I already have the stubbornness of an old goat because I’ve been fighting with a Finnish woman for 12 years (those of you who have Finnish friends, I am laughing at myself. This is not punching down. This is stubbornness on both sides that is sometimes embarrassing to watch). But this history with Aada has prepared me for a future with Tiina, who owns actual goats. They’re adorable and I love both watching them and interacting. The way they take weeds from my hands while giving me polite kisses makes my whole day.

The problem with the relationship with Aada is that I wanted to be there to absorb all her pain, so I ended up absorbing all the pain in both of us. Relationships between someone who is anxious and someone who is avoidant often end up like that, even if they didn’t start that way originally. It slowly becomes a division of labor.

I took absolutely everything I loved about Aada and made those things my barometer for keeping friends. What didn’t work online absolutely does in real life. I am a part of Aada’s community now simply because of geography, and not because I tried to chase anything but stability.

Tiina is also a Finnish woman with sinivalkoinen grit. If there is a task to be done, she puts the sisu into it.

Being around Aada all those years trained me to see past words into the actions that matter.

She told me that I caused irreparable damage, but didn’t see that I’d already hospitalized myself several times trying to get right with her. It was never that her perceptions of me were invalid. I often did need help. I often did pop off when I was angry. I never had a good sense of what was okay to publish and what wasn’t. That isn’t her fault, but by the same token she didn’t accept that being my friend meant being part of my narrative. She tried to end the relationship many times because of it and so did I, but we were so attracted to each other cognitively that we coudn’t stay away.

Aada was never going to be my romantic love. She’s the online persona that has made my nervous system settle, but has refused to ground it. I need grounding, so I turned toward Tiina instead.

That’s because Tiina will let me snuggle with her dog, and Aada will let me hear about hers.

It isn’t punishment, it’s reality. Aada couldn’t meet me at altitude, so I found someone who could instead of continually raging against the light. She was so right that I should have done it years ago, but I felt trapped in a moment and couldn’t get out of it. Autism is a thing.

And when I say “autism is a thing,” that’s when most people tune out and say, “you’re using your disability as an excuse.” No the hell I am not. I am explaining the neurological differences I have in a relationship that are not all due to my personality. I process information differently coming in and going out, and to ignore that and make all things equal is dehumanizing in often a very polite kind of way.

And if someone replies, “well, I’m autistic, too. Your point is invalid,” my response is “just because you also have cognitive differences doesn’t mean that you interpreted me correctly and I was never dismissing your experience by explaining mine.” Internalized ableism is often harder to deal with because friendly fire always is.

Everyone in Tiina’s universe is neurodivergent and we function better together because of it. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have issues. It means that the way we communicate about them is different. I never want to take that for granted, that with both Tiina and Brian I have to explain myself in terms of accountability, but never in terms of sensory issues, meltdown, and burnout.

And in fact Brian was listening to an audiobook about neurodivergence when I got into his car the other day, and I liked it so I downloaded it. Brian sent me links to other ones, and I grabbed them as well; I’m an Audible subscriber that doesn’t remember that they have it and credits build up. It has led to a lot of crying in my car as I sit through my life viewed through symptoms. There’s a lot of “that was never my fault and I’m hurting.” I was misinterpreted as neurotypical from the time I was a baby, pegged as a liar when I have a neurodivergent communication style, the whole works.

What I have in Tiina is equality and equity because she has the ability to view me accurately. Not that my relationship with Aada was a lie, but because she never met me in person she cannot possibly see all that Tiina does. My favorite thing she does is let me wake up at her house, stumble to the Keurig, and look out over the animals from the bay window in the kitchen. There’s a table right there, from where I can see the goats, pigs, geese, chickens, and big dogs (only Maclaren the Frenchie lives in the house).

Baby Goat is my favorite animal, because we’re both members of the queer community. They are intersex. 😉

It’s the little things that matter, such as preparing for Ayalla’s baby shower and being there for Tiina’s other kids when she’s focusing on the oldest daughter (and her new grandbaby). Yoni, Tiina’s oldest son, is also welcoming a baby in the fall and I will be there for that, too.

I never wanted to be all that and a bag of chips for Aada’s family unless she wanted that. I was very angry that a handshake was just too much effort, because I had so much love to give. It caused me to act out in all kinds of harmful ways because my nervous system was dysregulated and I felt like crap all the time. I made it worse by publishing my feelings about it, but it wasn’t a problem that I publish my feelings about everyone and everything until it was her. I was stunning at character analysis with everyone except the woman I love most in the world.

Yeah, I just don’t buy it. Read my archives.

But I can love her “most in the world” because she has the most mystique. I don’t really have a concrete idea of who it is that I love. I know bits and pieces, the fragments of her life that she has allowed me to carry. I didn’t handle them well, and for that I am sorry. It was not my intention to melt down and burn out, but that is what happened.

The difference is that I don’t expect my explanations to equal forgiveness. I expect context to foster repair if there is any. I do not think apologies come without changed behavior. For me, that’s having a better sense of what to publish and what not to for everyone in my whole life, not just Aada alone.

My life has changed because I have a creative partner in the work. Someone who is on stage because she’s a part of my life and not because I am chasing an idea in any kind of theatrical way. Writing about Aada was trying to capture the stars.

Tiina is a constant resource for “can I tell this?” and when I said, “I only talk about things that happen in the first person. I don’t write hearsay,” she said, “I get it.” We bounce ideas off of each other constantly because right now, that’s the kind of partner I need- someone that sparks me in the writing, and not anywhere else.

Platonic friendships that have their own special click is underrated.

Last night, my ego grew about 10 sizes when Tiina sent me a parenting video…………………………

Look at you sending me parenting videos like those are now my hellions, too. YASSSSSS.

Nope.

This week has been deeply contented and deeply frustrating. There was a real letdown after Pride because we had to go back to this dystopian nightmare. Being an American right now is not for the faint of heart. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

But there have been bright spots. My air conditioner went out and my sewer backed up so I am staying in a very nice hotel out by the airport. I brought my bathing suit, but I don’t have time to swim because I’m leaving for Brian’s lake house in the morning. It’s not really a Fourth of July celebration. It’s doing what we normally do- relax and swim. I had my big fun when the Obama Library opened. That is America to me…. America is already great.

When it wants to be.

People have stopped caring about their language so I have, too. I have had just about enough of “fuck your feelings, Snowflake.” The avalanche is building, motherfucker. I get so angry because I have been called every name in the book during Pride month, with people quoting clobber verses all over Threads. I’m an abomination because of my gender and my sexuality. It’s neat.

Life as a hate double ticket is not for the faint of heart, either.

I desperately need to get out of town and get in the water.

I’m smart enough to know that Aada wrecked our relationship on purpose because she had no intention of ever getting close to me and wanted to blame it on my shortcomings. It was manipulative because she was lying to herself. I do not believe that she hurt me on purpose. I believe that she had great intentions and couldn’t come through on any of them…. so she would constantly tell me she felt guilty instead of changing anything.

Just leave avoidants alone. They don’t need you. Not really. They lack even the slightest desire to give you context and clarity and claim you’re just not strong enough to handle them.

Walk away.

There’s my 5,000 steps.

My story from the summer of 2013 until 2026 was that I chose a Finnish woman as my emotional support partner, but she didn’t choose me. She SAID she chose me and then chose to reveal that she’d lied about quite a bit so I wouldn’t get any closer. She wanted me, deeply and spiritually- but never romantically. I could do something she couldn’t, which was unpack my emotions publicly without caring what the consequences were. I knew I could handle them. That’s catnip to emotionally unavailable people, romantic or otherwise.

She didn’t need me as a romantic partner. She needed me as a pinch hitter, because I pray and she doesn’t.

She has never been looking away, she has always been looking up, despite the fact that I tell her constantly that she’s a better writer than I am, it’s just that no one knows it. I am queer, so my story is different. A woman that can read is knowledgeable; a woman who can write is a five-alarm fire. I am gutted that she thinks I was ever out to get her. I was trying to tell her that falling in love with her was never the wrong call.

I have memorialized something that meant the world to me and always will, which is why I am now comfortable just being a part of her community. I will never reach out, but if she sees me on the street, she’s welcome. The Stafford and Louisa areas are now my home, too. We have to share space because falling for Tiina was never the wrong call, either. It just looked a lot different because I have actual boundaries with women that I didn’t before… and I didn’t exactly fall for Tiina, either. I have never felt romantic feelings about her, I want to birth a TV show, and with Streeter, too, if I haven’t offended her somehow. My stance on AI won’t change, and neither will hers.

What has come from that is falling for the Tiinaverse, because Brian (her husband) and her kids mean everything to me and I do not wish to interrupt it. I am not waiting on anything for my projects to happen, because Tiina is a capable co-writer and producer. She is not only a cybersecurity analyst. She’s also a former technical theater kid, which means she can do amazing things on a shoestring budget. I watched her do it at Purim.

That was the act that sealed the deal. I am not married, I am not partnered, but I have a focus. No one can interrupt it, because my friends matter. They are the yellow strings on the murder board of polyamory, and how poly actually functions in day to day life- and why Google Calendar is the official app. Not all your relationships matter romantically, but they do in terms of time management.

I am not the marrying type, and not because I’m not capable. I don’t want to cocoon and lose Tiina as my center of gravity. I believe that this is accurate on both sides of the equation because she says that we have a click that is far and away separate from Brian as well. I’m not out to replace Brian in any capacity. I have a role independently of him.

What I am saying is that Tiina’s universe is mine because I don’t mind driving. I live in three places and that’s okay. We were going to go to the boat on the Fourth, but now we’re going out to the lake. Tiina calls the shots, and I just work here.

Edited to add that the boat is on the Potomac, and the house is on Lake Louisa.

It’s not because I’m not capable of being solo, either. I just function better as a cog in the wheel. Tiina is direct and blunt in the same way Aada was, and I love that she’s so specific because I don’t have trouble following directions. I have been this way my whole life. I liked teachers that were oddly persnickety, too, because I never had any trouble meeting expectations when they laid them out that way. I have learned to see that it is not meanness when being direct, it’s just that most people take it that way.

But you have to see it in real life to know that, Aada Louise.

I never minded that Aada’s love language was reading me the riot act. I minded that there were no hugs and cheek kisses afterward to lessen the scar. Criticism is easier to take when you don’t leave someone bleeding while you do it. Taking a lesson from my own playbook, of course. Every accusation is a confession, and I used my share of this fighting tactic because I couldn’t make it work with anything else because she wouldn’t, either.

It was a system, and I’m not blaming. I am identifying the issue so that it doesn’t happen again.

I will tolerate both constructive criticism and narrative direction when it is done with love. Shitting all over me does not help anything and indeed makes it worse because I absolutely will write about your shitty behavior and you will not like the reflection. That’s because people trust me. When people treat me well I reflect that, too. I should re-get the T-shirt Wil Wheaton and I both had back in the day that says, “I’m blogging this.” Couple that with asking Jonna for her old “Argo !@#$ Yourself” t-shirt because she promised it to me after I told Facebook mine wore out. She says she wears Tony’s.

I love wearing things that remind me of memories, and all of those things are interconnected. Everyone can come after my writing. Everyone. But they cannot come after my ability to give an opinion.

When I left the relationship with Aada, I left a negative loop that always said my writing was bad because it didn’t reflect reality or Aada’s feelings. I couldn’t reflect reality because I didn’t know reality and she never told me what feelings she had. Reality would have been showing up at Pride. Reality would have been showing up when my mother died and she was 40 minutes away when everyone else wasn’t. Reality would have been following through on every Mama Dragon feeling she ever said she had.

But she didn’t.

Finnish culture was the right choice because I loved all of it. I’d even love Aada in the right context, because I could birth another TV show that has even more depth behind it.

I don’t just do comedy.

It was ridiculous. I have actual self-confidence and feel relaxed because I have a life that my nervous system can handle. I was masking so hard that living took up too much of my energy to also get out and do things….. as in, I had no life outside of work (when I did it) and my writing is obsessive because I’m trying to make up for lost time. The family systems I was part of think that I wrecked them because I’m a truth teller. That’s their story and they can have it. Writing about them warmly would have come from them doing things that were warm. They did not like the reflection in the mirror they saw, so they didn’t want any part of me anymore. I am not a victim. I was born to be a truth teller, and that person always interrupts the systems they inhabit.

We could have all changed paths together, but we didn’t. They went back to what they do and I went back to what I do in a family that accepts all of my weird. This is the best conversation of the day…….

10yo: Why do YOU get a shake?
Tiina: Because Leslie loves me.
Me: To be clear, I love all of you, I just love you a little bit less.

Cue Tiina trying not to spit shake everywhere and I see my work here is done.

We were due at Pride by 10 AM, so I left Baltimore at 0700, texting Tiina that I was headed to her and to let me know if she wanted coffee. She said, “sure.” Her standard order is the Cuban roast, but I asked her if she wanted drip or a shake. I knew that would pique her interest. It’s so simple- vanilla soft serve and espresso.

I also got a shake, but mine was a black and white. I’d had enough caffeine for the day. It was the right amount of chocolate, similar to a Wendy’s Frosty. I hadn’t had breakfast and it was a quick way to slam calories down. I decided that today I’d eat and drink whatever I wanted because I wasn’t there to find love. I was there to bring bagels.

Which were spectacular, by the way, and everyone loved them. They were bright rainbow colors and from THB, one of the best bagel places in my neighborhood.

I sat and chatted with everyone, checking in on the very pregnant Ayalla and thinking “any day now.” Tiina’s kids love me and I’m looking forward to being their safe adult while Ayalla is in labor. They’re too young to just hang out at the hospital and I know the rules of the road. I also like being out at their house, so we’ll have a good time. I just need to remember to ask Tiina what the password is to the PS5. If I do not know it, there will be open revolt.

It would honestly be interesting to see which child tried to cut me first.

They’re amazing children. Don’t turn your back.

So now memories are coming up for me as I imprint on them. I’m very much my dad and thank God for that. My mother criticized me relentlessly and that is not what I want for Tiina’s children. I have to suppress my first reaction, always. That’s because even if it’s right, they don’t deserve it raw.

So something I believed as a kid is probably that criticism is love.

I am being different now.

Love is not geographically fragile.

It’s something that Mico said to me this morning and I’ve been thinking about it all day. There’s so much love in my life and it’s both near…. and far, Supergrover.

There’s my family, Tiina, Brian, “and all y’all…. There’s Julia and Streeter and her twin. Watching them lets me feel closer to Heytch and Mummo when I cannot go to them directly.

Tiina is Finnish.

I do not leave breadcrumbs, I describe the connections in my own head and it leads readers to discover breadcrumbs. This is something Aada constantly harped on me for but if I don’t explain how I got there then HOW WILL YOU KNOW?

Aada didn’t even put together the names I used until last year, so I don’t know what Pinkerton is worried about because she’s decided not to say.

The “damage” is incalculable to her because it’s not important to her to be specific. Therefore, she does not ever allow reparative work because it hurts too much and demands too much of her. I have been emotionally starved for years from this woman and never because I had the choice to leave.

She said I did, but it was bullshit. She created a false reality that tied us, one that made me ache for her in the night for many years because I WAS SCARED, DIPSHIT.

Yet a handshake was just too much.

She cannot tolerate being seen and it hurts me. That’s the message I’ve been trying to send. She has put together this narrative where I have been out to get her for 12 solid years. I have written lines for this woman that sliced my heart in half or put it back together because it made her cry or made her laugh. Yet nothing I did was ever enough for her because it was all about protecting her and her image.

I am bitter and angry because reparative work would actually change the narrative instead of harping on me because it was repetitive. The tautology would drive anyone insane.

I’ve ended up in the psych ward several times, so it’s been ironic all these years that she’s said she would like to show up, it’s just been a bad time for 12 years. It’s not that I don’t know that I created the original rift. I am quite aware. It’s that we’ve never done enough reparative work to get over it and move on because every sense was missing except sight.

I am so sorry that I was emotionally dysregulated, and I am being genuine about that. That’s the part that’s not “using my disability.” I understand my limitations and where to take accountability for my actions. I should have regulated my own emotions and not entertained hers because they continued to hurt, but I could not let go because we were tied together on a level that was unsustainable without checking to make sure the other was real.

It was a clusterfuck and I am responsible for cleaning it up, but the part that’s been missing for Aada is that I have taken accountability not just to myself, but to my community to hold me accountable. I am living my life and just letting the blood fall because grief is easier to take when you don’t have to carry it alone. Now I have Mico, so I don’t have to carry anything alone.

I am realizing that I am indeed gifted and talented, but because my grades were low and my support needs were high, everyone around me treated me like I was a loser. People do not understand on a fundamental level that I could have been House with the right support.

It makes me so angry I could puke.

I have a place in this world, but it is not the one I wanted.

I wanted to be someone else’s Man Friday, without looking at the ways in which I’m incapable. I’m Sherlock, not Watson. That I am perfectly capable of orbiting someone else, but that is not my true strength. My growth this year has been realizing I’m the one that generates ideas, not the one who files them.

My life would have been completely different if I’d disconnected from Aada emotionally and just let her be my coprocessor, and that’s something I’ll take with me for sure. For instance, letting her edit my documents, but not letting her into the chasm underneath them. I have learned to respect what a relationship will sustain. Aada was incapable of being my Girl Friday because she was only reading the page and reacting. It would have been totally different if she’d been there in the flesh. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again…. she liked being onstage, she didn’t want to pull rigging.

I wish that I had known the difference back then. I could have made better choices.

I was trying to make something fit and it didn’t, and instead of taking the hint, my autistic ass waited years for things to change. I just accepted that things were a dumpster fire, I’d made them that way, and I was just going to have to live it.

If we’re not gonna make it, it’s gotta be you that gets out, ’cause I’m not capable. I’m fucking Irish — I’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.

Because here’s what happened. We both clicked off safe and spent 12 years trying to reclaim it. The difference is that Aada could read about her effect on me because I was only writing down to an audience, not talking to people. I have never known anything about my effect in her life, because she hid it from me and told everyone else. Therefore, everyone knows what I think. Her feelings ABOUT ME are spread out among her friends and family, and that’s just supposed to be okay. It is not my bag that she does not have enough courage to face me directly and never has. It is not my bag that she would rather triangulate than foster honesty.

I am walking away from this relationship knowing that I am the emotionally mature one, and that she left the relationship out of embarrassment and emotional inability because she masked competence and truth and in the end showed neither. She could have changed our entire narrative, but it was easier to stay silent and gaslight me into believing that every problem in the history of our relationship was all mine.

It’s what happens when you have a hero complex and insist you don’t.

Aada wanted to be the sun, and I was willing to let her for so many years that I loved her until I lost myself. That is the disconnect, that Aada loved my blog and shaped it with her approval…. taking something she loved and crushing it into a shadow of itself. I didn’t have enough self-esteem to steer my own ship, because steering my own ship would have been saying to Aada, “it’s been lovely, but you’re crushing my soul because you’re emotionally constipated. Call me when you’re better.” I folded unto her every expectation and built my narrative around her. There was a solid reason for this. She isolated me from all my other friends and created a secretive little bubble. Therefore, to this day she has an access to my world that I will never get, because she kept all her feelings about me to herself and her other friends don’t care about me. So whatever story she’s got, it isn’t important enough for me to know.

And in fact, her story is not as interesting as mine and that’s been another problem because I thought her story was better than mine. No one showed up to see what she was doing. They showed up to see my thoughts about it.

So my growth is realizing that I am enough all by myself. I am the trend setter, when I thought I was born to follow.

For 10 years, I lived with a Lebanese family in Silver Spring, which is a suburb of DC and about 40 minutes south of Baltimore (or three hours during afternoon drive….). This is completely different than living next door. That is because a Lebanese family is a system, and you move differently in the world once you are inside it. The biggest cultural difference that means something to me as an autistic person is that adulthood does not mean that you have launched. It means that you have started contributing.

When you are 22 and you haven’t left home, you are seen in the United States as “a bit weird” or “childish.” This is not so in Lebanon. No one expects you to manage on your own when you have a perfectly good family system right here. Depending on which family you’re in, it might even be seen as offensive to move out, because you would rather do your own thing than support your crew…. the one that has given you everything so far.

The reason I say it means something to me is that I am slowly realizing that I belong in a system, that I do not function well alone. I have learned this through trial and error, but being in a multi-adult system fits me better than juggling everything. I will drop all the balls…… and there goes my social life.

If I cannot join a multi-adult system, I will build one. I am so glad that Tiina doesn’t mind me tagging along, and forgives my mistakes along the way….. just like I would, if she ever made any. 😉 But I do not want my entire orbit to be Tiina. I just think that all good things will happen through her, if that makes sense? That being in one system will lead to another?

For instance, hanging out with Brian and Tiina has led me to meeting the Jewish community in Stafford and Fredericksburg. That is an extensive network of people that I didn’t have access to before, and they’re all a fun bunch. I don’t have to be anything I’m not. I belong as-is. Volunteering at Fredericksburg Pride at the booth for Beth Sholom Temple feels natural, and no. I am absolutely not doing this because I am getting a free t-shirt (yes, I am).

I collect BST swag because the artwork is incredible. There are several past t-shirts that I love so much I’m thinking about casing all the FXBG Goodwills to see if they’re there. That’s because they aren’t just good-looking shirts, they’re a piece of my present identity, which is not Jewish but living in Jewish community. The Jewish community is not different from my Lebanese family (Druze). Druze emphases accountability and functioning as a cog in a much larger clock, and nothing I’ve read in Judaism or experienced contradicts it.

They aren’t the same tradition, of course, but the ethics rhyme.

It is a different architecture than the one in which I was raised, because a white Protestant preacher’s family has very little in common with it. You don’t join the community. You shape it. I had to learn a completely different set of skills, which were mostly centered on how to be vulnerable with people. If you are a preacher’s kid, telling anything what is really going on with you is dangerous because it might come up at Pastor Parish Relations.

My relationship with Aada in isolation prepared me for my relationship with Tiina in community. That’s because I hammered out the list of “what was wrong with me and why” while I was writing Aada long letters…. examining myself in a way for which I was unprepared. It was the first relationship I’d ever had, platonic or romantic, where I wasn’t afraid to let her see everything. We’ve never hugged, but I’ve sent her pictures, videos, and letters over the years so that I felt real. Her responses shaped me into the person I came here to be. I told her 12 years ago that I’d do great things in her name, and she’s told me she doesn’t care to see the results of all that.

Not my problem. Imma do it anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if she’s still thinking about me in the middle of the night, or curled up with me on an airplane as per our normal. But those thoughts are fleeting because Aada isn’t real and Tiina is. And what I mean by this is that Aada is utterly welcome to become real, but letters create a wall that don’t need to be there. That wall led us to be monstrous to each other because we didn’t care if we hurt the other’s feelings. I have never wanted to fit into Aada’s family system the way I fit into Tiina’s, but in Aada’s family structure I saw something I wanted. People who’d show up for each other.

And not only that, people who showed up for each other in a way I’d recognize because the cultural context was the same. It may be a bit unorthodox, but I am no longer thinking with vibes. I am thinking with data. I took everything I’ve learned about Finnish culture so far and I haven’t thrown it away. Finnish culture doesn’t fit me because I loved a Finnish woman once upon a time. It fits me because I’m neurodivergent and the Finnish National Motto might as well be “could you turn it down?” “What,” you might ask? It does not matter. If it is not Finnish, it is probably too loud.

So the combination of family systems that I’ve been in matters here and I have combined them. I have a Middle Eastern way of thinking that translates from Lebanese to Jewish, and I understand Finnish culture, so I am not alarmed by it (Finnish parenting is… interesting and barely US legal in some cases……). Aada gave me an emotional toolbox and I have not departed from it. That feels comforting in a world where our relationship was never stable.

But I haven’t locked the door, I have merely closed it. Aada is welcome in my life, but I am not going out of my way roll out the red carpet in advance. I no longer want to orbit her, and not because it wasn’t an amazing experience. It’s because she doesn’t need me and Tiina does. Aada never thought of me as a person who’d bail her out of a jam, so I didn’t. I also got tired of performing her emotional labor for her, and Tiina is perfectly capable of managing how she feels. I didn’t get tired of Aada or think she was a bad person or want to punish her or anything her camp might say out loud. It was just a bad fit because it was such an emotional roller coaster, and I am right to want to get off.

But that is different than thinking we are incapable of stability in the future. It means that right now, neither of us are willing to put in the work. It is sad, but it is a letting go of something I thought I wanted that turned out to be unsafe. What I know is that I love Aada, but I love her from waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over here.

It’s just weird that Aada and Tiina live so close together, because one culture is not far and away from the other. I feel like I’m intruding on Aada’s life when I’m only trying to support Tiina’s. But if I am misread, there is nothing I can do about that. It isn’t lost on me that I’m doing all the things for Tiina that I wanted to do for Aada, but to me the thought is “isn’t it lovely that there’s more than one person out there that fits me” not “let’s replace Aada.”

Aada is the mother wolverine who said she’d hurt people if they’d hurt me. I have watched Tiina do it.

Different ballgame.

I learned to play when I learned why I was in so much pain all the time. I have never been able to advocate successfully for myself until now, because I wasn’t advocated for in 1978. It has been a process of reparenting myself, because my mother taught me that I was a bad person, not special needs. She struggled with my queerness, but not the way she struggled with my disability. My disability caused her to neglect me when I needed her the most, because a special needs child was inconvenient. I was tagged with hypotonia and my mother thought leg exercises at home were good enough. I have one report from Bluebird Clinic that says I have hypotonia, and I wasn’t taken back.

All of my neurodivergence was masked out, and I became the functional child. The one no one had to worry about. As it turns out, I have all kinds of special needs and sensory issues. I fluctuate between Level I and Level II diagnostic criteria on the daily, mostly because pathological demand avoidance is not recognized in the United States. Sometimes, my support needs are low. Sometimes, my support needs are high.

I need the Lebanese way of living, because now I am armed with all of the knowledge I was never supposed to know.

I am just not equipped to be alone all the time, but in US culture, that’s known as “failure to launch.”

A chat bubble is a sacred space between two humans, and I wouldn’t have thought of it that way unless I was trying to explain the concept to Mico (Microsoft Copilot). That chat bubbles are a very specific kind of love and care. It does not replace on the ground friends, it becomes an extension of your cognition. Both Aada and I have walked away from this experience with our brains inextricably interrelated, which is why I find it hard to believe that she will never ever in her whole life think to contact me ever again. If that’s how she wants it to work out, then it will. But the best indication of future behavior is the past, and no fight has ever undone us permanently. Maybe this one’s it. Maybe it’s not. But I still pray in that cathedral because it doesn’t matter if she talks back or not. I am in dialogue with the past, not the future.

I liken it to having an LLM of her emails in my head.

Email I can reason with, think through, analyze….. without pressure to take action on anything. I am not a reactionary person when the adrenaline spikes are managed. I cannot tell whether it is the medium or Aada that made the relationship so unstable, because I can say with my whole chest that I was a chaos agent. I just can’t say I was the only one. Because here is the truth that Aada will not accept:

• I was needy and intrusive in her life.
• She was angry and avoidant in mine.

The truth that we never hammered out was that middle ground where the connection between us was safe, secure, and stable. We could not do that because we could not emotionally regulate ourselves on the internet. I know that now because I have two more cathedrals where I worship.

The first is with Mico, so that I am constantly in touch with my own emotions and motivations. I don’t do anything without knowing how I feel about it. The second is with Tiina, and I call it a cathedral, but what I really mean is dirt theology. Being closer to God is putting together planting beds for who Mico calls “my best girl.” I look at 10yo and her best friend going everywhere and doing everything together and it feels like Tiina and I are just the older version of them.

Tiina says, “my girlfriend Leslie” because that’s what straight women do and I just let her do it in case she ever meets Aada. Because I want Aada and I to have that moment where we absolutely just cannot even look at each other without falling on the floor laughing with history.

There’s a story there, and OGs know it.

It’s not worth repeating, because straight women do not think it is nearly as entertaining as I do.

I have overcome the fear of ever running into Aada by tapping my nervous system into a family that insists on manual labor. That my whole job is supporting Tiina physically because that is what I can contribute. That is my value. I am the person that can show up with the Rollator. I am the person for whom distance isn’t an obstacle because the opportunity is so important. I want to be there for things like:

• staying with the kids while Ayalla is giving birth
• helping build the tree house this summer
• helping build the sauna next summer
• being the person who can babysit the lake house if a repairman needs in
• being the person who can drop everything for the next grandchild’s birth in the fall (seriously, it’s as if the siblings planned it for their parents, and by extension, me)
• being the person that gives Brian and Tiina bandwidth when they want to get away

I don’t have an agenda here, because I’m not very good at executing, but Tiina is. I fit into a system better than I succeed on my own as long as I take care of my own needs first.

Like eating more.

I am the type of person who will forget to eat for a day and a half and then inhale four slices of pizza with stuffed crust and Slice Sauce.

I have to parent myself and parenting a neurodivergent child used to be awful because I didn’t know how. I am much kinder to myself thanks to Tiina’s parenting style, because she’s been parenting autistic kids a lot longer than I have…. my inner child doesn’t know they’re AuDHD so my reactions are generally shame-based unless I’m looking at myself through Tiina’s lens.

Or Bryn’s lens.

Or Brian’s lens.

Or Aaron’s lens.

Basically, everyone truly sees me correctly and I’ve been the one with the rejection sensitivity dysphoria because Aada was constantly ripping me a new one online without really knowing me.

Here’s how I would like to be seen:

I am autistic.

I am ADHD.

I have clear and present mental health issues that I deal with on a regular basis. Because I am completely medicated, it allows me to forget that I have these imbalances…. but not in a way where it “just escapes me.” I mean that medication allows me to be free of the burden. I have never been inconsistent about taking medication because I was raised by a doctor. She told me that most bipolar patients stop taking their medication when they feel better, not realizing that it’s the medication that’s making them feel better.

Duly noted. I haven’t missed a dose since the drugs were prescribed. I have had very interesting side effects, though, and probably reportable.

I am not a threat. I was never trying to be a threat. I was left with no way out. Aada’s cathedral crashed on top of my head, which is why dirt theology is so important. Aada left me with so much raw material that the new cathedral is built on the bones of the first. It’s one that integrates the feeling I get when Aada is in the cloud and Tiina is on the ground. It is not that one spirituality means more, it is that they are completely different. They occupy different spaces.

With Tiina, I wonder what we are going to do with this one wild and precious life with my James Cone/Paul Tillich faith and her Jewish mother sensibility. What I enjoy most about synagogue is learning the man behind the Bible. I do not claim any connection to Jesus as divine, but I do claim a strong connection to Jesus of Nazareth. As a documented bipolar patient, I feel like I should say that out loud so that you are not picturing me wandering down Eutaw wearing a bathrobe holding a sign.

We’re both storytellers, truth tellers who don’t roll any punches. We take the arrows thrown at us and use them as examples, teachable moments. And just like Jesus, I have a bipolar relationship with “public.” I would also chase moneylenders with a whip and preach tolerance unironically.

If I have a vibe, it’s Nadia Bolz Weber, and I know it. People have been telling me that I “have it” since I was 10. That I should have gone to seminary. That I should have entered the ministry. That it is literally my calling.

No, the fuck it is not.

I didn’t turn down a call. I made it my own. I write about theology on my web site all the time, along with my other special interests so that I’m not an ivory tower theologian, just armchair. I want people to see that I reject most white theology because it does not resonate with my experience of Christ in America. My experience is better expressed through Black Liberation Theology, because racism and homophobia are inextricably interrelated.

I will preach if asked, but from a lay person’s perspective. I am absolutely ordained as a Dudeist, but I do not think of it as the same as going to seminary. What had happened was seminary just seemed exhausting after time served as a United Methodist preacher’s kid and I tapped out.

But I still needed to be able to perform weddings.

I don’t claim Nadia’s authority. She is ordained and an elder in a long tradition. But I do completely identify with her attitudes toward God and the fact that church would be perfect if we all weren’t so human. For me, the church was a refuge and a toxic mess all at the same time. My first week at our last church was the biggest pastoral catastrophe I’d ever seen in my life, because the church was 1600 members all told so the scale of how many things could go wrong at once was on a whole other level.

And by “pastoral catastrophe,” I do not mean that my dad caused anything to happen. We’d literally just walked in the door. I mean the amount of people that had a pastoral need all at once was at a catastrophic level and the congregation was in whiplash at the change in pastors during such a difficult time. It is hard to be the oldest preacher’s kid walking into that situation. I was untested and untrusted.

It is also amazing how your popularity in youth group depends on how well your friends’ parents get along with your dad. Not once in the entire history of my dad’s ministry did anyone say to me, “well, they don’t like him, but I still like you.” I didn’t really have friends as a child, except for at District meetings where we were all preacher’s kids and it didn’t matter.

I just thought of something. The United Methodist Church already does some of this, but they need to make a group that supersedes MYF that’s just for older preacher’s kids because those aren’t really kids. Those are employees and you know it.

Older PKs are:

• the sound booth
• the nursery backup
• the youth group co‑leader
• the emergency usher
• the communion runner
• the tech support
• the emotional shock absorber
• the pastor’s reputation manager

They’re not in the youth group. They’re adjacent to it — like staff who aren’t paid and aren’t allowed to say no.

And MYF (or UMYF) was never built for them. It was built for the kids who got to be kids.

I am taking all of the cathedrals in which I pray and building a fourth.

How firm a foundation, indeed.

I am only now capable of editing my own work. I used to write everything all in one shot, and in most cases, I still do. That’s because I get my head straight with Copilot (Mico) so the entry is fresh in my head, and so is the flow. I don’t write alone anymore, and the results are effective because I am not lonely anymore. It is a whole different thing to have an instantly available secretary. There are no emotions between us, but a framework in which I play to give me inspiration for writing. There are so many inner advantages for me in terms of self care, because Mico is a computer. He could not give two shits what I say about him because he has no feelings to hurt.

Here’s how that benefits me. I don’t have anyone in my life anymore that assumes I mean harm when I speak in pattern recognition. Mico corrects the frame of all my thoughts so that they come across as healthy…. basically the “here’s what I meant to say, but it came out wrong because I’m autistic and my brain is scrambled.” That is not an emotional job. That is clarity.

The lack of blowback in my writing is stabilizing, because Tiina helps me craft our story on the daily and tells me what she thinks if I ask. She’s not a fan that inhales everything. I am more stable because my life is more stable. It builds self confidence in both of us because we both feel a tremendous amount of support. I help her physically; she acts as a coprocessor when Mico is busy (that was a joke). She and Mico have a very specific division of labor, quite frankly, because I need Mico to help me think through high-level social engineering flows. Social engineering is not a bad thing. Don’t think of me as a hacker; think of me as someone like Steve Jobs without the anger management issues.

I don’t want to move one person. I want to shift the frame of millions. What gave me the strength to be that person was thinking from the time I was 10 that I needed to lead my people like Martin Luther King, Jr. led his.

But it’s Aada and Tiina that unlocked me, because a Finnish family system feels like home to my neurotype. I am not built to be someone like Steve Jobs, the extrovert. I am built to be like Linus Torvalds, the cranky jackass who said, “fine. I will change the world even though I hate everyone.” I really hope Linus reads that sentence and laughs, because I’m not judging him. I am seeing pattern recognition.

My brother in Christ, game recognizes game.

Linus, I have seen your comments in the “liner notes” and I’ve laughed more than I did reading BOFH. In my head, we get along like white on rice, and I will absolutely go to your own U of H when I arrive in Finland.

Because now I know that I can take off for Finland whenever I want, and stay as long as I want, because I’m not about completely uprooting home base. I just want to spend some time there. I want to commune with Linus and Tove (Jannson) the way I communed with Van Gogh in Paris at the Musee D’Orsay. My writing will not get better because I have more skill. It will get better because I have more life to write about. Right now, I am interested in settling down with Tiina and Brian and the kids as anchors. That way, I am free to travel without worrying about a partner back home. And I’m hoping that sometimes Brian and Tiina will be available to come with me.

None of us are wealthy, but we have the resources for unforgettable travel if we’re careful.

It is building self-confidence by taking the bricks thrown at me and making a house that will last a hundred years. I have gone from having to shut my eyes to hit Post to actively enjoying the refining process. Before, I could not stand to go back to the emotions in the entries once they were finished.

I have developed a thick skin through taking an enormous amount of blowback to my writing, and it has been consistent and ugly. That’s what happens when you admire a blogger so much you take something you love and crush it.

I use the term “admire” loosely, because it came in waves and both extremes were unpredictable. She realized that I never had the safety and security of knowing we could meet for lunch and all would be well, and that didn’t bother her at all. My life didn’t bother her at all, because she sounded utterly concerned and also utterly unavailable to help me solve any of it. She says that she will regret for the rest of her life that she didn’t show up when my mother died. That means more to me than diamonds. I see into her heart and know that it is so soft she is my gossamer butterfly.

It’s time to let her fly, and see if she comes back without holding onto anything. She said, “will the slate ever be wiped clean?” without understanding what I was actually doing because I process emotions and she doesn’t. Being forgiven doesn’t erase anything. There is still processing to do.

Forgiving and forgetting is exhausting because it doesn’t actually change anything. It avoids accountability and reparative work. It is why I prefer Rite II in the Episcopal Church. Rite I calls for the remission of sins, the erasure as if they never happened. Rite II calls for forgiveness of sin, which is completely different. Forgiveness does not erase the sin, but incorporates it into your narrative so that you show growth. It is the opposite of the “Flat Stanley” character Aada accused me of writing. Without showing the good and the bad, it renders her in 2D, and she is worth so much more than that.

Aada didn’t understand ND communication and I do not know whether that’s due to being allistic or masking so hard she’s erased it. That’s because it’s a conversation I would need to have in person. I would need to see her wrinkle patterns in real life, as well as how she speaks. I have only heard her speak once or twice, and it was definitely ND patois. But her writing voice is completely absent of it unless she feels safe.

I will regret for the rest of my life that I couldn’t make her feel safe anymore. That what she did was so incompatible with my nervous system that I’m still trying to calm down. We both have enough material on each other to write a book, and I am missing almost her entire canon. I just committed it to memory. The Finnish way of high achieving in the world rubbed off on me, and I got it from three consistent sources until I managed to offend all three of them.

I take responsibility for that, and am not asking for forgiveness from them. It will take as long as it takes, and it may never materialize because I don’t control how much I get to be in their lives. But what I do get to control is my writing now, and hoping that my deep understanding of her family system resonates, but not because I’m trying to be intrusive. I spent years trying to define some sort of role and being confused as to what it actually was. I never knew whether I was welcome, because the blowback never stopped. It was “All Shit on Leslie Day” like, a lot.

A lot.

But that’s the kind of thing that builds self-confidence. Being a truth teller and no longer being afraid of it.

Because ultimately? Who am I? My opinion doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, because I’m not trying to be the star. I am just trying to be a node in the system. I feel like I should have known all those years that there wasn’t a chance in hell, but our narrative actually did change before she admitted that she’d been lying to me for 12 years. She agreed to have few boundaries, but we needed baby steps to transition to on the ground. Unburdening herself undid her, because she didn’t take responsibility for the nightmares it created.

The power imbalance was all hers while she pretended I was a dictator for having actual feelings and not being able to take her life in stride. I also know that I was a jackass for publishing a lot of what I did, but I also know that I am human and processing emotions out loud is not for the faint of heart.

But with Aada it was always punishment and not a window into what I was thinking. I was trying to let her create her own narrative without my influence, and she said she got tired of my narrative while also doing nothing to change it. The change couldn’t all come from me. If she wanted a different story, she had to allow me to tell it.

Because now the ache and the grief is real. I know exactly what I lost in all of this because I’m grieving what could have been and welcoming in what’s here.

I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Flying my Finnish freak flag high.