for damn sure she wasn’t going to find a “Share a Coke with…..” bottle anywhere. So I ordered her one from Atlanta. There were actually six. One with her actual name, one with her character’s name, her husband, her kids, and her dogs. Except the Coke bottle said “Boytoy” on her husband’s because that’s how we referred to him. She never saw them, because I mixed up the address and put my name on the wrong part of the form. So they got a box addressed to me for a reason completely unknown to them and returned it. I was furious because it cost so much to do, but I was only angry at myself for mixing up the web form. It was so unique, and ADHD fucked me. I was absolutely miserable because it was the nicest thing I could think of to do virtually because I’d been a jackass. It was the friend equivalent of having to sleep on the couch and buying chocolates and flowers to beg.

Since she wears suits and crap for work, she also travels sometimes. I sent her a bracelet with a charm for her favorite cause. She told me it was perfect and sent me a picture of her wrist. I feasted on that for weeks because now I could go wherever she was, metaphysically. She just isn’t the sort of person that would tell me where she went, because it’s not important in her daily life and that’s really what I wanted to hear. I don’t care how she’s doing professionally. I care how she’s doing emotionally. I am the red telephone where she is concerned. Even now that we’re done I won’t hear a bad word about her because my friends don’t care about her. They care about me. They don’t recognize how much she gave me because even I’ve never heard her side of the story. I couldn’t make anything better. She was looking for hurt, so she found it.

The bracelet said to me that as long as I kept my behavior consistent, she’d know that my drug protocol was working , and not to worry if I spiraled out, that it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with my mental health, and no one else is in charge of managing it. I know when to go to the ER/psych ward. If that doesn’t end up being the whole story, still not her damage. Blame poor health and bad medicine, not the patient.

It all seems scary to people the way I lay it out because I’m dispassionate. I have a disease. It has to be managed. People need to know they’re off the hook for checking in on me, because when mental health issues pop up, if I don’t do anything that’s my fault.

“Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?”

Wow. That was dark, even for me. I’m mostly fine, so that’s not an indication that things are about to get worse. It’s just a reality check. Run the numbers, don’t diagnose me.

I am awaiting the cause of Sinead O’Connor’s death. I think I already know what it is…. and no matter what it is, you don’t die at 56 of natural causes.

I don’t want to know, but I ran the numbers.

Here’s the other thing you need to know. You cannot guess what mood I’m in, or whether I’m experiencing depression or hypomania in my work because I write about things that have already happened and I’m searching for the road ahead. I map out what I feel now to plan for what I’ll feel later. It’s not because I know you better than you, it’s that I have to decide how I’m going to react to our next interaction based on past history. I will know whether it’s time to stand up for myself or apologize with fancy Coke.

However, I did not just send a gift and assume that she’d take it as “I’m sorry.” It’s just that her love language is action and mine is words of affirmation. I compromised, she didn’t. She could respond in her own love language, but she couldn’t meet me halfway and talk about her feelings. I never knew which way was up. It’s just not fair to leave someone in that much confusion because my need was being rejected. I needed her to show up, be present in the moment. Instead, her responses were dismissive or angry. Meanwhile, I’m trying to do things that make her less angry and annoyed, but I couldn’t because I was guessing all the time. I got done with guessing way too far past my breaking point. She had enough information to blow up my life, not the other way around. And yet she saw me as a threat without realizing she felt like one to me, too. We were in the same boat, just back to back.

She is the Aunt Voula. I am the Toula. She will be everyone’s favorite and I’m okay with that because she’s my favorite, too. We’re in that weird age gap where I’m not young enough to be her kid, but not an average age between siblings, either.

In the beginning, she treated me like an equal. After fights, she treated me like a pest. It is my fault I treated her badly, and her fault that she never got over it.

The problem isn’t even that she “never got over it.” It’s that she is free to be someone who decides how they feel about you on a daily basis for someone else. It was chaotic and I was tired of the swings.

It wasn’t good for my mental and physical health.

We Will Come, Because We Love Our Girl

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Michael,

I wish I’d thought to write this letter a long time ago, because I have things to say to you that should have come from me years ago. You know everything I didn’t. Just more than I can possibly take in. It was a shitty hand to be dealt for both of us, because here’s the thing…. the woman we love didn’t let us bond, so we couldn’t talk to each other about the ways we could support her. I wonder all the time what it would have been like had I been your wing man long ago, because I would have. I would have cheered you on from the beginning. All the things I never knew cost me, and you should know it. We both know how it feels.

She should have let us feel each other out and then claim our corners to regroup. It would never have come together in one hour. We both would have had to learn to manage the other’s feelings and not get frightened of them, because we both know they’re large.

We should have been allowed to make room for each other, and I was stuck in the bathroom. I hope we’re both sorry we never sat down at your table and just served every dish we’d created over eight 10 years. If you were me, you would have traded those two for a lifetime and you fucking know it.

We should have been allowed to bond because we didn’t have a full house and wouldn’t until all parties saw all the cards. I would have dealt you a hand if you’d been allowed.

What I know for sure is that that we all would have won and rotated hands. What I know to be even more certain is that you and I would remember every loss and celebrate every victory until we were dead.

If you’re the man I know she’d choose, I know you’d move heaven and earth just to stand next to her. If you didn’t turn out to be that man, God have mercy on your soul for this life and every lifetime after. My feelings are just as feral as hers and I will find you.

My only job in this whole equation would have been to allow you to be the best husband you knew how to be, because I wanted to be you and I’m just not capable for many reasons. Neither is she. That doesn’t mean that my protective nature went away when she said it should. She may be her daddy’s little girl, but not the fuck in my presence. I said that about her EA. But her EA was me.

It was my role to be “The Girl Whisperer,” and we never got that chance. So here is an itemized list of things you’ll do if you love her:

  • If you can’t cry when she does, you’re not paying attention. She doesn’t generally cry, so by the time you get to that point with her, she has no myelin on her nerves and she’s working practically blind.
  • She loves levity because of it. It preserves her armor for too long until she’s desperately needing help because she hasn’t asked for it. You are going to have to fight her on accepting love every day, and if your game isn’t sharp, her life will pass you by because you’re not really taking it in.
  • If men do not talk to her first, they will overfocus on her beauty and undermine her smarts. If you have never seen her with someone who has underestimated her and taken in its enormity, you are missing out on the best part of her. When you realize that you are missing out, course correct immediately. Your story is not more important. Her story is only more important right now.
  • If you give up, you will never see what delayed gratification looks like, and it is immense. You cannot take it in. She will see your sacrifice, I promise. She sees it too much and it weighs on her. I am walking away because I did not want to cause those swings of emotion in her. I didn’t need her to think about me while she was busy. Neither do you, but don’t go too long. One resentful feeling can be put away. Years of them can’t without resolution.
  • When she doesn’t have time, she doesn’t take time. Do everything you can to lower the volume on television channels in her mind. You can’t turn them all off, but you can make your signal more pure. I hear she likes well-written letters.
  • If you write something beautiful for her, she will keep it forever. Even if everything ever written between us has been put into the trash, she’ll be able to quote her favorite lines from memory. This is not a humblebrag. This is acknowledging sometimes a piece of notebook paper and a pen end up being more expensive in value than a day at a spa.
  • She is also a writer. If you can’t reach her through talking, switch mediums.
  • Dark begets dark. Make sure she knows she’s an absolute diamond every second of every day, and make sure she knows she’s of the purest color, cut, clarity, and brilliance. That’s because she won’t tell herself, and her inner monologue keeps her from seeing how beautiful she really is.
  • I will never get over this loss, and you won’t either if it happens. Make her your first priority because you can’t not. You will not be able to afford those consequences, and I assure you from the wisdom of my experience.
  • Everything I write has a thread of her running through it, and if you were me, they’d be mostly about her. It’s not because I’m not capable of doing my own thing. It’s because my story isn’t more important right now. It will be more important later. I had to choose which story was worth telling. Look at me and tell me it’s mine. I dare you.
  • Because she’s a boss, she’s going to remembered for her professional accomplishments. I hope you’ll come here to read about her emotional accomplishments, and know that they are much more important than anything anyone else will ever read, and only we know it. We’re the ones that love her for who she is. We will remember all the things other people never knew.
  • She uses ellipses to an enormous degree. It’s your job to find out where the trail goes.
  • Sometimes, that trail leads to me. Being apart is injuring all three of us.
  • It is not lost on me that I can move on, but if you ever do it’s going to be a straight up problem. I’m glad she knows you well enough to know that I am not projecting jack shit. You’re a rock and I fucking love you for it. You have no idea. Just none.
  • Make sure that you’re capable of telling when she’s in hell, especially when it’s your fault. Most of the time it will be. That’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
  • In moments when it gets difficult, remember that her love will overtake you with a forest fire’s intensity. Remember everything you love about her in order to keep the flame in your mind and not the ash.
  • She thinks she needs less help than she does. You’re going to be stuck in a fight to let her love you, so sharpen your weapons.

I have never wanted anything but Kings full over Aces for you. I would have reached out. I would have been a better person if she’d let me grow into that role. I would have trusted you to drive, and just slept in the car.

There are so many more bullet points, but I couldn’t go any longer without expressing all the things you never knew, either.

There are so many things we could have shared. I will leave it up to you to decide what I mean because that’s exactly why I need you…………………. on some days more than I need her. It’s just that you have the Google Calendar and I have a yellow string.

That yellow string is now yours if you want it. I just wanted to offer because that’s all I was ever trying to do. If our relationship was going to get healthy, it had to be the three of us, with a relationship that allowed for more as I accepted it from the universe.

You’re the coauthor of her story, I just wrote it down.

Always and as you wish,

Leslie

Wordless

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite genre of music?

I am the one that provides the words.

I need music to flow like water around me. I love the word “soundscape.” I love how composers and writers make love to each other, birthing individual creativity that feeds the other.

Probably one of the reasons the partners I’ve had haven’t been creative (except Dana). I thought it was a good thing that we were so different, because we were feeding each other. Now, I realize that nearly every relationship I’ve ever had with a woman became based over time on division of labor. They’ll do all the thinking if I’ll do all the feeling.

I was comfortable with my beautiful girl’s availability because it was no different than any relationship I’d ever been in with a woman except the relationship I was currently in. That does not mean I choose wrong, or that I’m a bad person for not getting rid of the Internet relationship. There’s several reasons I couldn’t do that, and even when I realized it was necessary, it was too late.

I can’t remember which entry I was reading where it became clear, but I know for sure that I am trauma bonded to this woman and perhaps it just didn’t present for her in the same way. That’s fine, and I don’t expect anyone to have my experience. I was just reading over what I’d written when it hit me….. “that’s a trauma bond.” You need her so bad it physically hurts? That’s a symptom.

If she doesn’t have an itch on her skin when she thinks about disconnecting from me, then of course we are not the same. I wish I’d thought about that years ago. I should state for the record that I am not saying she caused trauma. It’s the opposite. She came into my life while I was experiencing acute trauma, and sat next to me while I took my own medication. No one who sat with me at that time isn’t bonded to me in that way, it’s just not as extremely loud and incredibly close.

I think the itch on my skin is thinking that I am too incomplete within myself to do life without her, but that’s my trauma talking, not my personality. Even she would be surprised to see how vulnerable I really am, because I don’t write from that place often. It never left my mind that she’s older and wiser, so be on your A game. Seeing her as younger comes from getting to know her inner voice. I care for that child as much as I care for that adult.

I betrayed everything I believed in because my disease started managing me. I don’t think I came back to myself until I moved to DC and had been here long enough to feel stable. I had to get away from Dana, and I had to get away from Houston. Our relationship looked so much different without those two things, and I was grateful. This is because I moved to Houston with Dana because she wanted to teach, but then when we got there, she didn’t do anything until she had to.

So I was managing my career and all kinds of PTSD triggers everywhere I went. It was unsustainable, especially the day when I learned that my new therapist’s office was a couple streets over from…. That house.

Getting out of Houston so that I could be myself again might also have been the answer to saving my relationship with Dana, but I don’t think anything could have done that. We got into a pattern where she’d check out on her phone, I’d decide she wasn’t interested in interacting, and e-mail my Supergrover. It wasn’t a big series of fights, just more that when we each looked up, the other was busy, so we assumed we could just keep on doing what we were doing. We woke up months later and didn’t have much of a connection anymore. The reason that a straight girl did not and could not have had any culpability in this is that if Dana and I had made more time to be emotionally available to each other, we would have been okay. We just stopped communicating.

Just because Dana was jealous didn’t mean anything my beautiful girl did to contribute had purpose. Dana chose to get angry at the wrong woman.

Actually, she forgot to get mad at two women. She should have destroyed me, and also herself…. Because I am betting that she does not think of herself as checking out and not caring, and how that might affect my relationship with her.

Because if I tried to engage her and it took more than a few minutes to get her to engage, I gave up. Maybe it was too fast, but I don’t have patience for saying “just five more minutes” when it comes to a video game and I am offering to take off your clothes.

Gay or straight, Supergrover whooped Dana’s ass, and here’s how she did it. Dana didn’t start acting like I had serious value until Supergrover noticed I was brilliant.

So, everyone can think I’m the bad guy until I’m dead. I don’t care. But the relationship started to fail before I shot it out of its misery.

In a perfect world, I would have seen another woman looking at my brilliance and thought, “oh, that’s sweet.” It’s not a perfect world, and she’s hot as shit…. Therefore I lost mine.

I was the one that tumbled out of reality, because at that time in my life, reality bit (if you’re my age, you wore out that disc. It’s probably scratched to shit yet still in your parents’ basement somewhere).

I just wish that I’d used music to help me more than I did. I wish I could have drowned out both women so that I could hear me more clearly. Perhaps my need would have been filled by something healthier, cleaner.

Music definitely would have helped me move on for good, but even that was confusing because I did have a relationship with my beautiful girl. Tenuous, but there. It was a note that grew up to be a symphony, because I love dissonance in the right chords.

Too much had happened for either one of us to feel the same way about each other without work, and we decided for whatever reason that this was a conflict that could be solved by writing. In retrospect, it made things more complicated because neither one of us can read when it comes to the subject matter. How would our conversations be different had she ever put her arm around me? How would kissing each other’s cheeks and hugging tight have mixed up the equation? I go back and forth.

It’s not something I think about a lot, because it’s pointless except in determining that I don’t know as much as I thought I did. It’s just not possible for each of us to feel as much fear in person, because there’s more to grab onto in terms of context.

Because of what has happened, I am wary of online dating, because I know what a shit show it has become. I’m getting a taste of my own medicine in terms of not being able to deal with others’ emotions, because a guy who randomly reached out to me now thinks we are in a much heavier relationship than I do. I just tell him everything she’s told me and surprise, it works. So obviously I know that we were not on the same page and she was trying to fix it as well. Our approaches were just so different that they prevented us from seeing what the other was doing or even understanding it.

But it’s not the same situation. I did just meet this guy out of nowhere, and he started acting enamored after a couple of conversations that had legit nothing to them. Nothing was said that could have created a trauma bond, because I don’t talk to anyone about that unless I’m writing on my web site. I feel like people get enough of my problems if they’re fans, so I won’t talk about my issues unless people ask….. or with Zac, I’ll just ramble around until he finds a point. 😉

I am finding out that being bisexual has nothing to do with sex at all, ever. I have learned that I have dated few men not because I’m not wired that way, but because men legitimately have no clue about what women go through societally and are so damn condescending about it that some dude will say two things wrong and I’m like “block.”

To be fair, I haven’t specifically started seeking out men or women. I just connect with people. However, I notice how I’m being treated and overall, men treat me like I’m little and cute. Boy, I will fuck you up. Respect me as such.

It’s because men aren’t looking at me like I’m half a husband, and it is their downfall. I will never be “the little woman.” I don’t understand most social constructs and step all over them, so expecting that I already understand everything about male/female relationships is a mistake on both our parts.

When a trauma bond snaps, it feels like quitting caffeine cold turkey and then having to deal with the headaches. So, that’s a lot of fun as I negotiate being a new person. It’s why I feel like I’m not good at dating. I go out and I’m not focusing on them, but about how long it’s been since I had at least a goddamn Diet Coke. My body doesn’t feel right, and the one friend that’s always been there for me has taken a back seat…. When music could have handled the detox on its own. Music and I have been together since I was born.

My mother was a classically trained pianist with a degree in piano performance and pedagogy. My father played both classical and jazz trumpet, getting 26 full rides for college. Curtis, Juilliard, Oberlin, you name it.

I am what happens with “the Mozart effect,” but I’m not sure whether that’s a ringing endorsement.

Music has a way of focusing me that other things don’t, and I’m going to have to make a Supergrover playlist as well, because the music I needed to get rid of romantic feelings isn’t the music I need to feel calm. I’ll start with the color green. She reminds me of new life, new growth, new everything and the music should reflect it. I’ll have to go through my music apps, but it should start with something like “Sheep May Safely Graze” yet not exactly that because I’d be whistling it 24/7.

I just need things that are mathematically complicated in a major key.

Actually, that would be a good tagline for her, if there was one. Never have I met anyone with such a range of emotions that centered on light, often shining it into my darkness while I cleaned up. It was easier because I could see.

I listen to classical music a lot while I’m doing other things, because it relaxes my ADHD mind to have at least one plug filled. One less way for another stream of thought to interrupt.

That’s how I think meeting in person would have helped. Talking would have avoided all the traps of going down the wrong road too far before having to figure out an exit strategy, which as you can see is going really well. Obviously I’m not bothered by the situation because I never write about it. Eyeroll.

The writing prompt today reminded me just how much I cannot separate the music of my life from life itself. I am put together with blood and bones and skin, and yet that doesn’t mean music’s contribution isn’t there. Music is the invisible fourth wall providing structure…. So thick you don’t even have to have a stud finder. Just decorate it up, it’ll hold. Like concrete, music drips like water into all your softest places and hardens. Music that moves you will call you to you forever, and not everyone is attuned to your beat.

To turn that back on me, my rhythm changed and I didn’t realize how different it had become. I was a basic 4/4, with a new composer who only knew how to write time signatures by subbing in random numbers. Today, it’s a waltz. Tomorrow, it’s a march. Tuesday is experimental jazz odyssey.

I am living my life with the map on the table, knowing there’s no way to fit it back into the package.

Which ultimately leads me to my favorite song in life, and a story about my ex wife. I thought it was hilarious that the Indigo Girls were on tour, and Kathleen was late to the concert…….for the “GET OUT THE MAP” tour…….. 😛 😛 😛

The thing that stays with me from the first time I heard it until now is “I’m going to love you good and strong while our love is good and young.” The hope for that love is eternal, knowing a piece of it is in me. I can stop the itch on my skin, I can go back to my life, I can move on. But there’s never going to be a moment in my life that is bigger than “you think I’m smart? You? Really? Are you sure?”

Teaching Me, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I found a poem which expresses my feelings toward my beautiful girl, the platonic soul mate sent to shake me out of complacency… yet so far not designed to be a lifetime appointment. I am not letting that change me, however. Love does not depend on the recipient.

I told Kristina that she had saved me trying to translate my soul. Everything she writes guts me, but this takes me back. It is my entire personality, and the heart of miscommunication in a hundred percent of my relationships with neurotypical people. I have been this person in every relationship I’ve ever had.

It’s nice to see it clearly.

Poorly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you practice self-care?

My favorite form of self-care used to be taking a bath, but our bathroom got remodeled and now I don’t have a bathtub. It’s not an easy feat to have smooth legs, a standup shower, and cerebral palsy. Most days, pick two. In fact, I have two bags of Epsom salt (one in lavender, one in eucalyptus) that have never been used because I didn’t know we were getting a shower when I bought them.

Self care changed a bit when Zac and I started dating, because then self care started leaning toward getting out and walking with Oliver, and taking the train to his house, etc. I’m not a social butterfly unless I have to be. Most people take care of themselves by staying in. I’ve got that covered. I need to go out.

I find comfort in my bedroom/office more than anywhere else. This is because my house is very, very large and I am a small person. I tend to hole up in favor of feeling safe. I avoid most people in real life because I don’t live with my family.

I am fairly certain that my housemate thinks that because I’m queer, if she touches anything after me, that thing will turn her queer as well. I’ve gone out of my way to assure her that it TOTALLY WORKS. Don’t you dare pick up this peanut butter lest you suddenly find yourself noticing my sweatpants do fit extra tight today, you’re welcome.

Self care is learning to see others’ idiocy, otherwise it would bother me more often than it does that my housemate thinks I can King Midas her into submission (OMG. EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES TURNS RAINBOW). First of all, ew.

I can also say with a healthy amount of confidence that she’s not smart enough for me.

Self care has been about creating boundaries, which I can’t say has gone all the right way, but has produced all the right results. Having a relationship that was all in my head changed my neural pathways, but there was almost always an air of flying too close to the sun.

The relationship ended my marriage, which I’ve said before; what I haven’t said outside it was all my fault is that we trauma dumped too much too fast and each made the other take on things that they wouldn’t have otherwise chosen. This in and of itself was a crack in my relationship with Dana, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t undo it for anything in the world.

How it worked out was how it was supposed to work out, because I can truly say that I did not choose one or the other. The situation unfolded over years and I retconned it so I could explain it to myself. It was too much to act and process at the same time, and I think that’s what’s happening now. I couldn’t act and process at the same time, so I ended the relationship when I realized what it would take to be on the same page and not having someone to work with on a shared goal, because no goal was set.

It was a roller coaster, when my idea of fun is more “sitting outside by the pool and/or fire.” But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the ride while I was on it, or would turn down another trip if the situation were actually right to do so. I just don’t feel like she’s willing to hammer it out, because instead of seeing questions, she saw entitlement. It wasn’t my intention, but what my words said to her. As if I had an agenda she was constantly failing when I actually saw her as the good kind of trouble. I would do anything for her, and if the situation actually required it, I might even call her on the telephone (no, I wouldn’t. I’m not even that dedicated to me).

If it seems like I’m ragging on her a lot, I would tell you everything I ever loved about her if it wouldn’t result in identifying her. She is just too fun and funny to miss. I would be her second in command at anything just to watch her go off script.

I realized that if I meant as much to her as she meant to me, there wouldn’t be any doubt in my mind as to where we were and where we are and where we’re going because she’d actually want me to know all those things. Now I think she’s just afraid that I value me more than I value her….. that anything truly personal we shared will end up splashed all over everywhere. I doubt it, as we have no mutual friends, but it’s possible if I’ve managed to leave enough breadcrumbs without realizing it because that’s not something I’d do intentionally. I value her privacy, but it’s more than that. Talking about what we’ve shared means sharing things about me that only belong to her. It’s taking that tiny virtual meeting space and opening it up to others, when the purpose of our friendship in the first place was to be the other’s safe space. I would never intentionally violate that. I don’t want to invite anyone else into our space any more than she would want me to do it.

Self care is knowing that I need to turn my attention inward, that I need to protect my energy. So much of it went to her at times that I lost track of me. Not always, but enough. There’s one thing I won’t do, though, and that’s stop praying for her. It’s the least intrusive thing I can do, and probably all I ever will. I am certain that I have said enough, that she is done…. mostly because I told her if she was going, she couldn’t come back unless it was big. That us being so nebulous was kicking my ass. I wasn’t entitled. I was clueless.

That’s because I’d already done the clawing back up part, and it wasn’t happening again without major buy-in. What I didn’t do that I should have was cure her of all her shitty assumptions, like assuming I wasn’t getting what I thought I should out of our relationship. The truth is that she prides herself on not needing anything, so why wouldn’t she think that me being emotional was a weakness? That I’m needy?

I wasn’t needy. I was uneducated. If you don’t tell me what you need and resent the hell out of me for feeling, I’m going to rely on self care.

Truly, I think a lot of our differences can be summed up in our four ages….. ours and our inner children and how those developmental milestones rubbed up against each other. She’s chronologically older, and yet I see her as so much younger than I am. I wanted to protect her because of it, and I failed.

Caring for myself is now harder, because since I failed to protect her, I don’t care as much about myself because I don’t think I’m worth it. I’ve already proven I don’t take care of other people well, why do I think I can help me? I know they’re just intrusive thoughts; most of them don’t even have basis in fact.

I thought of something from yesterday that made me feel amazing. Years ago, I sent her a pen for Christmas. So. Who knows? Maybe I live in her ink, too. 🙂 Moments like that remind me that thoughts of her are not the intrusive ones. My giggle box turns over every time I think of that thank you letter…. that the pen (a novelty) was the first thing that had made her laugh in a while. It helps to think of these things, because I know that I am not chaotic evil 24/7.

Self care is being a little chaotic evil, though. No true regimen would leave out mass quantities of carbs and chocolate at any time, much less right the fuck now (the cramps are starting and I feel my uterus getting ready to scream).

Ohhhhhh……. the cramps are starting…… that’s why I was such a hot mess yesterday. Sounds like I could use some self care.

Failures Past and Present

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I’m in the process of letting myself off the hook for “making” my closest ally feel bad by “bringing up bad feelings about the past.” Here’s what she missed.

I was devastated when she married her husband and I told her that, including why. That it wasn’t because she’d said yes to him and not me. I’m not wired that way. It was because someone I thought of as dear to me didn’t even tell me when her name changed. But it was water under the bridge and trying to tell her an important part of my process… including the fact that when I saw her husband through her eyes, it made my soul relax. She had someone to lean on in such a concrete way and it made me so happy rather than wondering if she was okay and not really feeling as if I could ask that question. I wasn’t focused on anything but wanting to know why she’d chosen to keep the information from me so I could stop thinking about it. I feel like I’d talk about an issue, she’d see me as trying to intentionally point out every flaw and failure she ever had, and I’d walk off like a kicked dog.

I was trying to tell her how much things had changed, that my perspective had grown as I did. That having a 50 foot view made me see how our patterns fit together and how far we’d come over time. I was trying to tell her how much I loved her and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. I thought it would mean a lot to her to hear that her light erasing my dark wasn’t dependent on whether she changed her sexual orientation. I don’t have that much power, and wouldn’t use it if I did.

When I was telling her that she could lean on me, she took it as psychoanalysis, which to be fair it was. But it wasn’t pointing out flaws and failures, and I didn’t write the letter like that. I wrote it with as much empathy as I could muster, saying that I knew she’d been through a lot and I wanted to help. What does anyone who’s ever loved you want more for you than having less pain? I knew that I could help her have less pain by taking it on and hurting for her, breathing through it with her so that we both smiled on the exhale. I wish I had been able to express it in a way that she could hear it, because she is perfect in all her flaws and failures. Just perfect. I feel the way about her that people feel about babies… that no matter what their lives will hold, you know you’d die to protect them. There’s a place in all of us that is that vulnerable, the one that feels defenseless, and I gave her mine.

She just took away my piece of her. Let’s be clear, though. It was my fault entirely. She doesn’t do shit for no reason, but that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to emotions about it.

I think she thinks I don’t know why she yanked my credentials…. That the victim part is in thinking I’ve never done anything wrong. Just because I don’t say I know I’m responsible doesn’t mean that I don’t know it. I’ve said it in as many ways as I possibly could, but that doesn’t mean she heard it. But the thing is, I sound like a victim because I’m only talking about my problem with you because I’m not reading your mind and looking for your problem with me. I can take a guess, but it will come across as psychoanalysis, or so I’ve been told. 😉

I show my empathy by telling people what I think of what they’re going through, and write with such care and attention most of the time. Sure, I have e-mails that just say “thanks,” but that’s not the majority. It happens more frequently now, because I’m scared of starting friendship that doesn’t have an anchor.

I’m processing all this to let go of the past, certainly, but also to understand what I didn’t want for next time. The only way I can do that is to understand what happened so I don’t do it again. If I make a mistake, the pendulum swings to the other extreme so that I don’t have another appearance of the same mistake.

It’s not about her anymore. It’s about knowing what to do if anything like this happens again. I don’t want to lean into the surreal. I want to touch you at least once in our friendship, even if it’s just you accidentally stepping on my heel. I need to prove that you are a solid mass as opposed to my conscience. 😉

It’s hard for people to accept that when they do something wrong, it doesn’t mean I’m taking love away. I’m not rejecting them. I’m trying to grow with them and not against them. If my beautiful girl is impressed by my enormous changes, it would stand to reason that we’d be better friends now than we were, because those impressive changes would have happened together. I am not offended that she feels goaded and provoked because I know by now that she sees my concerns as bombs because she’s not that deep. It’s not that she can’t. It’s that there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “cain’t.” I know this because she’s done it.

I’m tired of working out all our problems and it only changing me.

And if that seems harsh, so be it. I can’t think of anything I’ve said about her in recent memory that she hasn’t taken as something I said to intentionally hurt her without ever looking at the ways I was asking her to take care of me, and asking her what she needed to feel loved as well. Therefore, when she said that e-mails making her feel bad were becoming the norm rather than the exception, I had no idea what she was talking about and she wouldn’t elaborate. If I don’t know what hurts, I can’t stop doing it.

We also have issues in both being fixer/pleasers, butt hurt when we’re actively trying to fix and the other isn’t receptive… not out of malice, but idiocy. I was dialed into my emotions, she was cut off. It wasn’t personal all the way around. She’s like that all the time, and so am I. But conflict with each other didn’t help. I keep asking myself why I required that of her, and let myself off the hook when I realized that it wasn’t me being demanding, it was me realizing that I couldn’t hold back my emotions. I couldn’t wall her off. I walked around in her inner landscape more than I should have, because she gave me a lot to think about that was interesting, and I gravitated toward interesting.

It made my asshole chew crackers when she said she’d marry Brene Brown (I would, too. That’s not the point. 😛 ). I can say that to you. It didn’t help hearing that Hannah Waddingham is hot as shit, either. That’s because me saying I felt the same way about her wigged her out, and she told me that, too. So, sexuality is nonbinary when there’s not a chance in hell it’s real. I am glad that she never in a million years said she’d marry me, even in jest. She definitely didn’t do it when she knew it was my landmine, but I mean early on, when neither of us could ever have done anything wrong. That’s because I would have hurt about it long after I died.

I just don’t feel let down. I don’t feel disappointed that I just wasn’t it for her. I feel like she has the right to be completely who she is, and to wish I could change her is the height of entitlement. I hate those people. What I did wish for is integration, and not necessarily physically, as in a cup of coffee together. Just that sense of integrating our ideas so that we were both up to speed on what the other thought.

I didn’t like being thought of as an asshole, and I didn’t like that she wouldn’t tell me why. I can’t hear that I’m making you feel bad when I’ve just sent you an e-mail saying that we’re both miracles and perfect, not together (but I can see it), but in all the things that we bring to the world.

I just have no idea what she was talking about, because I can have empathy for the way you feel and also no idea how to fix your problem with me if you don’t give me a little more detail. What did I say that made you feel bad, because I am not going to go through every line and have my stomach hurt trying to read your mind.

I also didn’t think it was fair that I looked at every feeling she had about me, seeing her as a spectrum, not a binary. She had me pegged as a dickhead unless I called her out and then I was very impressive for a few minutes.

It would always go back, though, because she hated being judged and couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact that I’m not judgmental about people. I’m judgmental about situations, but not in a way that’s trying to hurt people. I mean like an ACTUAL judge. Someone who listens to all of the facts and collates what they think and feel. Judgment is a way of making decisions. How do you differentiate between signal and noise? Some people perceive, some people judge. One is not more or less than the other, they’re different.

I judge people and situations to be perfect all the time. My judgment not only sees problems and analyzes them, it also makes me an incredible gift giver because since I’ve actually spent time muddling through our issues, I remember more of what you say and little things stick. Your favorite charities. Your job. Your interests. Your teams. Just anything that will tell you that when you get a gift from me, I’ve been paying attention. For instance, if your job requires that you be absolutely wired at all times, I’ll send you SBUX to maximize where you can spend the money. If it is Galentine’s Day, I will make you waffles, or send you a gift certificate to buy them. If I find out you’ve been a fan of Arsenal since you were a kid, I’ll kit you out over the next five years.

It’s a little bit like Sherlock Holmes deducing information, because through logic, he has a more complete data set than people think he does. I have a similar example to Holmes knowing Watson fought in Afghanistan. Not that extreme, of course. It’s just that I’ve picked up things over the years because I’m reading everything she’s not saying as well. This isn’t it, but a universal example would be someone being lactose intolerant because they’ve never said that, yet when you ask them what they want from a coffee shop, it’s always vegan.

The heuristic is that it’s more likely that someone is lactose intolerant than they just don’t like milk if they’ve never indicated they eat vegan food.

But I don’t tell her any of that crap to make her feel bad. I tell her that stuff because what I think is going to make her feel noticed and appreciated makes her feel terrible. If I can’t fix that, I need to move on, because it hurts too much to hurt her.

I let her go because I loved her, not because I was being a toddler.

If I’m the only one that makes her feel bad, my reactions don’t feel amazing, either. I’m just willing to tell you why so that more information means less conflict. Or it should, anyway.

Besides, fuck marrying Brene, because obviously if she hadn’t learned Microsoft Word from me, she wouldn’t be Brene Brown. I am directly responsible for all of her success and I won’t believe anything else. 😛

What Do I Do Now?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

One of the things that happened during the relationship with my beautiful girl was a very skewed sense of self. This is because she would say things that were completely counter to what the rest of my friends said about me. This was a very good thing in some ways, because I needed an outsider’s perspective. It was therapeutic to be able to talk about everyone in my life with no strings back to her, because we existed out of each other’s time and space. The dark side of it was believing a lot about myself that wasn’t true, because she wasn’t there. She was commenting on “there.” It took me a long time to take in that difference. It made me wonder what we’d have been like as a part of a larger group, because it would have made her commentary on my behavior so much different (I think).

The thing that reads universal to me is the difference between how you present in person vs. online. Seeing someone in their context matters. Isolating so that you’re only seeing each other is a blind spot. Tone of voice matters. How I see you treat other people matters. It is a different feeling of inclusion, physically and virtually. I will always be this person, the one that prefers virtual to physical, and the one that shouldn’t doubt its power. I get caught up in my writer personality, which leads me to ignore meeting in person until long after I’ve needed it- absolutely starving for a hug.

I wouldn’t even have suggested to said Internet friend that we should meet if I hadn’t discovered every single way my writing personality could fuck something up first. I wanted to meet up because I was tired of being misunderstood, but wouldn’t have cared about meeting in person if it wasn’t affecting us negatively. Text can only impart so much, and comprehension is due to context clues. It’s freewheeling to disconnect from anything that provides them. This is why I use the phrase “the emotional equivalent of freebasing cocaine.” Everything is coming at you straight, no chaser.

What would it have been like to know her as a girlfriend and mom- not because she told me she had a boyfriend and a kid. Because I was there and I saw them interact? Neither of us were keeping those things out, they’re just impossible to add as attachments (at least with Gmail). I would have loved to see her wipe the floor with her husband, because if she’s as brilliant with conversation as she is with writing, I could have popped popcorn. What I can do virtually is love him as an idea, a concept. What I can’t do is look at him while he’s looking at her to make sure he knows he’s the luckiest bastard on earth.

I also know that anyone she didn’t like wouldn’t last long…. Except maybe for my own amusement. Hearing her get bent out of shape over my dating life led to some of my favorite quotes ever…. All of them unprintable. I wonder what it would have been like for her to see me as a wife and a friend, and how fiercely devoted I am to both roles. I could tell her about it, but so different than her observing everything.

I’d want her to tell me when my girlfriend wasn’t looking at me the way I wanted her husband to look to look at her. She’s an excellent judge of character, and I could make a meal out of watching her feral nature when it comes to the people who are allowed to date me. I laugh when I think about how different it would have been had we experienced her physically meeting these people. I double over picturing asking her “what do you think?”

I grieve for that image as well. I feel like a bad writer when I cannot capture exactly what I mean, and I am sure a lot of what I’ve written has made wanting to meet me impossible. She thought I was a loose cannon as often as I thought she was, because physical interaction wasn’t slowing anything down. Anonymity helped at first and was hard over time, and not because of anything illicit or bad. It’s that only so much of each other comes through when you are not physically sharing the same space.

It’s a weird feeling knowing that there is so much I would have said with my body language that was cut out entirely. For me, it is similar to having a conversation with someone in Spanish. If they only spoke to me in Spanish, they’d think I was an idiot because I can’t even speak in more than one tense. I don’t know how to tell you what happened or what will. I can only tell you what is happening right now…. And even that is garbled. They will have missed what I can do with language when I have it. Choosing to be only virtual pals was the equivalent of being limited to Spanish when we were both natural English speakers.

It informs how I proceed. I make an effort to see Zac and not just Facebook Messenger him all the time. I make the effort to video call Bryn (though right now she’s on vacation). I try not to write so much down, because it’s not exhausting to write, but it is to read and it’s too much to ask of people who are too polite to say anything. Part of my love language is hearing the emotions that come up for you when you’re reading, and I know that if I send too much at one time, it’s overwhelming. When I have physically spent time with someone, it lessens my need to write to them because we just talked. Not having that guardrail is also problematic, because the last thing I want is for people to think that I am just rambling on for attention. From my perspective, I am including you in my life by describing it. It comes across to others as too much homework. Therefore, I am reticent to begin relationships over the Internet when I know there’s not a chance we’ll meet. You can only be so vulnerable with me in a vacuum, because I might know things other people don’t know… and yet I don’t know anything they do, either. Everything I know about that person has been distilled into black and white, where their pictures are all in color.

Color in a black and white relationship blossoms in commentary. Connection is so easy on one level, complicated on another. You can’t get to know a person’s natural rhythms, even in speech. The tendency on the internet is to pick out the angry things and comment on them first, without seeing what kind of day the other has had in any real sense… over time, it just becomes your perception of what their life is like. Perceptions attach certain moods and behaviors that compound in the other’s mind without ever being founded in reality.

I don’t know whether I am foolish for thinking it was better not to have this friendship than it was to live with the disconnects, because the perks were great. She’s my favorite humorist because there is literally no topic on earth she doesn’t know about, so no matter what ball I’m lobbing, she’s there with the world’s best pithy comment…. And the best ones are unprintable.

At the same time, I was carrying a lot of pain knowing that in some ways, I’d made meeting me feel scary. It made me afraid of myself. Not knowing where I stood gave me more reason to doubt our relationship would ever be more well-rounded, and that there would be an end to feeling like I was hurting her all the time. I knew innately that if I could emotionally injure her, I could emotionally injure other people. So I absolutely fixated on trying to make things right because if I could be redeemed from this mistake, I might be capable of a relationship where no one got hurt.

I had these perfect pictures in my head, changing as she and I did. Funny moments teaching her how to cook, joking with her husband because we know we’re the roadies on a pretty great tour. If the fates had aligned differently, I know I would have been Paul Child, not Julia…. And that’s why I needed her in a nutshell.

I don’t want to be the Julia. I want to be the Paul. I want to be the one cheering people on to do what they do and be who they are. Being supportive of her fills my purpose in life, too. But in this case, I am not limiting Julia to my beautiful girl. I just know I was born to help other people be great. Not having been that for the one I love the most is an exercise in torturing myself and leads nowhere good. Now, I absolutely know what I want in order to avoid the same mistakes. It is learning to negotiate those desires with others so that they also feel heard where the sharpest pain lives, because now I am overly protective of myself. I don’t let people in the way I should, because I’m thinking constantly about what I have done versus what I will do.

Telling me what you think while looking at me has become important again where it wasn’t for a very long time. I was afraid to come out of my shell for fear of rejection, so I just wouldn’t. Asking my beautiful girl if she wanted to hang after she’d already witnessed the worst things about me mattered. However, it was not a moment I knew I could take. It had to be given. So, when she said she wasn’t ready, I didn’t bring it up for years. It didn’t seem important in the grand scheme of things.

It became important because of all the things being lost in translation. Particularly, not knowing if saying that someday you might be ready is real or is something you say when you don’t know what to say. It is impossible to glean from mere words.

I made a meal out of someday without really looking at the amount of time that went by, engaging in the same behavior patterns over and over. It wouldn’t resolve without one of us doing something. I couldn’t stop feeling these large feelings, but I could do something to discourage them. I could turn my attention. I was tired of all of it. All the self recrimination. All the guilt. I have learned that I am not a bad person, and I should stop treating myself like it. I was holding myself to my worst mistake, reliving it in a way that she never would have endorsed. She would have protected me from me if I’d let her.

Dear God, how she tried.

Knowing she loved me that much, to try and understand something that wasn’t tangible or explainable, made me ferocious in trying to understand everything about me that repelled her. This is what I mean when I say that she’s always been the most honorable part of me even when I couldn’t be that for myself. She was rock solid in all the areas I was blind. She taught me to me in a way that will never be duplicated, because I had a yardstick to measure my success. Not in terms of material things, but in terms of emotional strengths she had where I was weak and needed time to grow.

But if the other person isn’t learning and growing with you, the imbalance shows quickly. There are too many chances for things to go wrong when 93% of you is somewhere else.