All of Them, with AuDHD

Daily writing prompt
Which activities make you lose track of time?

I could while away the hours just writing, and often do. But there are other activities that make time irrelevant:

  • “Playing” with My Computer
    • Most people would not consider installing an operating system “playing.” However, I like to try out different versions of Linux and can spend hours perfecting my desktop. Right now, I just have the vanilla version of Ubuntu installed, but lately I’ve tried Cinnamon, Mate (like the tea), KDE, and in a fit of insanity, switched over to Red Hat. The installer crashed, which is why I’m back to Ubuntu. I don’t know why I bothered with Red Hat. I haven’t used it since college. I think I was just feeling a bit sentimental, not realizing that the commands are different and I would have to learn a different way of “speaking” to my desktop. To be clear, I did not cause the installer crash. I just realized I didn’t want to have to learn a whole new system, making me grateful for the same old crap I already had.
  • Gaming
    • Gaming should be in quotes because I really only like “Skyrim.” I’m not sure you can call yourself a proper gamer if you only like one game. I was introduced to “Skyrim” by my brother-in-law, because I was watching him play on his Xbox and thought, “that looks fun.” A few days later I was fighting dragons on my PC. And in fact, I had to buy it twice because of the modding community. The first time, I bought it through GOG and the scripting engine was broken by an update. I have it through Steam now, which allows me to install it on both my Windows and Linux PCs. I am sure that you could get the GOG version working on Linux if you were a programmer, but Steam support is so much better that it’s not worth the hassle.
      • If you are interested, my character is a Wood Elf/Bosmer named Quinn. I’m deadly with a bow and arrow, so I generally conjure companions for melee (Dremora Lords are particularly good) and find a spot to pick people off, hidden behind a rock.
  • Cleaning
    • When I clean and organize, it takes hours because I will find things I haven’t used in forever. It stops the process as I sort through pictures, books, knickknacks, you name it. But there’s a rhythm to cleaning that is soothing, and I enjoy it when I am able. I have trouble taking care of myself due to my autism, but when I’m on top of it, I am absolutely “Anal Annie.” And in fact, I should probably take a nap to get ready for a marathon cleaning session today. I’d like to be able to host a friend this weekend and my apartment isn’t ready for that kind of commitment. If you make promises to yourself like that and often beat yourself up with guilt, I have a book for that called “How to Keep House While Drowning.” It has been revolutionary in helping me do what I can do with my compromised state. Executive dysfunction is real.
  • Reading
    • I inhale books. I’m a member of Kindle Unlimited because I’ve made a lot of author friends and want to read them all for the cost of one book a month. It’s also nice to be able to get most books that are recommended to me through KU as well. I’ve had to buy very little recently, but I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth. For the $12 I paid this month, I read five books that were $8.00 apiece, and another that was $20.
  • Walking
    • I’m a member of Planet Fitness, and one of my favorite activities is to set a program on the treadmill for incline and zone out to the TV, YouTube, or a podcast. If I’m listening to music, it’s usually “Podrunner,” a running podcast sorted by beats per minute and the DJ is fantastic. But most of the time I’m listening to whatever is on TV at the club. I tend to show up during all the talk shows, reminiscent of when my mother and I used to walk every day during The Oprah Winfrey Show.
  • Watching TV
    • I love to write so much that I’m always looking for smart television to up my game in terms of story construction. However, I also enjoy actual construction and “This Old House” is my comfort show. I have learned so much that I would seriously think about buying a house if I was married… because I don’t want to do all that work by myself. 😉

Oooh, even thinking about me being married again gives me the shivers. I do not want to get lost in thought on that. So I think we’ll call it for today and pick back up later. I have a house to clean……… ALL BY MYSELF, THANKS.

Me, Mostly

Daily writing prompt
What bothers you and why?

It’s hard to point fingers at anyone else for bothering me when I am such a handful. I didn’t even know whether to put an emoticon after that, because I don’t know that I’m joking. From my writing to my behavior, there’s nothing I cannot criticize, but I’m trying to be kinder to myself. If one’s behavior affects treatment of others, then it is up to me to be happier on the inside.

The first thing I did to make myself happier was to buy a membership to the National Aquarium. I was invited to go on Sunday, and the price of a membership was cheaper than buying two tickets individually. I thought that was a much better deal as I am obsessed with aquarium fish and don’t want to have an aquarium at my house. Plus, I’ve never been there before and I hear it is world class. Many of you don’t know this about me, but I watch videos on aquascaping all the time and look forward to being able to set up my own tank once I have a living situation conducive to it. I have had freshwater tanks in the past, but I’ve never actually landscaped one with live plants. I think that I would be less bothered once I was paying attention to my minuscule pets. I’d like to have shrimp, catfish, snails, and a betta. A cleanup crew and a betta fish wouldn’t take up that much room, probably 10 gallons, and that way the tank wouldn’t be a monster job to clean.

The reason my living space couldn’t handle an aquarium is that the water pressure is so low here it would take hours to fill a 10 gallon tank. It bothers me with every sink and the bathtub. I could write an entire entry on why this apartment complex sucks and why you shouldn’t live here, but I don’t want to give any indication as to where I live. Baltimore is close enough.

I am thinking now of moving back to the DMV in December, because my lease ends on November 30th. I love Baltimore itself, but the public transportation isn’t as good as I thought it would be. I need to be back on the Metro. My current group, Cognitive Behavioral Health, has another office in Rockville. I would like to stay with my people, and one of my counselors would be the same. It all depends on what kind of deal I can find with my living situation, because like I said, Baltimore is not the problem when I can get around. Uber is too expensive to take all the time, but it does provide an excellent stopgap when a trip on the Metro/bus is going to take two hours.

I do know that I need to stay in Maryland because I am getting so many benefits from Medicaid expansion. We will have to see how the “big, ugly bill” affects me in the future, but so far I have had no interruptions in service. So while I love Virginia, I am solidly staying on this side of the Potomac.

It bothers me that I have to think about all of this. I don’t want to be disabled, but here we are.

It bothers me that I have always been disabled, but these problems are just now being addressed. Better late than never, but I could have been helped with government services in Portland when I spent so many years without health insurance. I have been eligible for services since I was 18 years old, but I didn’t know why until my mother died. I found solid proof that I have had cerebral palsy since I was a baby, after she spent years trying to convince me that I was fine. My dad was overreacting. But interestingly enough, cerebral palsy is not why my care team wants me to file for disability. My bipolar disorder got the best of me, and that bothers me, too.

Most of the reason it bothers me is that I have a hum in my brain that will not go away. I think it was caused by stopping Lexapro suddenly, because even though I’m back on it now, the sound has not gone away. It is similar to the Emergency Broadcast System that used to play on TV during flood warnings (ahem), a minor second that drones 24/7 and demands my attention above all else. It’s hard for me to pay attention at the best of times because I have the ADHD/Autism combo meal. This is just shitty icing on a burnt cake.

I suppose the one thing that doesn’t bother me anymore is having to prove that something is wrong with me. I am settling into the life of a disabled person, learning to contribute to society through being a voice for other disabled people right here on this web site. My voice counts because as people read about me, they identify with my struggles. Or, if they cannot identify, they at least learn to have empathy.

It bothers me that most disabled people are written off as living off the government, when most of us would do absolutely anything to return to normal life. My life is anything but normal. I spend most of my time by myself. It’s isolating and lonely not to have a place to go each day, which is why I’m so grateful to have a group of other disabled people to meet with twice a week (once on Zoom, once in person).

However, at least with an aquarium membership, I have a place to go whenever I want that will feed me. I remind myself of the character Sam from “Atypical.” He goes to the aquarium to feed his love of penguins. Perhaps I will also find an animal that will be my special interest. I do love puffer fish……….

It helps to be bothered less by my living situation now that I’ve figured out a plan- Rockville is on the Red Line, with easy access to the National Zoo. It’s the place I love to write the most when it’s not hot, so until I move I want to try and find a place to write at the aquarium. All I require is a bench, because I carry a tablet and a keyboard in my backpack at all times. After I move, it will be back to finding a “replacement Kevin.”

Some of you may remember that Kevin is a giraffe. I used to sit next to him and write blog entries, having no idea what the giraffe’s actual name might be. I just named him Kevin for my own amusement. Then, one day I went to find Kevin and found out the Zoo had closed the entire giraffe exhibit. Kevin had moved.

Kevin is probably the reason I felt the most comfortable moving to Baltimore in the first place. I needed out of the DC area just to catch my breath, and it felt like he was the last tie to that area. But now I would say that my breath has been caught, and I miss DC more than I thought I would. Now that I have settled on a place, I feel at peace. My time in Baltimore will be much easier to survive knowing it won’t last forever.

It might even make my apartment less bothersome, but I doubt it. I’ve been without a dishwasher for what seems like a lifetime because the water pressure is so low it makes washing dishes incredibly taxing. I have submitted requests for everything that is wrong with my apartment and no one has come by. The last straw for me was finding a mouse eating my bread and hot dog buns.

I am paying too much for this apartment to have problems like this, especially those that go unaddressed. I am bothered that I cannot seem to be “the heavy” and get the repairmen out here on my own. I just hate letting people in that I don’t know, so I work around the problems on my own. I know I need help, but I have trouble helping myself. My dad and my sister advocate for me as much as they can, but it’s hard when they live so far away.

However, my sister is a lobbyist, so that’s another reason why Rockville is a better choice for me than Baltimore. When she’s in her DC office, I’d like to be closer than I am now. We have too much fun together to make her come all this way. However, I know that I have introduced her to a place she loves as well. Again, Baltimore is not really the problem. The Inner Harbor is gorgeous, as is Fell’s Point. It’s getting around Baltimore that’s the hard part. When she comes to visit, she rents a car and all of my problems disappear. I don’t drive, so it’s nice that she’s willing to drive me around.

The most fun I’ve had in Baltimore is when she’s come to visit, because she looks up restaurants and decides where we’re going to go in advance. It becomes a “staycation” for me because it’s always a place I haven’t heard of yet. Of the two of us, she’s the social butterfly. I wish I was more like her, because she’s so headstrong that I feel taken care of in her presence. I wish I could extend that feeling to others.

It bothers me that I’m her older sister and I’m not able to provide that feeling of safety to her. I am sure I had my moments when we were young and this is just payback, but still. I wish that I was large and in charge, but I have a struggling relationship with taking care of myself, much less others.

Which brings us back around… it’s hard to point fingers at anything that bothers me more than my treatment of myself, so it’s time to get happier.

It starts with looking at fish.

Wisdom

Daily writing prompt
What do you think gets better with age?

I think that the only thing that gets better with age is wisdom. You have enough life experiences to react with more ease and grace than you did in your younger years because so much has happened to you that you know what deserves your time and what doesn’t. You have enough regrets to know not to commit the same mistakes, as well as enough victories to know what works.

You become better at regulating your own emotions, and controlling your own behavior. You realize that every problem begins and ends with you. You have no need to count on others to provide the answers, because you realize that they are only speaking from their experiences when they provide advice, which cannot line up to your own. It isn’t that you stop taking advice (necessarily), it just looks different because you have a better sense of what will fit you and what won’t.

I have recognized that these are the things I need to work on in my own life, this continuing to learn emotional regulation and impulse control. I lost the great love of my life over it, because I was so angry that she lied I could not function. As a result, it made me so depressed I needed counseling and still struggle with those demons. The thing that makes me feel better about the whole situation is that I am not the great love of hers, so we will drift apart naturally over time as I forgive myself and move on.

The thing is, though, I am being dragged kicking and screaming toward my own redemption. Getting better with age feels so far away because this relationship did not express any wisdom in controlling impulses or emotional regulation. I popped off. Full stop. That comes with my brand of neurodivergence, but it doesn’t mean that I am not accountable for my actions. I am filled with sentences like, “if I could go back, these are the things I would change.” But they are useless and would fall on deaf ears.

I sit like an old wizard twisting his beard, alone in my castle.

What I can do is provide comfort to myself- that I haven’t met all the people I’m going to love in my life, nor have I met all the people who are going to love me. I can only work on myself and try to become the idealist my personality profile says I am. I am tripped up by my own mental illness, and that comes with its own set of problems. They require addressing, because I am tired of not being included in the safety net of a local friend group and it’s my health that stops me from getting out and making one.

I have become too introverted with age, refusing to leave my house in favor of communicating through writing. Though there is nothing wrong with that in moderation, the pendulum has swung too far. Letters are not enough, but it’s amazing how much they’ve provided over the years. I have more friends in other places than I do in Baltimore and DC, and keep in touch with them daily thanks to the Internet. But something is missing without contact comfort, and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t need handshakes, hugs, and face time.

I suppose that also had to come with age, because I had to go on this journey to figure it out.

I have spent the last 12 years touch-starved and lonely because I was more interested in learning about my pen pal than reaching out to people in my area. I gave her too much power, another morsel of wisdom that has only come with age. I am not sorry that I fell in love with her writing, because she’s damn good at it. But I’m sorry that it isolated me to the point where I didn’t want relationships with other people. I just hung on two words:

Someday, perhaps…..

I still hang on those words occasionally because none of this feels real. Nothing feels final because it never has. We will always have a reader/writer connection because even when she’s not in touch with me, she’s still reading here. I can only hope that I will write something that will resonate with her, because she sees that I am learning and growing in wisdom. That may be a pipe dream, but I’m allowed to have them.

Wisdom is telling me to have a wait and see attitude, because every time I think that my connection to her is shallow, she surprises me with depth. She has always surprised me with depth, because I will get two or three words from her for months on end, feeling rejected and small until the Mama Wolverine claws come out of nowhere and slash my problems from me. If nothing else, I will miss that about her in the future.

Getting better with age is allowing myself to be my own Mama Wolverine, slashing problems away on my own. I think that has been the point all these years, learning to stand up for myself. I didn’t so much fall in love with a pen pal as I fell in love with the person I was when I was writing to her. Even she says that meeting her in person couldn’t live up to my imagination, which made me blush because she knows my imagination better than I do and I think was trying to poke a little fun.

Eventually, what I hope gets better with age is letting go of her as the voice in my head to which I compare my own.

Spanish and Sundry

Daily writing prompt
What are you most excited about for the future?

I have finally reached a section of Duolingo that has vocabulary I haven’t studied and I’m on my own. It makes me excited for the future because I can’t skate by on 30 year old lessons in school. I am actually using the software to prepare me for trips to Mexico in the future- none of which are planned, by the way, but I have a better shot of going to Mexico than anywhere else. Granted, when I get there I will mostly be asking them why they don’t wear the green t-shirts and where the bank might be, but it’s a start. 😉

Kidding, but not by much. I remember the first time I went to Mexico on a mission trip. My Spanish was equal to that of a Mexican toddler, but the people were so kind and corrected me with such love that it lit a fire in me to learn more. I learned that Sylvia and Hector were getting married, that Marta was building a new house, and that little kids don’t listen to me no matter what language I speak (I was on a trip to teach vacation Bible school). It was my turn to listen because I picked up more just soaking up conversation than I would have trying to talk. For instance, those are the real names of the people I met, stuck in my brain even though it is now over 30 years since the last time I went to Reynosa. There is just no substitution for immersion, so it’s time to start finding telenovelas on Pluto TV, or watching the news on Telemundo/Univision.

I had friend recommend “La Reina del Sur,” but I have already watched “Queen of the South” on Netflix. It would be a good brush-up to have a show with which I’m already familiar, but there are others I haven’t seen that might be better after I finish it. For instance, I have not seen the original “Yo Soy Betty, la Fea.” That’s “Ugly Betty” for you American viewers. I have found it on Peacock and Apple TV+ according to reddit, so I will be searching it out after I finish this blog entry.

Because I have an auditory processing disorder (comes free with neurodivergence), I like to have the subtitles on as I listen. People don’t have subtitles, but I need the extra help while I am learning.

There is a point to all of this. Many of the homeless people I have encountered, as well as the workers in my neighborhood, speak Spanish and their English is poor. Instead of making them learn English, I want to turn the view of Americans on its head. I’m perfectly willing to put myself out there, mostly because if I get a job in the future, I want to work at Home Depot.

That’s another thing I’m looking forward to in the future- discussing jobs I could do with my care team so that I am not reliant on SSI/SSDI unless I really want to be. I am eligible for both because I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when I was 18 mos old. I don’t regret the choices I’ve made in my life with my career, but it would have been nice to know that I could have gotten disability from the jump. The reason I didn’t know is that my mother hid all the paperwork I needed to file and my sister found them among her personal effects after she died, well into my late 30s.

My mental health is not helping the situation, so I am looking forward to working all of this out. I either have a journey into the workforce or a journey into the court system in which I’ll have to fight for my right not to party.

But there are things I can do on my own to further my education, and a second language has filled the hole in my heart at not being able to work in the immediate future. Right now, my job is to attend classes at Cognitive Behavioral Health and learn all I can when I’m not there.

I actually started with Finnish, but after a 43 day streak, I was hospitalized for my mental health. After I got out of the hospital, it had been just long enough since I’d studied that I don’t remember much. It seems like I forgot Finnish in “kaksitoista sekuntia,” or 12 seconds.

Duolingo is also not the best learning tool for Finnish, because it does not have the AI features that Swedish and Spanish do. Everything is done with the keyboard and reading, so you don’t get to practice by speaking out loud. The reason Swedish is important is that the cooking school I would like to attend next year is in a Swedish-speaking region of Finland, Vaasa. The school is called Vamia, and it was recommended to me by a YouTuber named Cyril:

At this point, I do not know if this school is right for me because the tuition is free, but living in Europe is not. I am saving my pennies and riding out the lease I have in the United States until November, and then I’ll decide what to do. I know I would like to go to Vaasa before I decide to move there, but even that is a stretch on my budget. I just have to hope that I will get more subscribers to both my Medium and WordPress blog, because every subscriber here adds to my ad revenue, and every reader on Medium adds to the income I get the longer you scroll through my drivel. 😉

Culinary school would accomplish two things. The first is that I would like to work with Finnish YouTubers like Cyril to create a channel with Finnish content. I think I would be hilariously cranky like Anthony Bourdain, because that is my kitchen personality. The second is that I want to start a ministry for unhoused people that revolves around the kitchen, and I would be better equipped to do that having been trained as a chef and not merely the line cook I am now.

Traditional advice is to work in a kitchen before you go to culinary school to make sure you like it. I have 10 years under my belt, from dish to pantry to sauté. I have worked every station and though I cannot say I am excellent at any of them, I know I will get better by hanging in at school. Plus, there are plenty of jobs I could do without learning Finnish until I’m ready, because most Finns speak English, especially in the hospitality industry. Vamia also instructs in English, with (I’m guessing) the requisite amount of French required.

In the meantime, I am looking forward to all the nonprofit ideas I have coming to fruition. I have to have a Plan B in case going to school in Europe is not feasible… and it’s probably not, to be perfectly honest. I want to go more than anything, but again, it’s going to take a lot of money I don’t have yet. But that’s the thing about dreams. When other people know you want something, they are willing to help. For instance, my readers showing up every day. Each little bit helps.

If I stay in the Baltimore area, my idea is to create a nonprofit called “The Sinners’ Table.” It centers around accepting all the people that society rejects, giving them a fine dining experience they could never afford on their own. I am doing the hard work of identifying stakeholders and writing a business plan, because that is something I can do in my spare time while I am waiting to see what is going to happen with my job and school aspirations. If other people have to run it because I am not eligible for a job, I will be able to volunteer.

But why Finland in the meantime?

I would only have to worry about my living expenses and not the fabulously high cost of tuition. Any Le Cordon Bleu institution in the United States would bankrupt me quickly, while I can find housing for the rough cost of living in DC or Baltimore. Some things would be more expensive, like clothing (I’m not skimping out on cold weather gear), but an apartment is roughly the same. The biggest cost to my family would be me being so far away that it’s hard to visit. However, culinary school does not last that long. If I like Finland so much that I want to stay and get permanent residency or citizenship, that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I come to it. I don’t get to see my family that much as it stands now, because they’re all in Texas…. far away from the current flooding, I might add.

My biggest problem is that I am an idealist who doesn’t necessarily know how to break down large ideas into small steps for execution. I generally work best in a team for that, and I’m lucky to have one under me now. I have gathered the best and the brightest at Lanagan Media Group, most of whom went to high school with me at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Instead of using AI, I get immediate feedback from an arts brain trust.

Because make no mistake, cooking is art in any language.

And in the United States, the language in the kitchen is overwhelmingly Spanish. I want to be able to speak to my employees in whatever language they feel the most comfortable. Therefore, Finnish can wait.

But not for long.

The Aada-See

Daily writing prompt
What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?

The Homerian epic that has been my relationship with Aada needs to go for my own peace of mind. We have hurt each other over and over, trying to change… neither one of us has done well in that area. So now, it’s a blessing and releasing. I have asked God before to go with her where I can’t, and I repeat that prayer today. If I cannot be the friend that she needs, then I don’t want to be her friend at all.

It’s not that I don’t have hope of a redemption story, it’s that you can only have a redemption story if both parties are interested. She says that I have a need to manipulate both her and our relationship, without taking into account all the ways she’s manipulated me over the years. That’s for her and her therapist to work out, because her therapist will never meet me. She will never take in the drastic changes in my own personality as Aada’s edicts came down from on high.

The biggest is that I’d never had to keep a secret from my wife before, and that caused way more problems than it was worth. I suppose that I’m grateful I got to see Dana become violent so I knew she was capable of it before I spent any more time with her, but it all started with Aada saying “don’t talk to anyone.” The problem is that she made it where I couldn’t talk to her, either. I sat alone in my room with the weight of the world bearing on my stomach.

However, that was not our only problem.

She doesn’t realize just how much her lie cost me, and she never will. That’s because she didn’t come with me to a book talk with my favorite author. I couldn’t glance back at her and see her eyes when the question was asked, “so are you looking for a job now?” She couldn’t see the torrent of emotions running underneath my skin, but she could have if she’d been able to see my face. I was too nervous to say yes without her approval.

Through it all, I’ve charted our friendship on this web site, and I think it has helped me to see some perspective. I do not like it when Aada gets main character syndrome and fails to take in what I am actually saying. She skips over my pain and concentrates on her own. That has to stop, for both our sake. I am writing in hopes that she’ll listen to me. She is reading to look for attacks that aren’t there. She reams me out and I cry…. lather, rinse, repeat. It has been going on for 12 years now, and for the life of me I don’t know why I’ve hung in.

I guess you would just have to know how beautiful she is in spite of all her flaws and failures to know why she has been my Achilles heel.

But for the sake of harmony, I cannot hang in anymore.

She will continue to read everything I write, calling it toxic. The only way to stop that is to write about other things… I have to find a new muse, something that fills me with the passion to write. It shouldn’t be a person, because it puts too much on one relationship. I need to find nature, or God, or something.

The only thing left is to thank her for being the inspiration behind my writing thus far, and forgive her for all her missteps.

It’s so much easier than forgiving myself for mine.

Dreaming

I know that because I betrayed Aada, she will never trust me again. That’s because she will not give me a chance to rebuild. The thought is devastating, and runs on repeat in my head. All of my thoughts of her are now intrusive, because there’s nothing I can or should do. I just need to leave well enough alone.

Unfortunately, that is not my personality.

I want to fix everything. Surely, there’s something I can do, something I can say that will make things right. I don’t do well with relationships ending, because I don’t think they ever do. As long as we’re both breathing, there’s still a connection. It is manhole cover in size, and I cannot manage to shut it down.

My energy goes through that chord even when we’re not talking, because I know that she can use all the prayers she can get, even though she wouldn’t call it that. She doesn’t “do” prayers. She used to call me her “pinch hitter,” and I hope that at the very least, she’ll think of me that way now. I know I have done wrong, but I do not want that to be my only narrative.

I don’t want to provoke her, as she says my blog entries are designed to do. I want to tell my other readers that this relationship has left me in a million little pieces. I have felt every feeling for her that a human can express, from deep love to deep anger. My anger got the best of me quite a few times over the years… and so has hers. Through it, we’ve managed to forgive over and over.

Therefore, even though Aada says that her decision is final, it does not feel real. It won’t for a very long time, because I will need to turn away from writing to her. I will need to turn away from writing about her. I will need to stop making her my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night. I will need to find other people to make those touchstones, and it is frightening.

I do not like moving on from someone I’ve loved this much over the years, one who agreed to be my yellow string on the murder board of polyamory (red strings are romantic, yellow strings are emotional support- making that very clear). Cutting a string is tantamount to cutting off a limb for me, because I feel emotions down to my neurons. Pain tears through me when I think that the other end of the string is an empty slot.

The truth is that she made friends with a blogger, not knowing what that meant. I made friends with someone in government, not knowing what that meant, either. We should have worked closely together, or she should have told me I couldn’t have a blog. Either would have been acceptable, as her career came first.

I don’t know how I lost sight of that fact, but I did. I didn’t say to myself, “self, you’re running in a different league now. Cut the shit.” Because all my writing is shit to me. I throw it out there and let other people tell me whether it’s good or not. It’s not my decision as to what has value.

Aada found tremendous value in my words at first, and then as our relationship became more enmeshed, the more she hated being a featured player. I am sure that I have done my part in embarrassing the hell out of her, but I hope I explained my writing to her behind the scenes well enough that she won’t hate it all in the future.

That’s dreaming, I’m sure.

I wish that I could stop crying, that the grief would lift long enough for me to get out and start making other friends. But so far, I’ve just stayed in my own little bubble. I need time and space to emote. Because I’m autistic, my emotions are large and need room to breathe. I need time alone for red mist rage at myself, because I did not get the future that I wanted.

I sabotaged it, and I will never know why. Perhaps I was tired of keeping secrets all the time, that it made my life too small. Perhaps I was tired of all the isolation, because Aada would not let me get closer to her. She kept me at arm’s length and let me sit in my discomfort at not knowing who she really was. I mean, I do know her writing voice and could pick it out of a lineup. I have memorized her face, but only in one photo.

I have dreamed many times of making her laugh, have sent her videos and pictures of myself so she could get to know me “in person.” I wanted to make the transition from online to offline as easy as possible. But I think that wanting to meet in person was just too intimidating. I cannot help but believe that when I asked her about it, she got nervous and started fighting with me just to end our relationship before it could happen.

I can see how meeting me would be intimidating given all that I’ve written, but I am strikingly different in conversation. I am disconnected from my writing and do not retain blog entries. Our relationship would have been without context. All of the love that I poured into my writing may or may not have been there after a coffee together, because who knows if we would have gotten along as well without the anonymous wall that the Internet presents?

I think about that all the time… that normalization of our friendship would have cut her out of my blog almost immediately. Why would I need to write about her? I just saw her yesterday! Etc.

I dream about what I would do if Aada came back to me and said that what I did was horrible and I have a ladder to climb if I really want to make things better. My answer is “anything. I’d do anything.” It is not up to me to decide how hurt she is, nor how many steps I’d have to climb. And right now, it’s just a dream.

I am preparing for the worst, that I’ll never see her again, and my heart is bleeding out. Hope slowly drains from me as I fumble around on this web site, trying to explain how a virtual relationship got me so twisted up that I cannot breathe. I am lucky that I have other people in my life who have gone through the same thing, that 10 years later it still hurts to think of an Internet friend who is no longer.

I remember saying that I thought she was scared, that frankly, she didn’t know what would happen if we were alone in a room together. Would our easy give and take transfer to conversation, or would we tear each other apart? She did not answer.

She did not answer a lot of my questions, preferring to hold her emotions close to the vest. I am attracted to that, because my emotions spill all over everywhere and I constantly tell myself that I need to learn compartmentalization. In all my friends and romantic partners, there’s been that disconnect in which I constantly crave their emotions when they are unable to show them.

I think that Aada was attracted to me energy-wise for the opposite reason. She saw her inability to emote and wanted to be more like me. That I was a breath of fresh air when she was stuck in the doldrums. But over time, that led to too many fights because I required her to do emotional labor.

I extol my love for Aada all over the place, but I wasn’t always happy with her. No relationship can claim that it’s always happy if it’s in any way dynamic.

Our dynamic was to have a very close moment and then separate, because Aada could not sustain it. Our dance of intimacy required separation after difficult conversations. I did not like it, because I couldn’t understand why closeness couldn’t stay in place. Now that I know more about her, I know that it wasn’t personal. It’s what she requires, and I fell down on the job.

I want to give her what she requires, and right now that is separation. It is not good for me, but her needs must come first. I am the one that hurt her this time, and it doesn’t matter what I think anymore.

I look in the mirror, and I am shattered.

Into a million little pieces that will eventually rearrange into a different order, with or without her.

A Letter That May Never Be Read

Dear Aada,

In trying to talk about my own feelings, I exposed the world to my perceptions of what yours might be. It was wrong, and I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you why I did it, but there is no answer to that, just like there is no answer to the reason why you lied to me. What I do know for sure is that I did not set out to hurt you, that you were collateral damage in trying to explain my journey to everyone else.

I am sorry, like you said, “a million times over.”

I have no excuse for my behavior because there isn’t one. I fucked up. I also accept that you have no interest in working toward a future, and that’s what scares me the most. I don’t know who I am without you. I think, though, that I am going to find out.

This phase of my life has been rewarding, but also tremendously lonely and isolating. Your insistence that I tell no one anything at any time was also manipulative, because it marked all my other friends as unsafe. I sat with unbelievable anxiety in the pit of my stomach while I waited for letters from you, not reaching out to anyone else because I couldn’t. If anyone asked me what was wrong, I would not be able to tell them. I got to where I wouldn’t leave the house. My mental illness spiraled out of control. I didn’t get any relief until you said I could write about what I wanted.

I took your words seriously, that there’s nothing I could say that would hurt you now that your life is different. Then, come to find out, that wasn’t true at all. We could have avoided a lot of missteps in my publishing life if you had been clearer. I thought that for the first time, our lives were equally boring.

But they’re not.

If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have published anything about our relationship at all, and yet it is the richest tapestry on this web site. I hope that one day your anger will lift, and you will go back a few years. I think you will be surprised at how much I’ve learned. That seems to be the way, anyway. My friends read about themselves and are incensed in the moment, and then when time has passed, my words just hit different.

I was never trying to manipulate you. I was trying to illustrate you- to paint you with words. I have often ripped you off blind, using things you’ve said so that you know I’m paying attention.

One of the most profound things you’ve ever said to me is that I “paint my feelings as fact.” I am still not sure what that means, but it’s such a beautiful line that I repeat it. I guess I just have never met a writer who didn’t paint their feelings as fact, because it’s their story.

It’s a line that I wish had led to an in-person conversation, because I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained what you meant. I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained lots of things. But knowing me, I would have worn a baseball cap to hide mine. I was social masked into eye contact at a young age. I could not hold your gaze long, but I would have tried.

I would have tried harder to be the friend that you needed me to be with more support from you, because guessing what was okay to publish and what wasn’t landed me in this mess. I do not blame you. I can only blame myself. But what I do know is that if we’d had any kind of production meeting, you’d be happier with the result.

I needed my editor.

I would burn this whole blog down to get her back, because that’s how much I believe in our ability to write together. You write fiction, I write nonfiction. I’ve had so many ideas over the years as to how we could harness this and make it profitable. Maybe I’d be a better editor for you because I wouldn’t catch plot holes, but I’d definitely catch spelling/grammar mistakes.

It’s just another dream that died, because we’re not on the same page.

I wish I could stop being so sad. My life feels over. I keep thinking about the conversations we had before I was admitted to Sinai and wondering how it all went to hell. I do know that when I was in the hospital, you were with me in spirit. You sat at the foot of my bed while I slept, watching to make sure I got healthy. There were too many signs of you to ignore.

How did you get that green shirt to me? How did it get back to you?

You are always the best.

We could start writing there… it’s a story that needs to be told in fiction for both of us, doesn’t it?

You are always the best.

You told me 12 years ago that you’d have lots of juicy bits for my first novel, and I still don’t know how to write fiction. I don’t visualize anything. My brain doesn’t come with that feature. You can see the whole map at once. I have a feeling that’s a large part of our story without saying anything. That you saw the whole map while I fumbled in the dark.

I’m still trying to find my way without a lantern.

That’s because I want to stay in my lane, writing what I know while you build the fictional worlds. I’d be a good research assistant and Dagger’s not hiring….

I wish I’d known how much you thought of me, wanted to impress me, wanted to be my friend as much as I wanted to be yours. I know all of that can’t possibly still be true, but I’m flattered nonetheless.

I wasn’t the one that said you were a nobody. To me, you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. I was trying to send you a message, and you thought I was being literal, launching an assault with words.

I thought you would know by now how I feel about you after years and years of telling you EVERY DAY how much I feel for you. I’m not sure a day has gone by in 12 years that I haven’t written to you, my blog coming in second because if I was responding to you, my other readers just didn’t matter.

I believe that part of you is proud to be Aada, because when I write about other subjects my emotions don’t run as deep or as real. Part of you, I’m sure, would like me to push the big red button and move on to something else. But how are you going to feel when I do?

You said that you learn more about yourself when you’re reading me, and that comment sticks in my mind as well. It’s what I wish every reader took away. That they read me to learn more about them.

Stay away for as long as you need, because the thing about letters is that they keep. The thing about blog entries is that they keep. You have a treasure trove here that you may not want to lose. I have not always behaved badly. Neither have you. We have grown and learned much just by being so incredibly different.

You are logic. I am emotion. We are built to be complementary angles, but we flounder by dividing up all the labor. Sometimes, I must be more logical. Sometimes, you must be more emotional. But that’s only if there’s a relationship to fix. I don’t think there is right now, I’m just going off past history. Eventually, you’ll want to know what I’m up to and you’ll drop a note out of nowhere, and I will be prepared. I know you well enough to know that you’re thinking, “that’s impossible.” But life is long, and we haven’t managed to stay away from each other yet.

I really would sit down with you and your therapist if the opportunity presented itself, because I do not want to be a manipulative force in your life. I have told you for years that I came to DC to do great things, and in no world do I want you to be excluded from them.

I would also sit down with your husband and answer any question he threw at me, and in my imagination, the first is, “what in the absolute hell is wrong with you?” I would probably cry and say that many doctors have tried to figure that out, but they’re still scratching their heads. Join the club.

If this is really the end, I hope he’s the one for you. I hope your family, friends, and colleagues are there to fill the hole that I left in your heart. I’m only now realizing that I made one, because our relationship was so turbulent that I didn’t take in your feelings, not a quarter of them.

I have cried so many nights, wanting to please you and not knowing that I already did. That I am enough, all by myself. I’m sorry for every moment that you did not feel like enough, all by yourself… and that is what was so surprising about your lie. That you didn’t believe I was sufficiently impressed with you, as you are.

My God, Aada… if you only knew.

When my mother died, the only person I wanted was you. I couldn’t emote in front of people, but I could write letters into the night. I would not have recovered without it. So know that even if we never speak again, I will always remember your contributions to making me feel like there is life after the death of a loved one.

My life won’t be as interesting without you, but I have to be prepared for the fact that your anger will stay in place. That what I have done is too big to forget or forgive.

All I can say is that the emotions you said I had weren’t accurate in the slightest. You read me wrong, just like I read you wrong.

My point for the last year has been that we need to stop reading each other, because there are so many ways we could communicate our feelings. I have heard you talk in a voice note, but you have never picked up the phone. I have never seen your body language, micro aggressions, facial expressions, anything to indicate what is going on with you except words in the heat of the moment.

Surely there is a part of you that wishes you knew those things about me… that we hadn’t put it off so long. I hate that I know your coffee order and have never actually gotten to bring you one. I hate that we have never taken a walk. I hate that I only know you in black and white, because I know that there’s a well of information I’m missing and so are you.

We could fix this if we tried, but I cannot hope for that. I can only hope that I can recover on my own. But know that it is a setback of enormous proportions. I will have to work hard to forgive myself for everything I have done and left undone.

Because you are always the best.

Love,

Leslie

Structure of My Own Making

Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?

When I wrote about this prompt last year, I remember saying that I didn’t have any daily habits. That was 100% true at the time, but now I’m charged with creating a structure with which I can live. My care team at Cognitive Behavioral Health does not think I am ready for a job yet, so I am muddling through what that actually means. Am I disabled for good and should start pursuing government assistance, or am I capable of slowly creating my own recovery into the workforce? My writing does provide a little bit of income, and as I get more popular here and on Medium, I see results. I’ve been a blogger for a very long time, but so far I’ve only had one fan who was so impressed she thought I should be world famous. I would like a few more of those. 😉 But nothing good will happen if I do not take care of myself.

This starts with setting medication reminders in my phone. My day flags if I do not have the correct doses at the right time. I have always been good about taking my medication because I had a doctor tell 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 that way. However, I was not so on top of it that I remembered to take it at the same time. I’m also on a lot more medication than I used to be……………

I’ll talk about my psychiatric drugs because I think that people need to learn about them. I am not a doctor, just a waiting room that doesn’t suck (thanks, Paul Gilmartin. I stole that line from you). Crazy meds need to be talked about because it’s such a major undertaking to be put on them:

  • Lamictal (lamotrigine)
    • The first time I was put on this mood stabilizer was the first time I knew what it was like to live without depression. It took about six weeks for the fog to lift, but I’d never been more grateful in my life. The only side effect I’ve experienced so far is nausea, and it was very hard to deal with for a long time. Now, I’ve just decided to stay on it regardless of the side effects because other mood stabilizers make my weight balloon. It’s also an old drug now, so it’s relatively cheap if you don’t have insurance.
  • Lexapro (escitalopram)
    • This is the gold standard of SSRIs, and most bipolar people don’t take them. That’s why I think my diagnosis may be wrong, that I actually have autism and not bipolar disorder. In a bipolar patient, SSRIs tend to make them flip out with suicidal ideation, negative/intrusive thoughts, etc. My SSRI keeps me at an even keel when I am really paying attention to my body. As for side effects, I haven’t noticed any of them.
  • Buspar (buspirone)
    • This is what replaced my benzos for anxiety, because it is not related to them and yet performs the same function. It’s better for me because there’s no risk of addiction long term. I do not have an addictive personality, but better safe than sorry. I have been on Klonopin for over 10 years, but my new clinic doesn’t prescribe benzos to anyone. The entire hospital system has put their feet down over it, so I have to adjust. Now that I’ve been on it for several weeks, I am unsure whether it works or not. I will keep you posted. The one thing I do know is that it’s the most important drug for me to take at the same time every day, because it will flat stop working if I miss even one dose.

My crazy meds aren’t the only ones I take, they’re just the most important for keeping my structure stable. It feels like everything is hitting all at once as I age, because I didn’t have to worry about hormone replacement therapy even a year ago.

As an aside, it’s a big joke with my sister that because I’m enby, I thought that if I was going to do hormone replacement therapy, it would be in the other direction…. after that particular doctor’s appointment, I went home and consoled myself by buying both the book and audiobook of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” I needed some Stress Tabs #10 and some candy bars (but maybe not 11). As it turns out, the book and audio were not enough. I also watched the movie on Prime just to see Kathy Bates… “how do you accidentally run into someone…. how do you accidentally run into someone six times?” I get it now. I’m older and I have more insurance.

My medication is working, and for that I am grateful. Now, my schedule runs from sun up to sun down, skipping the night owl routine altogether. And in fact, when I took my sleeping medication yesterday, the sun wasn’t even fully down yet. I prefer to work in the quiet of the morning, especially on the weekends before the kids in my apartment complex wake. The ones who live above me are particularly loud, which is why I’m glad I have good headphones. I hunker down in my office after a night of wild dreams and try to remember what they are. It provides a writing exercise that’s all my own, propelling me into really thinking about my life and what I want to accomplish. I accomplish nothing without coffee, through which all things are possible.

Coffee is also part of remembering to take my medication, because I have found that a lot of caffeine is just enough to control my ADHD, but Ritalin or Adderrall is too big a jump. I have a coffee machine that makes a cup at a time, and my preferred coffee is Cafe Bustelo. It’s in honor of my old chef, John Kinkaid, because we used to walk to a Cuban restaurant between prep and service for their Cafe Bustelo lattes.

I mentioned in “Why It All Still Hurts” that I was working on a nonprofit, and I am… but that dream has been deferred. Kinkaid was killed in a car accident. I am still reeling from the grief, but I got Kindle Unlimited and added five books on starting a nonprofit to my library. Again, the idea is dinner with dignity, offering the unhoused food they could never afford on their own, and opening my kitchen up to take homeless people on as apprentices if they’d like to learn the trade. I am still sold on this idea, it’s just going to take a lot longer to accomplish than I thought.

That’s because the longer I think about it, the more ideas I have. What if instead of this one nonprofit, we were able to build a library like Oodi in Baltimore? There, I could have my cooking classes and a place to serve food, plus books and maker tools for everyone. My structure these days is centered on how to spend the government’s money for the good of the people. Learning about Oodi and all the services they provide gave me a bigger goal than just “dinner with dignity.” It would give the unhoused a place to go. Maybe my purpose is not to go to Finland, but to bring Finnish ideas to a city that needs them. I want to redirect Maryland’s money from the DC metro area and Annapolis to Baltimore, because it is so underserved. A lot of the city is completely trashed out with no way to fix anything…. or so it seems from an outsider’s perspective that just moved here in December.

I need more time to watch and wait, gathering stakeholders and formatting a business plan. Perhaps my structure will always be internal, because that’s how autists work best. I do not want to go down in history as merely a blogger. I want to create something beautiful that will last and bring hope to people that might not be feeling it that day.

I find that working on giving hope to other people is the easiest way to claim hope for myself. I am slowly building a structure into which I can grow, taking others’ ideas and implementing them like a plant takes root in the soil.

But it all starts with remembering to take my medication.

I Feel So Weird

I feel like the poster child for the digital age, having had an entire relationship from beginning to end over the Internet, pen pals for 12 years with only a few pictures and one voice note to show for it. That’s because I’ve deleted the millions and millions of words between us on one e-mail account, and am in the process of cleaning out the others. I cannot bring myself to delete the last one, though, because it’s so full of anger that it lets me know two things. The first is that I didn’t get the e-mail I wanted, but I did get the e-mail I deserved. The second is that Aada does indeed love me, because people who don’t care don’t get that angry.

My journey to take is why I was so doubtful that her love was real. That I needed it to be more grounded when she thought it was already in the dirt. Why was I so insistent that meeting in person would fix everything? Because my writer personality is not the sum total of me. I’m introverted and quiet unless I’m involved in a conversation with people who are giving me energy. In person, I am much less likely to engage, preferring to watch my surroundings. I wanted her to know that side of me, because she’s the person I wanted to sit next to as I stared out into the beyond.

If I think back to when my mother died, that’s when I needed her the most. She’s got big mom energy, and I needed to soak in it. She didn’t have to say anything in my grief, I just wanted her presence.

I still do, and I hope that over time she forgets how angry she is right now. I wish that I had been a less turbulent force in her life, because I own my part. There was no way we couldn’t be turbulent without the normalcy of conversation… e-mail allowed us to go down the wrong path much faster than we would looking into each other’s eyes.

I wish she’d seen my crooked-yet-endearing smile. I wish she’d seen my disabilities. I wish she’d seen my autism up close and personal, as well as the ADHD that plagues me. All of these things would have given her more insight into this person that she thought was so impressive at first… because I do not think that I am.

I wish I’d taken in that she wanted to impress me, because I was always trying to impress her.

What would it have looked like if she’d told me long ago that she was intimidated by me, that she’d lied about knowing an author to impress me before it became pathological? I would have laughed. But by the time she’d told me about her lie, it was so deep and involved that I could not help but react in anger.

What would it be like if I could take all that back? What would it be like if I could go back to day one?

I might have gotten our picnic if I’d just been cool. I could not be cool because I fell all over myself in hero worship, not knowing that she was equally jazzed… I mean, why would anyone be impressed with me? I’m a third rate hack who emotionally vomits all over the Internet.

I’m not Jenny Lawson, for Chrissakes.

Am I embarrassed that I fell in love with her? No, but I’m embarrassed by all the ways I’ve shown it. I’m sure her husband would have some choice words for me, but I’m not even sure he knows I exist. However, if he does, I hope he’s taken it in stride and would roast me rather than be angry, because of all people he should know that his wife is utterly incapable of returning feelings for an enby with a female body. And besides, I don’t know her in 3D. Behind every beautiful straight woman is a man who is often sick of her shit. I don’t have to put up with any of it, so how could I really know what it’s like?

The butterflies in my stomach would have gone away much easier watching her actually be said straight woman. Over the internet, her patois is as gruff as any man’s. Meanwhile, in real life apparently she is cute and cuddly because I’m the one that got the cactus. I don’t feel bad for wanting to meet the cute and cuddly side of her, but I don’t know why it couldn’t be arranged. I am sure that I scared her with the intensity of my love- but to be fair, she scared me with the intensity of hers. She cannot return my feelings when it comes to romance, but God help anyone who tried to cross me. Many of my former friends and exes, we joke, are buried under her pool. I hope she will do me a solid and keep them there.

She has told me that I am part of her wild and crazy brain, so I can only hope that when the heat dies down, she’ll come back to me. I don’t hope for much, but I do hope for that. Life is long, and grief is weird. She will never truly leave me, because she only tries to stay away from my web site. There is no telling what I will say that will make her think, “Leslie needs me.”

Let me clear that right up. There’s no situation in which I don’t need her. I pop off and get angry, saying that I don’t want this relationship but I cannot bring myself to actually mean it. She got under my skin in two seconds flat, and I haven’t stopped thinking about her for 12 years. I have often put my own needs below hers, and I thought that since she told me there was nothing I could say that would hurt her professionally that I could write about what I wanted. There was a gap between what was said and what was meant. I cannot take back anything I’ve written

Nothing here is meant to provoke her, but it does. This is a problem because when she says I’m trying to make her mad, she will not listen to me when I say that my writing is not for her. It’s for everyone, because I’m not trying to do anything but show my audience what it’s like to live in my own head, to think with me through enormous relationship problems that they may be going through themselves. I think that my digital love is a new take on relationships because it’s something that has happened many times to people my age and younger, the architects of the current social media landscape when it first began because we were the people lost in Internet Relay Chat first.

Aada is not my first digital love, but she’s the longest, outlasting my marriage by four years.

No one in my life takes in that part of it. She is now the longest love of my life, and I do not know what to do with that information except file it away, knowing it’s true and yet trying to forget. I need to connect with other people and I’m at a loss as to how. I want to secret away into our little bubble again, and I’ve had a hard time adjusting (really hard). I cannot believe I was willing to give up so much for e-mail… because she was going to meet me in person one day. Surely it will be next year. Maybe now that it’s been five years. Maybe now that it’s been eight. At the 11 year mark, we talked seriously about baby steps. I am certain that she thought she needed to unburden herself of this lie before she actually met me in person, and ran when I got angry… not knowing that I would indeed get over it.

I keep composing an e-mail in my head…

Dear Aada,

Don’t do this. Don’t cut me off. We are each a part of each other’s wild and crazy brains. Losing you is like losing my right hand…………….

And that’s where it ends because I know that she doesn’t feel that way about me.

Or does she?

That is where I have always been unclear, because I am so vocal about my love for her and she’s got all her emotions tied behind her back… but the wall comes down occasionally and the Mama Wolverine claws come out with the clear message that I am hers. Those are the moments I’ve lived for, because they’re few and far between… yet just so precious.

I am mystified that Aada’s therapist thinks that I have a need to manipulate her and our relationship because I am a blogger who writes about their relationships and experiences. I have always been that. It’s why Aada sought me out in the first place- she was impressed by the way I lived my life out loud. And then everything she loved about my writing became something to castigate once she was my actual friend.

I have not changed. Aada’s view of me has changed.

The difference between her and me is that I would actually sit down with her and her therapist and try to create healthy coping mechanisms to bring our relationship into the future. I know that my writing is a basket of crazy and I do not want to stop Aada from getting healthy if I’m the problem… nor do I really want a future without her.

I think that being digital friends allowed patterns to become entrenched that do not happen in verbal conversation, and that we could find a way forwards with some frank discussions with eye contact. I don’t believe that I’m not the problem. I don’t believe I’m the solution, either. I just want to be. It is not in my nature to hurt someone and not have empathy swallow me up. I have done wrong and I know it.

I have also admitted my flaws and failures every step of the way.

The bitch of it is that I know we love each other. I know it like I know the earth is round. But sometimes, love isn’t enough. The way I hurt her may be too big to fix, because I broke her confidence due to my own mental illness. I was so depressed and anxious that her love couldn’t reach me.

So what would I do in the future that’s different? I would listen closer, because I don’t think I really took in her feelings. They are muted in a way that I cannot always see/hear/feel them. I miss social cues, particularly over the Internet, so I’ve glossed over what she’s written and published my own takes on what I thought she said instead of what she actually did.

I would insist on meeting in person, as intimidating as that is to both of us, because it would lessen my need to write about her if I wasn’t lost in imagining who she is… because that’s all an Internet friend can do, imagine the context in which a person operates. I imagined her as a hero, and she hasn’t entirely fallen off that pedestal for me to see her as a normal person.

It blinded me to a lot, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t take for my journey now.

That doesn’t make it less weird.

Boundaries

I wish that I could have stuck to the boundaries that Aada set for me about not talking to anyone. I really do. It would have made my life a whole lot easier in terms of not upsetting the apple cart. She didn’t recognize that her secrets were big enough to constantly make me sick to my stomach with anxiety… and not because I didn’t tell her. She was too busy to pay attention to all the warning signs that I was going down. I cannot imagine how much a face to face conversation would have helped, but I cannot hope for that anymore. I can only hope that as I move forwards in time, my mind will quiet on its own.

I have been told that my actions were disgusting, that I had a need to prove something by talking about our relationship. I had nothing to prove because all I wanted was relief. I was isolated beyond belief with one friend who wouldn’t really let me have any others, because I couldn’t share what was troubling me to any of them. I chose Michael because I thought… no, I didn’t really think. I was desperate. I couldn’t hold on anymore. He quieted all the anxiety in my mind, but he also caught Aada in a lie. When he did that, one string pulled all the others.

She said I was like a child in a toy store with “you’ll sure as shit get her side, Dagger.” No, that wasn’t delight. That was anger. That was truth pain. That was “if she lies to everyone else, she’ll lie to you, too.” But at least Dagger “isn’t Michelle Obama, for Chrissakes.” My reaction to that line is unprintable, because she knew it would hurt… and it did. That’s because Dagger is precious to me. No one disrespects Dagger in my presence, one so large they identify as the definite article. Michael told me to e-mail them both at the same time, because if they knew each other, it wouldn’t be a big deal. They didn’t, and it was…. especially because the lie snowballed over 12 years to the point that she made me block her on Facebook, ending a relationship I wanted professionally.

I’m just sick over all of it… some days so angry I cannot function that Aada picked up her toys and went home… at others willing to beg and plead like a five year old. I cannot be angry at anyone but me, because apparently if I’d done everything she said the way she said to do it, I’d be sipping coffee on her back porch right now. But is it all really my fault when I told Aada for years that I was anxious and upset? Yes, it really is. The stakes were too high, and I ignored them. I also cannot take anything back.

It is not true that I am the only one at fault for our demise, however. We both did a number on each other when all we really wanted was love… again, not like that. She’s been my muse for 12 years because the only thing more beautiful than her face is her mind… and I met her mind first.

Oh, wait.

That’s not true. The first time I saw her picture I was instantly charmed because she looked like a comic book character. Her hair spoke to me. 😛

I hate small talk, so little jokes became heart to heart conversations in which I disconnected from everyone else just to spend more time with her. And because I couldn’t tell anyone about our conversations, when I was with other people I was there but not present. I retreated into myself so fully that even my family had trouble connecting with me, and that was fine with Aada as well. As long as her secrets were safe, who cared what happened to me?

I waited until I got the all clear from her- that there was nothing I could say that would hurt her- before I started talking about the last few years. Then, a few days ago, she told me that wasn’t true. That people in her professional life had told her they were reading my blog and that was dangerous. So, Aada’s work people, welcome aboard, I guess. I wouldn’t have invited you, but now that you’re here, I suppose you can stay… as if I have any control over who reads me at all, or would even know.

Don’t give her any shit, she’s already been through it having to deal with my sorry ass… though that’s what I hear you’ve already been doing- making sure she’s okay. Keep doing it. If she won’t let me love her, then congratulations. It’s your job now. I’m alternately the easiest and hardest act to follow you’ll find.

That’s because I drive her insane, but I’ve had my moments.

And this is where I start to cry and shake, because those moments are precious to me. I will never love like this again because there will be no circumstances in my life like the ones in which we met. You’ll have to go back and read all 12 years because I’m too tired to talk about them today.

I am not too tired to talk about how my brain chemicals are rearranged with grief, because I deleted everything in my Gmail account both from and to her. That means that our most precious moments from when our relationship began are no more. They at least live in my memory, but I cannot take them out and read them as they happened. In some ways, this is for the best as I tended to reread often and dwell on them, not moving forward in time. I just wasn’t smart enough to see all the consequences involved between what is said and what is meant.

“There’s nothing you could say that would hurt me” has been the biggest lie of all, because of course when you lot showed up (Aada’s work colleagues), I wanted to crawl in a hole and die. The very least you could do is send me some swag through the mail.

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

After all the shit we’ve been through, I’m still finishing up this entry in tears because despite everything, I’m losing my favorite person. But I think that “my favorite person” has been an idea for a long time, and she’s not real. I’ve never gotten to sit down with her and hammer out details on what is acceptable to say and what isn’t, so no wonder my blog is an absolute shit show when she reads. The one thing that makes me sad is that when she reads, she does not take in my thoughts and feelings. She does not see me as a separate person. If she doesn’t agree with something I thought and felt, it is not that we’re different, it’s that I lied.

For instance, I said, “I do not want you to feel like you’re cheating on your husband when you’re talking to me.” That doesn’t mean that Aada has ever actually felt this way. It meant it was something I worried about. I didn’t lie about jack shit, because if Aada had said, “I’ve never felt that,” I would have been relieved and that would have been the end of the conversation.

She says that she is also not the person I portray here, and that I agree with wholeheartedly. I only know her in 2D, while the rest of her friends and family get to experience her laughter. I have never heard her laugh….

And I’m sure not laughing now. I broke a ton of boundaries after I thought it was safe, because there was nothing I could say that would hurt her.

When the best thing for me would probably have been not to talk at all.

How Do I Keep from Screaming?

I have done it this time. I have successfully killed a relationship that I really wanted to last long after we did, because we’re both writers. I just want to scream into the void, hoping it swallows me up.

The one thing that keeps me going is Jesus, and I wish I was being funny. The resurrection is a wonderful metaphor for forgiving each other later in life and moving on… or what I will do to resurrect myself after this little death. Who knows which way it will go given our long history of death and resurrection already? I’m trying to stay away from her, she’s trying to stay away from me. It’s not going that well on either side because she still reads me. Maybe all we need is time to get over what has happened, and maybe it’s best if we move on. I think that depends on a lot of factors, but I know what I want. It’s her- it’s always been her. I just don’t think she’ll choose me, because I’ve let her down. I’ve hurt her and I know it, but I don’t know how to make it up to her. I can’t just write my way out of this one, but I can try…. resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.

If there is a second thing helping the resurrection along, it’s my blog, because at the very least the last 12 years will outlive me, a biography for those who lie and love their audience.

I am so sad that I want to get down on my knees and beg, and I’m not sure why. Our relationship has been turbulent from the beginning and I don’t know why I should want that. Mostly, it’s what I know and cannot turn away quickly… but that is dismissive of who Aada is as a person I want to work with to create something beautiful. Our relationship has been that at times, and we’ve both wanted to get back to it. I cannot know what our future holds, together or separately. I can just throw wishes up into the air and see if any of them stick.

I want our attachment to be secure and non-volatile. She seems to think that I manipulate her so it will never turn into that. She loves me enough to say goodbye over and over, but not enough to make sure it doesn’t happen in advance. I do not like the roller coaster. I like my dreams in which we’re just us, laughing over whatever… even if it’s at my expense. I think I would make her laugh. I accidentally do my own stunts. The fact that she’s now married doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because she’s so secure in that relationship and I’m so secure in the fact that she loves me the best way she knows how (when we’re getting along).

I was jealous of her then-boyfriend for about three minutes. Three minutes is all it took to realize two things. The first was that I loved her so much that I needed for her to be happy, no matter what that looked like. The second was that I needed her emotional support way more than I needed romance, and she was up for it. I didn’t want to be bitter and angry I didn’t get a diamond ring, I wanted to be overjoyed that this woman would have me in her life at all… and that’s been my theme over the years. Just be happy she loves you on her terms, because you cannot believe how deep that water runs.

I wanted her to be with me for all of my huge life events, and so far I cannot even get her to meet for lunch. We make great pen pals, but she will not show herself. It makes no sense to me because she literally lied about knowing my favorite author just to impress me, so if she was so impressed, why has she stayed away? If I think about that part of it too long, I actually do start screaming. She wanted to meet me because she was impressed with me, and then stayed away for over a decade.

WHY? WHY, GOD? WHY? I’M SERIOUS!

God doesn’t know, either.

I used to dream of taking her on a picnic so that we could drink wine in the sunshine, forgetting about all our problems. And yes, I am aware that she already has friends and family with whom to do such a thing. I never wanted any part in separating her from any of them… most particularly her now-husband.

Because I cannot hide behind anything I’ve ever written, I was hoping that he’d roast the everliving shit out of me on a daily basis (I am laughing very hard). I’ve never met Mr. Aada, but the reason I’d want to is to make sure he loves her the way she needs to be loved. How would I do that? By watching them together. I have no need to intrude because if Aada is happy, then so am I. I’ve had 12 years to get used to the idea that she’s not queer and not available. I have also had 12 years to intimately understand that my heart flipped the fuck out and it doesn’t matter. My feelings just stay steady, my heart walking out of my chest when I think of her………. I just let her set boundaries and abide by them.

When I read the Outlander series, I knew I wanted to be the Lord John Grey to her Jamie for the rest of my life.

She has not so quietly loved me like a house on fire in return, because she absolutely is my James Alexander Malcolm McKenzie Fraser. I can speak to her in ways that other people can’t because she’s glued to my writing. I draw her like a moth to a flame. She’s intimidated by me because she thinks that her writing isn’t as good as mine, when in reality I think that my writing pales in comparison to hers. She doesn’t often have time to write long letters, but when she does I memorize them. I wish everyone could read her long letters, or that she was also a blogger. I think you’d find that I’m the hack.

If you meet her, you’ll never forget.

If you love her, it will be a runaway train.

If you lose her, you’ll rue the day.

Which is why I’m just here, screaming into the void. I know on some level that this post is delusional, because I’ve done enough to push her away for the rest of our lives. But maybe it’s not. Maybe something will push us back together that neither one of us can see right now, because I have no idea what she’ll read and think, “that motherfucker…. let me get my purse.”

That is a direct quote from her regarding the last man that tried to hurt me. Now, I’m sure that I’m the one with the big purse headed towards me. I just wish there was something I could do to change the arc.

In short, this sucks.

I hate our situation and am desperate to improve it, but there’s nothing I can do. My heart hurts and the only solution for that is Ben & Jerry’s.

And time spent screaming into the void.

Learning to Manage

I wrote last night that I was learning to manage without Aada in my life, but this morning I have a different take. When she’s not in contact with me, I try to do everything I can to distract myself from the fact that she’s not coming back. That all the dreams I had for working together are dead. I’d sent her an e-mail last week, imploring her not to be embarrassed about lying, because my friend Michael had posited that she was, and that was the reason she was staying away. I wanted her to know I didn’t care. I just wanted my friend back. I then went back to avoiding thinking about her at all, and forgot I’d sent anything.

So yesterday, when I actually did get correspondence from Aada, my adrenaline, dopamine, and cortisol went sky high. As I mentioned, it was not pleasant, and “ripped me a new asshole.”

Technically, she ripped me a brand new two bedroom, two bathroom double wide asshole, as from the movie “Bernie.”

I was up most of the night after two sleeping pills because I just could not quiet my mind. I kept rereading her anger and wanting to quiet it, knowing nothing will do that but time. I have learned over the years that it’s better not to fight fire with fire, so my response was as meek as I get. I also don’t think she’ll get it, because the last line of her e-mail was that she was going to block me… but she’ll read it here:

You may have blocked me already, but I only have two things to say. The first is that I didn’t lie to you. I deleted everything in my Gmail account and then found the one from January in my Hotmail account months later. Not the same thing. The second is that you missed the point about [my friend] Michael. He told me he thought you were avoiding me because you were embarrassed, and I was trying to tell you not to be.

That is all. I wish you all the love and peace in the world, and I wish I could be part of it. But I know I’m sick, and I’m trying to get well. I wanted you to be a part of the wellness, but I’m not sure you’d ever be open to it. 

I’ll still be writing for myself about my own thoughts and feelings whether you’re there to read them or not. That’s how it’s always been, that’s how it’ll always be. You’ve been the center of my world for the past 12 years and I’m supposed to get over it and forget it in a few months?

No.

I am sorry for all the hurt that I’ve caused, and I am trying to work forwards without you. It’s not going so well, to be honest. Even seeing that I got an e-mail from you nine hours ago made my heart beat too fast because I thought, “she’ll never get this one. I’ll be too late.”

I don’t know how to talk to you anymore, but I won’t stop blogging. I don’t have another life to write about instead. This is the only one I’ve got.

If you thought I lied about anything in January, you could have told me that then. I would have listened.

I don’t set out to irritate you, I just do.

I don’t know what else to say.

I stared at the ceiling until sleep finally overtook me around 3:00 AM.

She called me out on saying that I deleted all my e-mails from her. She called me out on betraying her confidence. She called me out on everything I’ve ever done, and I deserved it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get the right to feel. She isolated me from every one of my other friends with her schtick and wouldn’t accept me into her life with full faith and credit. So, I couldn’t get close to her, and I couldn’t get close to anyone else. I thought I was doing the right thing by confiding in someone else who was also IC, because I needed an objective ear. He just happened to put together more than I actually said because he already knew the building blocks.

I don’t think Aada ever took in how damaging her isolation was to me, and still doesn’t. She said she had no interest in being friends with me because I talked to Michael about her, and that’s fine. Michael and I actually have a healthy relationship in which he doesn’t require me to be secretive, isolating to the point where I have no other friends. It was this kind of shit fit that led to my divorce as well. “Don’t talk to me, and don’t talk to anyone else, either.”

She feels that she’s not responsible for my divorce in any way, that it was all my decision. But what choice did I have, really? I couldn’t compartmentalize, therefore I couldn’t keep secrets from my wife. I also couldn’t separate from Aada because the damage had already been done. I was trauma bonded to her on multiple levels, one that I felt go off last night, sending my brain chemicals into such overdrive that enough sleeping medication to down a baby elephant didn’t help.

I am tired of the narrative that I manipulate our relationship when she is guilty of doing the same. I cannot attach to other people in the same way I used to because according to her, I shouldn’t talk about our relationship at all. So while she’s off in her own little world, I have to cope with it. Talking with my wife always helped, because we’d pray about it together… until Aada hit the roof that I’d even said anything. In the church, my life has always been about care, connection, and community. I did not know how to section off a rope so my Members Only jacket was secure.

The Members Only jacket was a straight trip to a straitjacket instead.

I have spun out many times over the years, wanting her love and affection because I wasn’t getting it anywhere else. Recently, she told me I could say whatever I wanted…. and that turned out to be a false flag. Last night she berated me for my blog entries as if she’d never said that.

I cannot predict other people’s reactions to my writing, I can only go off what they say in advance. And to be fair, no one likes being written about all the time. I am free to say whatever I want as long as I glow about her, but saying anything negative is off limits. It’s not fair to me as a writer, because everyone in my life is 3D. There are going to be times when I’m happy and not, because I have the full range of emotions as a human being.

Learning to manage without Aada is trying to find the truth in all the years we wrote to each other while making room for new people. I don’t have enough life experience to move on yet, because talking about my last 12 years invariably involves all the time I spent writing to this one person. I’m trying to curate new experiences, like bumming around Baltimore with my sister, but not enough time has passed for me to change my writing altogether. It’s a conundrum, and one I won’t know how to solve with anything but time.

My cognitive behavioral health group helps, because I’m slowly making friends there. I even found two guys who go to my gym (though I haven’t run into them there). Walking seems to help, because the longer my endorphins stay high, the easier it is to feel like I’m walking away from my old life and into something new. Aada’s e-mail was just the high of seeing her name in my inbox and the aftermath of realizing she was not going to be kind.

She deserved her pound of flesh and I won’t take it away from her, but no one ever wants to be read the riot act. It was just more shaming into isolation. It feels as if I should have been happy only having one pen pal the rest of my life, a relationship so massive that it prevented me from seeing other people… yet not. Because I’m free to have a relationship with anyone I choose if I gain the ability to cut off a limb, or so it seems to me.

It’s not realistic, and I know that she does not give me the same courtesy. She can’t, because I’m a public figure… in moderation, of course. I choose to live my life out loud here, the thing she loved so much about me when we met. She took a butterfly and slowly cut off its wings.

I am not the only manipulative person in our relationship. But again, if that’s what her therapist thinks, then more power to them. They don’t know me, have never interviewed me, so what could they really know from one side of the story that may or may not be accurate? My guess is that it isn’t, because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve written Aada e-mail in which she completely missed the point I was trying to make and skewed it into something else. If she’s only taking what she reads into our relationship to her therapist, then of course the therapist doesn’t know shit from Shinola.â„¢

Again, there are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the truth.

It’s Aada’s therapist’s job to be on her side, and I support that. But to use that as “evidence” that one person is entirely wrong in a relationship when they’ve never met them is ludicrous.

I do know that I’ve done wrong, but I don’t think I’m the only one that has done wrong. Having someone lump all that on my head is just cruel. It makes it where I can’t sleep at night.

I’m learning to manage, but I cannot say it’s going well.

This Blog Is Not For You

Dear Aada,

My writing is not to provoke or upset you. It never has been, and it never will be. My audience reaches into the thousands on a daily basis and millions over 25 years. There are people who read that don’t know who you are, just like you didn’t know the cast of characters when you started reading, either. What drew you in then draws them in now. It’s a peek into my life, just as it is. To think that I single you out and write only to provoke you is to ignore that I show my readers what it’s like to live in my head. You aren’t thinking about my audience when I never stop. Do you really think that you are my only reader? My blog is a treasure trove of memories… not always good ones.

It’s not always the portrayal of a healthy mind, because so much of my writing has to do with being mentally ill, and definitely showing the symptoms of it. I know I’m sick, and I know it will take a hell of a lot for me to be well. At no point do I think of it as manipulating you or our friendship, because I’m not even aware when you read unless you tell me so.

You said that people in your personal and professional life are reaching out to you to see if you’re okay. I wonder if they know how many people reach out to me to see if I’m okay after I’ve written?

The answer is “zero.”

Being a writer is a lonely life, and I chose it.

It was less lonely when I could write to you, and now I’m stumbling around in the dark all by myself. Mistakes are being made because our easy give and take is no more. I do not know what I am going to write that hurts you, because until today, I did not know that I could do so…. you told me that there was nothing I could say that would hurt you long ago.

I wish I could put a moratorium on writing about you, but you’ve been the absolute center of my world for the last 12 years. I’m not going to forget about it in a few months. That’s not true to who I am, because I don’t move on quickly or easily.

I did not have joy in busting you in a lie. I was angry. Truth pain burned inside me. I did not laugh the way you said I did, I was in full-on autistic meltdown…. and then I burned out. I haven’t left my house in months except on the days when someone comes to pick me up.

I’m in a group called Cognitive Behavioral Health, where we talk about healthy coping mechanisms. I have found that I am not the only manipulative person in our relationship because as I’ve learned more about the way I work, I’ve learned more about how you do, too. Neither one of us are spectacular friends to the other, quite frankly. But if your therapist really believes that I’m the only manipulative one, then so be it. Nothing I can do about that. I do know that if I was with you and said therapist, they would tell us we’re both wrong.

There are three sides to every story- yours, mine, and the truth.

Just like there’s nothing you can do to take back your lie, there’s nothing I can do to take back my betrayal. What I can do is move forward, knowing that I was wrong and having to carry it with me. The burden is extremely heavy and my chest is tight. At first, I could not breathe. Today was the first day in months where I reached out to people I hadn’t talked to in a long time and asked for a phone call. I took a break from thinking about you only to find out that the one time I’d been away from my computer, I actually did get an e-mail from you.

It ripped me a new asshole, and still I was happy to hear from you at all. There’s a lot I want to address, but I won’t. Now that I know you weren’t exactly telling the truth, that I could indeed hurt you professionally, I think it’s best if I don’t say anything. I’m just writing this here because you said you read my blog, but blocked my e-mail (explain that one like I’m five…. wait, you don’t have to. You either love my blog, or you love me. That seems to be the general consensus in my life. Did I mention writing is a lonely life?).

It is late and I am ending my day humbled, because even though the e-mail didn’t say what I’d hoped, I did get an e-mail from my favorite person. And that’s the bitch of it, really. You ranted at me with questions I couldn’t answer because the last line was that you were going to block me, not willing to even wait for a reply no matter what it was.

There’s only six words I really need to say:

I am sorry.

I love you.

That’s it. That’s all I really can say after what I’ve put you through. I do not like my life without you in it, but I am learning to manage.

Leslie

Why Does It All Still Hurt?

Here’s a letter to Aada from January that I think is relevant now. I am still in this much pain, all the time. Nothing has changed, except that she lied about knowing Jonna and Tony Mendez and her profession. She was never a member of the intelligence community, she was a fraud who wanted to wind me up over the internet. It worked, to the point that I’m afraid to go to the spy museum anymore. I want to run into Jonna even less than I want to run into Aada.


It’s been a month, no recurrence of any dreams. I was just upset to the point of nausea and I always will be. No response is ever necessary, because I have created my own closure and moved on. But what I want you to know is that it was all real. All the love, all the tears, all the emotional dysregulation in which I gave in to emotions at either end of the spectrum.

I never want you to feel like you’re cheating on Michael when you’re talking to me, and I felt dirty for talking to you when I’d had a dream like that because it wouldn’t be fair to you to reopen that wound. But I hope you’ll hear that I told you 11 years ago it would come up again, and that it wasn’t an overarching problem. That I would deal with it as it came up, on my own. I have these intense feelings for you both because of who you are, who you have always been to me, and the edge on which I love to ride in terms of high on life.

Loving intelligence is my only vice these days, but I had to step back and reassess when I couldn’t make it through Jimmy Carter’s funeral without falling apart and thinking of Tony and how I hoped he was there to receive him…. you have to call in a Moses….

I will probably never finish “In True Face.” It’s too painful now, because I know more than one character. I’ve read “The Moscow Rules” and saw you skulking around Georgetown. I felt like I’d been stabbed, because all my feelings about our loss of possibility spilled onto the floor…. yet another time in which we’d become too volatile for words.

I know that’s what we both wanted to stop. I was trying to explain autistic red mist rage, PTSD, mental illness, everything from my point of view and how I saw you as a mirror to me, a broken child who needed to take refuge in a system. When it failed to be the UMC, I skulked into the shadows….

That’s where I found you, and want to live with you in the cloud as I have always said. But I think there were a lot of misconceptions that made me full of rage where you would berate me for my actions without taking responsibility for what triggered them. That I was wholly affected by your silence when we could have written something together that actually would have reflected both of us instead of just “Leslie’s Memory Trove That May or May Not Be Accurate.” Do you think that I wanted my story to be inaccurate? No. I wanted it to be as our relationship was- painful, honest, real.

I just cannot have that if you are not comfortable with me being in love with you once every 11 or 12 years. Whatever. It’s my bag, and I realized it will never go away. But what I can do is not think about it, not bring it up, not ever hint that I feel this way because you never said things shouldn’t go back to normal. You just let me trigger you until you couldn’t stand it so that my anxiety went through the roof. What would it have looked like if you corrected me in the moment rather than popping off and reaming me out for everything I said in jest? Why were you so fucking pissed that I was impressed with both who you are in real life and who you are in mine?

Why are you so fucking pissed when I treat you like a princess AND when I fuck up? How do I do anything right?

How do I get you to see that your reaction to me saying Aino was AuDHD was ableist BULLSHIT because you treated AuDHD like some sort of mental retardation, thus offending ME? Again, if you’re going to be offended by something, be offended by the fact that she’s probably smarter than you….. except she’s not because you have the pattern recognition of an autist as well. You just cannot predict autistic people because you’re social masking. You know what a neurotypical person is about to do, which is why you’ve been treating me the way you’ve been treating me for 11 years.

I wasn’t some stupid jackass fuckboi. I was charmed. Just head over heels. It was never supposed to happen and all of those feelings were above my pay grade. It cost me everything, but it was worth it. I am no longer the smartest stoner dumbass in my group of friends, but a fresh writer with a voice.

That’s because you taught me not to take any shit, even from you.

Fuckbois don’t learn anything. They just keep trying. I have been up front with you every day on where my emotions are, and they’re not rational because *emotions* aren’t rational. Logically, I can see every point you make. But there’s no emotion behind it. There was more emotion in your writing when you were mad at me than at any time in our relationship. That only lets me know one thing. You are comfortable with anger and avoid joy.

I will never get over “no one needs your help,” so I’m hoping to partner with Street to Kitchen and World Central Kitchen to bring a homeless ministry to West Baltimore that does pop-ups with famous chefs to make sure that homeless people get better meals than they could ever afford on their own. Our tagline is “dinner with dignity.” We’re working on shirts for the kitchen that say “No tattoos, no earrings, no profanity, no service.”

I am not a narcissist, Aada. I process empathy differently and so do you. We both have terrible gaps in our memories and everything that comes with all we’ve been through. I have always wanted to stop fighting you and start hugging you, but I have never known how. It has been like trying to hug a cactus on both sides….. because our dance of intimacy is so finely tuned. We have a close moment, wig out, and separate. Where is the balance we had in the beginning where we could both laugh?

Why did it become so defensive all the time as if I was out to get you, when the truth is that if things had been different I never would have let you go? That does not mean that I am bitter and angry and don’t accept you for who you are. That means your pattern recognition is off by a large margin. I have never wanted to hurt you. I have always been autistic and off my rocker, incapable of emotionally regulating myself and you incapable of emotionally regulating me in turn. You’re right- not your responsibility, but something that would have made our relationship instantly better…. a different sensory experience of each other than our writing personalities. We’re both professors when we want to be, because I listened to five beautiful pages about you and your sister’s relationship in which you analyzed her perfectly. You analyze my family perfectly. When I do it, it’s rude, offensive, and “why do you even think you know me?” Maybe because I’ve spent time with you every day for 11 years.

Time is relative. You visit me in the quiet. We talk it out. I try to understand you better even though I feel it’s all over. I won’t move forward without understanding why we fell apart, and now I know that. I wanted a secure connection, you wanted anxious/avoidant and not to change it. I won’t live that way, because it’s not a goal that you’re working towards. It’s a goal that you said you would, but I’m not worthy anymore because one thing wasn’t clear to you. I did not push you away forever. I pushed you away for asking a simple question and getting defense back, with you having no recognition that it had been 11 years’ worth of you not sharing anything and me trying to come up with things to talk about. You acted as if you had no agency to change anything, and we floundered.

But you know who I am. I’m that person you rescued and yet also hate my guts because I didn’t handle it well. How was I supposed to handle it? Like you. Except I’m your mirror opposite, the thing you were attracted to about me in the beginning- just energy. I’m not saying you have ever had feelings for me in any way. You are logic. I am emotion. The Twain don’t meet on that one.

Maybe we’ll never fix this, but learning I’m autistic has given me new ways to cope, but I assure you that I thought I was being kind. You coming across as STEM autistic and lacking in emotions once you stopped social masking was a clue to me that you weren’t a narcissist, either.

You used your power, Aada. You scared the hell out of me in a way I could never scare you. And then you expected me to pick up the pieces from that level fear all by myself. I spent years scared of you, unable to get over it and jumping up and down to make things better, horrified that I was just digging the hole deeper because you thought it was intrusive and I was trying my best.

I didn’t know what to do, because I’d managed to piss off someone I loved due to my own bad behavior and I’d never done anything like that before or since. I know myself better, can deal with myself better, can retreat when I feel any kind of blush. It’s not fair and it never has been, but I feel like in the beginning you didn’t care and now you do. Valid. But you didn’t send a memo so that my memory banks could be updated. You just expected I would know. I cannot pick up social cues in person. What makes you think it’s easier over the Internet?

I still stare at your pictures trying to get the sense of you that I missed. Everything you were trying to tell me and couldn’t.

I was trapped in the cycle of “don’t bother Aada because there’s nothing in your life that can compete” and “you’re her friend, too.” Except it’s been years since I really felt like that, because nothing has ever gone back to open communication.

You won’t share yourself with me, and you don’t trust me. What relationship is there to save? We would have to start completely over and there’s no way to do that. I feel like your dirty little secret and I always will. That’s because you don’t tell me how much you talk about me as if I’m a real person in your life. I had to guess that, too.

I also think that I had a right to be scared that you weren’t my friend. You were keeping your enemies closer. That it wasn’t genuine anymore, you just wanted to watch and be assured I wasn’t going off the rails. You could have done that a lot easier in person than you could as a disembodied voice.

You just kept telling me that my narrative was tired. Well, if you’re tired, imagine how tired I am bringing up the same problems all the time and they’re never fixed? It’s like talking to a brick wall, and I’m sure you’d say the same to me. You accept your feelings as valid, but won’t say “I hear you, see you, understand.” When did that become the norm?

I was never trying to diagnose you. I was trying to see you, hear you, understand. That’s what someone who loves you does, and I have been resolute that the blushing teenage feelings are never what mattered. It was all the ways we were able to come through for each other without it.

I don’t know why I’m even writing this except to say that you’ve created tapes in my head that will never go away, and I choose to talk about them while you keep yours hidden. Therefore, you’re always enraged and I’m always clueless. Keeping me clueless makes you angrier, but of course that’s all my fault. It couldn’t be that you purposefully left me with no information.

Our relationship is a tapestry, some of it beautiful, some of it terrible. I think that’s why I keep coming back. The benefits outweigh all the negative. But I stay away from you in order not to hurt you. I don’t want to add to your stress and I am done letting you interrupt my peace. I am happy to be the villain in your story if that’s what you need, but I have never been that. You made me that and admitted to it.

You’re afraid of me or something, and I cannot fix it. So I shrink away. I cannot care. I cannot love you because it only drives me mad without feedback. I don’t need to be driven mad as it’s a short trip.

You make my brain better when you don’t crash my dopamine and adrenaline with defense and anger. I am not saying I’ve never done the same to you. But the way I feel is that I tell my story, you don’t tell yours, and then get angry at the result.

When you knew I was a writer, you were my first fan, and then I wasn’t worth helping anymore. I could just sit in my fear and anguish while you were in actual danger because stop lying. I know you have to, but you’re too senior for every trip to be a pleasure cruise.

You wanted to ride off into the sunset. I wanted to give you a biography without telling people who you were, because in the end, you gave me all the important things. USG just gets you at work, and you’re so much more than that. My adoration is real and it’s deep- it has nothing to do with the trauma bond that makes me itch occasionally. I just cannot pretend it’s not real if it came up 11 years later in a dream. Dream analysis says it’s just “I miss you,” and that’s true. So I’m taking that part seriously and ignoring the rest.

My brain is a land mine. I didn’t mean to get my crazy spatter all over you. I was also panicking. I was also scared. We are equally yoked despite not being married because our problems are bigger than that. Or, I think of them that way. Maybe it’s not true, and you’re perfectly happy without controlling what I say. But I always think you want to and can’t, and that’s part of your frustration. That you won’t collaborate, you’ll just let me twist in the wind.

There’s no statute of limitations on guilt, as you said of our mutual friend many years ago, but I hope that one day we will actually have a conversation about what exactly went down and how much you cost me. What you have never taken in is that I was so glad to do it. The problem was not what you told me. It was hyping up my adrenaline that much and then saying that you weren’t going to talk about anything anymore, so I just had to sit there and guess.

You didn’t give me anything to work with, so I talked about myself and what I wished for you in the spirit of you getting healthy. But that was all taken as something negative and not I love you and want to help you.

I got tired of everything being an attack, because I was so fluid in my emotions and you had one tool- a hammer….. except in the few instances where you actually wanted to go to bat for me and that drove me crazy as well. Like, are you in or are you out?

I never decided violence was the way to your heart. You decided that we would work on fear and intimidation and I’ve never gotten over it. Then, you glossed over that part of my life and just showed up with an “I’m concerned about your family.” I cannot expect you to remember anything about any of this because it’s been so long. They’re just the moments that affected me more than they affected you (or that is my perception).

I am not who you think I am, and that is why I need separation. You will not allow yourself to see me as three dimensional character. You treat me as a “Flat Stanley” and make yourself one because you won’t give me room to grow and you won’t grow in your letters, either.

But the way to your heart is food, good hugs, and more food.

I at least know that.

If you write back, I will respond. Otherwise, goodbye and thank you. It wasn’t always fun. It was real.

How to Be New

The question on my mind is “how do I become new again after reliving my sins every day for 12 years?” Again, I hid out because I thought I deserved it. Aada didn’t punish me. I punished myself. Yet, you’re always meaner to yourself than a judge would be, so I thought that not leaving my house was the best answer ever. What did I do that was so bad?

I took my line cook mouth out of its context and put it in front of a white collar government employee who didn’t need my bullshit. I came off as an asshole at first and couldn’t forgive myself. I kept trying to change, but my ADHD and autism prevented me from picking up social cues that I should have. I couldn’t actually see because I was working blind. I hadn’t met this person on the ground, so I thought my lines were just lines… easily forgettable and throwaway. I learned that they were not years later, when I made a joke that was along the same lines but not nearly as raunchy, and she said that I triggered her.

Note taken, and I have never said anything like that again. Because what I know for sure are two things. The first is that I don’t get to decide how long she’s hurt. The second is that I had to do a monster amount of work so that joke didn’t trigger me. That’s because to me, comedy equals tragedy plus time. The joke allowed me to save face, because what I’d done made me feel like an asshole every day and that I would never deserve anything better than being by myself.

I won’t repeat it here, because I don’t know that she’s not reading and I actually am sensitive to her feelings, despite what she may think. The point is not that she should have taken it in stride because I’ve worked on myself. The point is that I felt awful because she didn’t say “I cannot joke about this, ever.” I would have respected that boundary if I’d known it was there…. I assumed that after a number of years, she’d be okay. She assumed that I already knew I’d start a fight if I made those jokes. Neither one of us communicated.

That’s how I want to be a better person in the future- really listening to people when they talk. I would argue that the drift between Aada and me started when I stopped giving a fuck about other people’s feelings; they didn’t communicate them. I am not a mind reader, nor do I want to be. I am not insensitive nor am I trying to hurt anyone in conversations. I have a problem when I am expected to pick up a social cue that isn’t there, then berated later because I tripped over it. This problem is not limited to the Internet, it just happens more there because I have more cues to go on in person, like the way a person looks at me. People think that I am insensitive and lack empathy when it takes an enormous amount of guessing on my part to figure out how people think and feel. I am often wrong.

Neurotypical life is full of cues that neurodivergent people just do not pick up, so my tagline might as well be “mean” when in reality, I am trying to let all people speak for themselves. I don’t want to be in the same place in a year that I am now, and I won’t be. I have beat myself up every day for 12 years over a relationship that was never real in the first place because I marked myself as “bad.”

I didn’t say to myself, “this is a bad thing you have done and you must recover from it.” I said, “you are a bad person and you don’t deserve anything good.” I am convinced that I was never a value-add to Aada’s life because that’s how she treated me most days. She said that my words were pricks on her skin because no one else in her life called her out on anything (to my understanding, anyway). When she didn’t want to talk about something, I only heard it when she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” That’s because I do not pick up the social cue of changing the subject. I change the subject and circle back around.

For instance, today my dad called me about money and I asked him about macaroni.

We talked about money, but we also talked about macaroni. I was in the grocery store. The circumstances of the talk were pursuant to the circumstances of where we both stood. He needed to talk to me about money. I needed help because I get decision fatigue in the grocery store. He needed to know how I report income. I needed to know which pasta shape he usually uses for a classic mac and cheese recipe. I hope that when I write down my hopes and dreams he knows how small they truly are, because I know how much I have in my account right this minute and I cannot count on anything more or less. My mother is helping me live right now, because my care team does not think I am capable of a job yet. I make money from Medium, but so far I’ve earned $12 this month… which is not nothing (thank you, fans). Mostly, it’s my mom.

That makes me think of Sam, who I told that “one day I’d be an author, living off an inheritance” and wanted her to come along. That’s because my mother had died, but I hadn’t gotten the money yet. We could have done a lot of things for us and the kids with it, and I’m bummed the relationship didn’t work out. What I know for sure is that it was idealistic thinking in those days because her biggest problem was that I didn’t drive and she couldn’t handle it.

She thought of herself as the mom taxi and I thought of myself as having the Uber app on my phone and access to multiple trains to get to her. The dreams I had for us were not pie in the sky, they’re true now. And yet, because I was “such a dreamer,” she’s moved on and I’ve lost something I can’t get back.

But the car thing was so ridiculous that I can’t get past it. I don’t drive because my reflexes are different than other people’s. Not only do I have cerebral palsy, I don’t have 3D vision and stuff comes out of nowhere. I might be able to make it safely to my destination, I might not. But instead of thinking about me and my issues, it was all about her and how she’d have to come get me.

I am not a child, but I do live my life differently on purpose. I’ve been a spoonie my whole life, and it’s only now that I’m dealing with it because I was streamlined as a child and didn’t know I needed help. I can think of so many instances that mark me as strange, but I’m saving all of those for my autism evaluation. What I can tell you is that I have always gravitated toward autistic people in terms of friendship, not knowing why.

The why is that we’ve only recently discovered how different autism looks in women. I’m nonbinary or NB or “enby.” That does not erase being born female at birth. The reason I present as enby now is twofold. The first is that I didn’t have a word for it. Gen Z coined the term. The second is that I am female though social masking, and it is alarming how many of them I lost when my mother died.

There was no one to reinforce them. I’m much more like my dad and brother-in-law and always have been, it was just hard to tell under years and years of being told what was appropriate for a woman and what wasn’t…. and her punishments for not living up to them were severe.

I am trying to get my life together in a way that is tightly controlled so that when other people hear me say that I live off a trust or have SSI/SSDI, they don’t infantilize me. This is unavoidable, but I can limit the damage by being an adult on the internet and making room for nuance. There are plenty of spoonies out there who don’t have a voice. I can be one of them even though I am flawed. I don’t know anyone who isn’t, even when I think my own sins are worse than everyone else’s.

There are multiple parts to infantilization, and here’s the biggest one:

I don’t control access to my money because I wanted it that way. I’m protected legally from being sued, because I took Aada’s threat seriously as a new path forward. You can have what I have on me, but you cannot sue my mother. Please enjoy your hundred bucks and maybe a free frozen yogurt coupon (if I have one). I may have to call a family member or my accountant to cover something, but that’s my own issue. No one needs to cover for me.

They just don’t talk about it. They assume everything, that they’re on the hook. It particularly affects my dating life when people see that I do not work in the traditional sense, that it’s great I have this little blog and everything. I was touched when Aada told me that she thought I was “this world famous blogger.” I hope that other people eventually see me in that light because nothing would make me happier than to make a real living off the writing I’ve done every day for 25 years (I do not publish every day, but I sit down at the keyboard without fail almost as soon as my eyes open). No blogger is actually world famous unless they’re gossip columnists. I write about my own life, and the people around me invariably get dragged into the fray because I cannot make up the situations in which I find myself. So, the people around me have to be a different breed of strong as well. If you are in my orbit, chances are you are utterly unimpressed with my writing because the kind of adoration I got from Aada messed me up. Someone who lovebombs an unknown writer by calling them “world famous” when they’ve never heard it before is going to feel some type of way.

I use the term lovebomb to indicate that it was over the top, but she never discarded me. Her lovebombing was real and genuine. I just cannot think of a real-life term that would cover the amount of adoration I received. I liked it a little too much, and now cannot stand anyone being in my inner circle that thinks I’m the bees knees. I need them to know that I’m just a regular person with both special abilities and disabilities alike. Aada put it best: “Give me a brain that outraces my body by a billion exponential degrees. The irony. The gods do find a way to humble us don’t they?” I’d been spending my life trying to keep up with everyone else, not knowing that in a lot of ways, I was so much further ahead.

But this is new and different for me. I needed people to help me and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t- they saw me as a normal person who was mooching off them. That social masking made me appear normal because I was using all of my energy to go outside, and there wasn’t anything left after that.

I know more about myself, and I’m willing to talk about it. I’m willing to admit that I’m the flawed one, but I’m getting better quickly with the right meds and daily exercise. I cannot even get to the gym without exercising a little, so I am starting autistic inertia early by leaving the house around 0700 on weekends and earlier on weekdays because my hours fluctuate during the week. I wake up anywhere between 0400 and 0600. Instead of starting to write right away, I’m going to change it up to working out first so that my endorphins are fully charged. Not feeling good about myself affects my writing to an enormous degree, as does focusing on me rather than the outside world.

For instance, I think that people think nothing is happening with Lanagan Media Group, when we’ve just gone quiet. If I bring something to everyone, it’s got to be more fully formed than it is right now. It does not mean that we’ve stopped working. It means that not everyone is entitled to know what we’re working on until it’s ready to have feedback and criticism. For instance, Evan and I really need to get started on the neurodivergent cookbook, and not because something like it doesn’t already exist. It’s that we both have brains that outrace our bodies by a million miles and it would be a fun project to work on with someone I adore. But the only thing we have so far is an outline and a promise to get together in either Baltimore or Oakland.

Evan keeps saying that he wants to come here so that we can go all over the place on the trains.

Because we’re AuDHD, we love the trains.

That being said, Evan has more health issues than I do and it’s hard for him to travel. There are lots of days where he’s just off the grid and so am I… neither of us has the energy to talk to anyone. I’m thinking that we need to start doing more Zoom calls and collaborative documents to get this book done, because our original thinking is that collaboration is best done in person. But perhaps spoonies must adjust because the energy it takes to fly across the country means several days of rest in either direction. The good part of this is that both of us have guest rooms. If Evan needs to sleep for a couple of days before he’s ready to work, he has the time and space to spread out. If I’m wiped at his house, so do I.

The blessing and the curse of being an AuDHD writer is that it takes so many words to get people to understand your disability and you have them if people will take the time to read. Our society is changing from long form articles to soundbites overall, and most people on the spectrum cannot function that way. There’s no emotional shorthand to communication with us, even amongst ourselves.

There are no shortcuts for people who are both on the spectrum, because autism is marked by an iron structure that we choose. One person’s does not match another’s, and it is foolish to go into any relationship thinking that just because both people are neurodivergent, that means we’re naturally going to communicate easier with each other.

It’s a learning process I’ve had to undergo, because my iron structure was given to me by my mother. Michael says I sound like an abused wife excusing all of Aada’s behavior towards me, but I don’t think I do. I think I messed up big time, and her iron structure does not allow her to forgive me because she’s frightened of what will happen in the future. That just has to be okay. She is of no consequence to me now, but I do have great memories that I would like to keep alive. You always remember your first fan, and I’m sorry I didn’t handle it well.

Our history with each other predated me because she was real-life friends with my ex. I slowly isolated her into being my Internet friend, but it wasn’t on purpose. She slowly isolated me into being her Internet friend, too, it just wasn’t based on romance. We were tied through a deep bond no one else shared, and she did not recognize that the burden was more difficult on me than I could say…. or can even imagine how to write about now.

Because as it turns out, her iron structure was full of lies as well. She needed me to believe that she was special, and I did. I loved her as a mother, a sister, a daughter… I did not need to believe that she was also a full-time superhero complete with cape and tights. But she thought I did, because I was a “world-famous blogger.” In the beginning is the end is the beginning. She’s too embarrassed to put on her big girl pants and face me now, or at least, that’s what Michael said. Whether that is true or not, I will never know. Because Michael and Aada do not know each other, they just have very educated guesses on who the other is based on my blog alone. It means something to me that what I say matters, but not like this.

Michael also works for the government, and reminds me so much of Aada’s patois that it’s hard to believe government wonks are actually different people. 😉 He has taken a rain check on his next trip to Washington for coffee or a drink when he has time, because his last trip was too busy for me to take the train.

It was funny… “I am not coming to Baltimore.” “Trains exist, Michael…. I told my sister the same thing.”

I have to remind people in Washington that trains exist a lot, because I don’t need them to come and rescue me. But in this case, Michael kind of did. He saw what was going on with Aada and me and put a stop to it, because we were both hurting each other. Now, no one cares if our relationship is dead or enmeshed…. it’s only Aada’s pride that’s hurt. But she has proven to me over and over that her pride means more to her than I do. The whole fight was because she wouldn’t show up for me the way I showed up for her every day.

She will say that I betrayed her, that I didn’t want a relationship with her. That if I did, I would have kept my mouth shut on a whole bunch of topics. I would say that I specifically had to find someone I could talk to inside the system and it just so happened that our relationship was toxic. Not “she was toxic and I was perfect.” The relationship was toxic because neither of us had great childhoods and were constantly manipulating each other when we got angry.

I would have liked to fix all of that moving forward, sitting down with a third party. Being alone in a chat room for so many years allowed us both a skewed view into each other’s lives. It was a relationship full of fun house mirrors, the distortion making beautiful reflections at times and horrifying at others. The one thing we couldn’t do was stay away from each other. I believe I have accidentally fixed that, but to say it’s what I wanted is a huge stretch. I wanted to be in a relationship where we could both rely on each other to have healthy responses to conflict, and our last conflict was a huge one in which she admitted to me that she lied.

Truth pain burned inside me.

That’s because she didn’t lie to me once. She started lying to me in 2013 and just a few months ago came clean. I was so angry that I said I didn’t care what she did now because her lies made me feel unsafe with her, something I regret. I wish I’d made her feel loved and wanted because her instant reply was “I will step away.” But I couldn’t control my reactions in the immediate aftermath of being told that she lied. Or maybe on some level I knew it was time to move on. I cannot say what I was thinking in that moment, only that I also told her that next steps were very much on her to figure out and not one part of her said, “I will find a way to make it up to you if you will find a way to forgive me.”

I wanted her to be new, too, but as it turns out only I was ready.