Tag: lovebombing

TW: Suicide

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What have you been putting off doing? Why?

I just lost paragraphs and paragraphs of this essay because WordPress screwed me, including the part where I said this was an expose on what it’s like to live that life of bipolar depression, not an indictment of my situation right now. My answer is that I, like all bipolar patients, struggle with life feeling like a series of moments where you’re putting off killing yourself… and that Supergrover was the thing that helped me keep all of that in perspective. That there are bigger things than me at work, a chessboard I’d never see with other factors at play, and a face I’d never forget because she’s “hell on wheels in a black dress.” She lost that beloved position in my life because she couldn’t commit and I was exhausted. Doesn’t mean I currently love her any less. I’m just sad. But full of hope because I am so much more than I thought I was. That’s due to her covering my ass. She’s not getting that I need her to own the fact that it’s difficult saving hers while also being a writer who publicly examines her life and her deciding that she wants to tap out is problematic and is absolutely contrary to the Mama Wolverine she said she was. Not interacting doesn’t take away my need to dive into the wreck, and it’s dangerous on many levels because I understand her better than most people and not because I’m a diagnostician. I am holding more cards. Again, it would have been so much more clear if I hadn’t lost the lead. Literally.

What you see is what you get. My situation is dire, and the reason I go on busting Supergrover up is that the dire part is completely and totally her fault. She cannot escape that fact, and doesn’t think she owes me anything when I agreed to help her carry her bag of shit. I’m not so much married to her as married to it. And she knows it. But it’s my behavior and not what triggered it until she comes back and says she’s been licking her wounds. It touches me that she thinks about me while she’s away. That what I say does resonate with her. That my words may be used in situations that matter. That I am actively building up someone who really, really needs it. That I pray to God all the peace that’s running through our chord is with her in the darkest moments of her life, because they are darker than mine. Her life feeds mine and is part of what puts off killing myself because I spent so many years loving her more than me. My first instinct is to protect her, and she knows it.

Thinkinng I was stalking her was over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.

I can respect her thinking it and I don’t punish her for it. I really don’t. I punish her for not talking to me about it and telling the one person who hated my guts at that moment……… the wife who was tired of my crap and used that information to great effect. She ended my marriage with it and thought nothing of it. Me breaking up with Dana didn’t involve her actuallly believing that I was stalking someone. It ended because she wanted to break up and needed information she could hold over my head, and that’s what she picked because those closest to us know our biggest vulnerabilities. She hit below the belt for YEARS on this one issue when it was completely fucked up for her to think I would ever walk away from Supergrover. Ever. And she knows it and she supported it. So, instead of working with me, she got tired of my crap and used every bit of information Supergrover gave her to berate all my opinions and bully me for something that she knew wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t the actor. I was the responder. And she knew it.

Supergrover didn’t leave me even in my darkest hours. The complete darkest. She, like Dana’s alcoholism (which I will state exactly that way because I’m describing her behavior in retrospect, not what I believed in the moment.), according to Homer Simpson, was “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” Dana’s alcoholism made her alternate between funny and scary. I could say the same about Supergrover all day every day and twice on Sunday, because her words at the beginning of our relationship affected the way I viewed her and she didn’t correct any of my assumptions. In my mind, her little girl decisions on how to cope with consistent out of body experiences made her who she is. She is 12 feet tall and bullet proof and when she’s angry she has no problem lettiing you know that. Our power imbalance causes me great anxiety whether we’re getting along or not, because I am reading between the lines on a lot of shit. She doesn’t have time for me and now that she’s said it, I’m out. But I still see her face is everything I do because she made it where I can’t not.

I can’t afford it, and neither can she.

I spend time with her character because she won’t talk about our issues with me. She takes all her feelings about me and tells someone else, then finally, finallly, after eight years broke it down and said she could do nothing for me. It felt like a bullet to the chest because I’d given up so much for her already without her even having to ask. I had to do those things to protect myself as much as her. Anticipating her needs was so easy right up until it wasn’t.

Seriously, when we’re working on all cylinders, it feels like flying over the mountains. The best audition you ever had. Hitting a high C perfectly in a concert. Knowing powerful, powerful writers I don’t. Knowing that if I’d moved here when we were at our best, I would have been welcomed with open arms because she didn’t constantly think of me as a low-key threat and I didn’t think of her that way, either. She might have even picked me up from the airport back in those days. I know she would have picked me up at her old Metro stop… at the very least, she would send someone else to do that. She’s very good at that, and I mean that so very lovingly and not in a snarky way at all.

But there were things that gutted me. Like moving and not giving me her address so I could surprise her once in a while. The last things that were meaningful to both of us were a bracelet with her favorite cause on it (and it’s now fairly ironic) and a pen that was meant to be a gag. It was her present, but I lit up like I was Santa Claus himself. I also just thought of a joke about her that she would love and now I’m laughing very hard and sad I can’t tell it. Too close to the hard out. But anyway, since I knew those things were big hits, as well as some books in case she wanted to change careers that I thought would be helpful (these were all different Christmas and birthday presents on different years, I’m not a baller trying to win her like a carnival prize). There is one way that I am more precious to her than her husband and always will be, and not because she kept anything from him. It was that she told me before she told him, so she remembers that, not that she didn’t want him to know.

Because Michael and I are the only ones who know all her secrets at once, it’s why I need him more than I’m jealous. I know they control every bit of her behavior and I know that if I’m struggling, so is he and I will not apologize for that statement. She is a queen and she needs to be told that every single day and not because I don’t want her to have it. I really believe that shit. If you believe nothing else I tell you, believe THAT. She has released so much dragon fire for me while also accepting a hell of a lot. Doesn’t seem to give a fuck that I’m in love ith this character every bit as much as I love her in real life. Is, I hope, secretly proud of the little bubble I’ve made for us in this corner of the Internet while also respecting her privacy.

It’s a lot, but it keeps me from putting off the things I love the most about life. It gives me a different perspective, one that’s bigger than I used to have. I realized that from the very beginning, my hunger for her was always about knowledge, not that particular kind of intimacy. It’s why the idea attracted and repelled me for far longer than it should have, and it was my own choice to be miserable over it…. but again, the way she laid everything out anyone would have. She knew how I felt from the very beginning. That what she did turned me on because it felt like she had shown up like fucking Richard Gere while I was in the middle of a tumultuous relationship. It was a hardcore disaster, but a bomb I needed to wrestle with like The Moment. I decided that especially in retrospect, but even in the moment, I knew I was making the right decison. The bomb was going to go off, and it was going to be hell on earth, but I’d be able to escape domestic violence and alcoholism if I left right the fuck now.

Supergrover has changed her mind many times over whether she wants to respond or not, and it kills me when she vacillates between Mama Wolverine and I don’t even want to tell you how I feel.

But that push pull is exactly what I need to keep the mystery of faith……..

Once you hear the emergency brakes, you’re likely to hear them again.

I do not call her a character like The Doctor in real life. I call her a character here because it’s just an outline of who she is, not the complete picture. You can’t ever know that because there’s so much I can’t include. So much she’s seen that I haven’t that I can’t talk about. So many things about her life that affect me, but I can’t hold onto her as tight as I can for once in our lives. It would help me a lot to know she’s real at this point. Or, as I told her a hundred years ago, “besides. Can I really make a decision like whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for, woman?” Then, she punched me in the metaphorical balls with the answer and I told her to fuck off. Now I’m laughing so hard I might fall off the couch. Grasshopper will never in her lifetime reach satori compared to that. Or, at least if I have, I wouldn’t know it. I hate it that she’s funnier than me. She needs to tone it down. 😉

Learning what I’ve learned over the years has been the 10 years I’ve needed that the first therapist I told all this to said I’d need to get over it. That’s because the trauma started years before I met Supergrover and she was the one who told me her secrets in hopes of understanding my own. It’s what makes us two peas in a pod, and our relationship goes better for both of us when she recognizes it. By now, again, it’s not getting any better because instead of talking through the situaton, she’s avoiding it. What I have not thought until having months to think about it is that our relationship is crazygonuts because we haven’t met in real life. I have been perfectly happy with not meeting before now, and will be. Our relationship is not dependent on it, and wouldn’t need to be. I just believe we will continue the same pattern until we make the commitment to each other to break it, and I can’t think of anything faster than realizing the other actually exists in a way we haven’t experienced before. We get angry and troll the hell out of each other in a way we couldn’t do in person. It’s the shortest way to make us stop regressing.

I’m proud of myself for recognizing what I needed and stepping away, because I really can’t handle Supergrover’s life without being able to understand it from her perspective. I also can’t stop living vicariously through her because I need to know what the boundaries are on the hard out before I start writing that day. She talks around everything and I Socratic Method everything until I figure it out on my own. It’s exhausting, and figuring out how to pray for her and love her from a distance is so much easier than working without a net.

I just can’t stop caring that I might identify her, so I feel the weight she put on our relationship in a deep and meaningful way that I’d rather share with her than carry alone. It would feel different after a walk on The Mall, and it’s what calms my internal rage. That whether it was romantic or platonic, all of my dreams where we share a glass of wine or a meal have been picnics in the sunshine. Walking around a pond feeding ducks. Now we can do that in my dreams, but I have no need to wine her and dine her even in lucid dreaming because it’s just not worth it to dwell, even in dreams. Nothing is going to change, so why bother? I am proud that even when I hit the sleep stage where I’m so crazy I don’t remember my own name, I don’t go there.

We walk on the beach as if we’ve been doing it our whole lives, and I want to be there for the rest of it. It’s what saves me from living my life as a miserable bipolar patient staving off the inevitable. When we’re together, I feel like I could do anything. No one has ever given me those feelings in such a unique was so that they were instantly believable and objective in fact.

What I have been putting off is laying out these feelings in front of her. That I’m as married to her as Michael will ever be, and those conversations in the sunshine are more than gold to me, even when I’m making them up. And I know they’re made up, because they’re the out of body experiences that help me deal with my real life…. complicated, wild, and wonderful because I once fell in love with a girl, standing in front of a girl, asking to be a fan because she thought I was a great writer. I wish I could bottle that feeling and use it as hair product.

It stops everything I used to want to stop putting off, which makes me feel safe in a way I’ve never felt before. I sleep better because this love became mine, completely by chance and no less wild and wonderful than the ups and downs of a decade in which we’d seen each other every day.

But if we’d seen each other every day, we wouldn’t have this, either. The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems…… according to Homer Simpson.

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

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolstoy Abridged

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

…she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

-Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

It is funny the lengths to which we will go, the things we will withstand, when we think we need something or someone… most likely someone. Things are an achievable goal. People are moving targets of emotion. In most relationships, but not all, there is some bit of lopsidedness to it. Not everyone finds that marriage, that friendship, that boss in which esteem and respect are equal to one another.

And yet we go on, trying to please and tolerating others’ behaviors as if they are normal in order to learn their particular brand of dysfunction. As Leo Tolstoy says in Anna Karenina, “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” No family is immune to it- to fit in, we adjust our expectations from the ways we were raised to the way they were… because equality is about compromise, and need is ingratiating ourselves, sublimating the parts of us that are completely different so “we’re on the same page.”

I didn’t learn this from my biological family. I learned it over years and years of emotional abuse. Early and often I changed my behavior so that I didn’t rock the boat, and walked on eggshells, afraid to be myself… because when I was, it was a signal to me that I wasn’t needed anymore. Agreement meant love; disagreement meant “I just don’t know what to do with you. I can’t win, so I’ll just leave.”

Appeasement was the name of the game, and we all do it, but some less than others. Take, for instance, your work phone voice and the voice you use when you’re just shooting the shit with your friends. If “the customer is always right,” sometimes that means swallowing words that need to be said and aren’t… mostly things like “you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Customer service is the only profession I know in which trying not to fake your own death so you don’t have to go to work is a daily struggle…. because people won’t unload on the others they’re mad at, but they have no problem treating the clerk at Target or the waiter at Jaleo like that. They think it’s impersonal, having no idea how deep their words cut… because hey, they’ll never see you again.

And that’s where they’re wrong. They need you. It’s not like they’re going to abandon going to Target or Jaleo, and they’ll see you again whether you want to see them or not. As soon as they walk in the door, you remember their “kick the dog” syndrome and try desperately to find someone else to help them.

But sometimes you’re stuck, and it’s a crapshoot as to whether they’ll remember and apologize.

This same behavior happens in relationships. We’re mad about something else, and unload on the people we love the most, because we know their softest spots. Unsurprisingly, they also retreat, and if the words cut deeply enough, and apology isn’t necessary, because they won’t hear it, anyway.

Because sometimes the emotional abuse is given, rather than received… especially if that’s what’s been modeled for you long enough. Others tiptoe around you, so that you don’t pick up your toys and go home… the exact scenario you were trying to avoid with someone else. You watch as they change their behavior around you, rarely self-aware enough to know they’re doing it, because you’re doing the same thing… your own egocentricity in the way… both saying to each other “please don’t leave me. I am broken and I know it, I just don’t know how to fix it.” Just not with words.

But that’s what happens with fully-functioning adults. As a child and an adult in any kind of relationship, the balance of power is off to an enormous degree… and any perceived anger is all their fault. There is nothing within them that says “this person is treating me unfairly and I need to stand up for myself.” This is because when the child tries to stand up for themselves, it leads to witholding of affection and long, drawn-out silences in which the child takes on the “I have to fix everything” mentality. Instead of another adult compromising themselves into your crazy as you adopt theirs, children cannot begin to comprehend what they’ve done wrong.

And often, this is the root of the problem with adults who also think that every slight is their fault. You don’t get away from it, there’s no relief until you can take back your own power… and it never, ever happens in an instant. It is a lifelong process of examining why you think the way you think, because even when you think you’ve made progress, you’ll fall back into old patterns because they are so ingrained. It is a lifetime of two steps forward, and between one and four steps back. Just like one is never cured of addiction, one is never cured of codependency.

Adulthood modeled badly for children leads to future adults that cannot trust their own intuition, often relying on other people they perceive as just as damaged as they are because they know they can take a healthy person and destroy them. Sometimes it’s a good thing to share experiences, as my friend Donna calls “compatible wounds.” At others, it’s one awful pattern feeding the other with no end in sight, because neither one is aware of just how much they’re doing to excoriate good memories.

The eternal rub, the thing that makes both of you bleed, is that when you’re saying awful words to each other, it’s really just a cover-up as to how you feel about yourself. If you think you’re worthless, that’s how you’ll treat others. You don’t really think that about the other person, you’re expressing your own disgust at yourself, and it comes across as rage and anxiety… words coming out of your mouth before you even have a chance to connect consequences. If someone has treated you that way, why would you? It’s “what you’re supposed to do” in an argument. For two people abused as children, these are fights that are designed to cut both people off at the knees, mutually assured destruction in which both parties have trouble standing back up.

The craziness continues because you’re so afraid of getting “crazy spatter” on healthy people… or at least, the people we view as such… not really taking in that everyone is fighting a battle of some sort. These days, I tend to believe that there are no healthy people, only healthy actions… and, as Elizabeth Gilbert says, “I don’t know of any story of self-enlightenment that doesn’t begin with getting tired of your own bullshit.” I had to decide to get healthy. I had to decide it was time to, in the words of St. Paul to the Corinthians, “put away childish things.” However, just like deciding to come out as GLBT, you don’t do it once… you do it every day. I can’t just decide once. I will die having to make these decisions.

If Need accommodates cruelty, it is a choice to step away from it…. not once, but each and every day. I would amend that statement to say that Need only accommodates cruelty when it is based in lopsided affection, when you think you need something not meant for you. Healthy need is interdependence, not wishing and hoping someone will finally realize what you have to offer… because pro tip… they won’t. Users that make it impossible to please them will only move on to someone else when they realize they can’t get adoration from you anymore. They’ll just lovebomb someone else until they’re so wrapped up in the lovebombing that they can’t understand why it would go away, and what they did to deserve it.

“Putting away childish things” is the realization that you know exactly what you did. You took those childhood behaviors and carried them into adulthood, where they no longer serve you… but again, it’s not a realization that happens once, but every time you interact with others. You have to ask yourself if you are really happy and healthy, or in the company of others, whether everyone is just unhappy in their own way. You have to stand up and say………….

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy. – Ernest Hemingway