I’m Still Figuring That Out

May 26, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What are you good at?

I treated myself to new-to-me running shoes today, because my old ones were bought in 2015. I do not know what happened to them, because they’re still perfectly comfortable. However, the rubber is starting to fall off and the tread feels like it has been dipped in chemicals so that they do not grip. Instead of being able to walk/run, I tend to slide around when I’m wearing them, particularly at the gym because everything is tiled. When I changed into them, I could tell an immediate difference because the floor at the store was polished concrete and I was able to jog in place without slipping.

I suppose that I am good at shopping, because a parishioner at one of our churches when I was a kid gave me a black belt in Goodwill. I have bought everything there, including important occasion outfits, just because I know my brands. That’s the secret to being really good at shopping, in my humble opinion. Even if I struck it rich, I would still rather have a $3-500 suit that’s been laundered a thousand times to make sure it’s soft than something brand new off the rack. My best find was in the early aughts, a full London Fog trench with liner for $24.

I also don’t mind not having the latest style of anything, because my clothes could best be described as the “Visiting Professor’s Collection” at Macy’s. Anything I buy is going to look timeless, because my shirts tend to come in three colors:

White
Blue
White and Blue pinstripes

However, I also like a bit of whimsy. These shoes remind me of Warhol and Lichtenstein, so I think they’ll look perfect with jeans and a button down. I am going to calm down the orange laces a bit by changing to UpUGo elastic laces. They’re not quite as bright, and I don’t have to tie them. I’m certain they’re mostly for children, but I wear boys’ shoes, anyway. Plus, who doesn’t love shoes with a cute little button on top?

I suppose I am good at writing, although writing is like courage. In the moment, you’re just doing what it is you need to do to survive. You don’t realize until afterwards that you’ve been courageous. I do not think I am a good writer. I put things out into the world and other people tell me if I’m a good writer or not. My therapist said that I must know I’m a good writer…. I did not know what to say to that. I’m glad she thinks that, mostly, because she’s more learned than I am. I have learned that I do not want to be an egomaniac, I just want to have confidence. I know that’s what she was talking about, but even telling people I think I’m a good writer sounds arrogant to me, so I don’t.

I do think that I could do a good job handling communications for modern executives, though, because most people do not know how to write introductory e-mails for basic correspondence. I was actually talking to my sister about this the other day, that the secretary she would have been given in the 1950’s would have handled the heavy lifting that AI is trying to do currently. First of all, it is unlikely that a woman would have had her job in the 1950s, but I definitely could have been the Peggy Olson to her Don Draper if given the chance.

I might be happy as a church employee of some kind, because that’s the type correspondence I can manage easily. I was reminded of this today when my sister asked my dad if he’d had a mobile phone in the early 1990s and I replied how I used to answer it. In the car, it was “Rev. Lanagan’s rolling office!” At home, it was “Lanagan summer home… summer home, summer not.” One of the parishioners had some alternatives to this which are really, really funny…. and also unprintable.

I have a good memory because they’re not really memories. An autist sees everything, everywhere, all at once as if no time has passed. This is both good and bad as I also have no friendship degradation mechanics. That’s a psychological term for calling up your best friend in third grade as if they’re still in the same place you are. If they are also neurodivergent, like as not, they are. If they are neurotypical, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

I am not good at reading a room, and that has served me well in some cases. Please believe that I have crashed and burned in others, but sometimes not reading a room correctly takes away the fear one feels in an unfamiliar situation and allows me to talk to people I never would have otherwise. For instance, I wasn’t approaching Jonna Mendez, chief of disguise and better than a mere mortal. I was approaching an old friend of Aada’s. Now that I know Aada lied and there’s no connection between them, I fear Jonna like the goddess she is.

That’s probably not healthy, but it is what it is.

Realistically, I know that Jonna puts on her running shoes one foot at a time just like me. But in my head she has attained a mythical status. I got all my books signed when I went to see her, so I have no need to bug her again. It’s probably just embarrassment on my part and she wouldn’t think twice.

But in my head, what if it’s not?

What if I’ve embarrassed myself to the point where I’m no longer wanted? I’d rather just keep my memories sacred and walk away, because I’d rather not find out what happens next in this particular story. I have other friends that work in intelligence and can regale me with stories when we’re both old and, more importantly, “outside with a drink in our hands……………” as Jonna so eloquently put it at the book talk for “The Moscow Rules.”

Those are the friends to whom I’d like to be a research assistant on their books, because I like writing non-fiction. I am not a novelist, and doubt I ever will be. I’m not running away from writing fiction, I just don’t get it. For instance, I don’t visualize inside my head, so I don’t really know how to write setting. I’m a gardener, so I have problems with plot. Because I’m a blogger, I’m solid at character studies……………. sometimes.

I am sure that I could learn these things over time, but conventional wisdom is to write what you know. So far, what I know is the world around me. Washington reads like a novel whether you aim for fiction or not. The characters and plots are interesting in and of themselves, and you do not have to make them up. I will never know what my real story in Washington is, because a lot of it happened behind my back. This is not a bad thing, as I fell into a safety net of sorts. One I hated, but still. That whole time in my life would just be a book called “Heytch,” because the trap I fell into was wanting to love her the way she wanted to be loved.

For the record, I showed up at the hospital because two incredibly unlikely stories were presented to me and I was betting that at least one was true. It was the one where she and her husband were wild about each other, and I could just come and live with them as a member of the family. That she was not poly and never had been; that she made it up to entice me when she didn’t need it. I would have followed her into the ocean no matter what.

If you really know me, you know just how little dating means to me, and how much I love deep conversations over coffee that never lead to romance. I could picture us as little old ladies together, and that meant more to me than gold, especially with her big sister right there to kiss the top of my head as she walked by on the odd occasion we ran into each other. Maybe I will write that story, if only for me, because of course it’s fiction now.

Sometimes I wonder how much of fiction is really fiction, and how much of it is people writing down what they thought was happening to them that later turned out not to come to pass. Fiction equals nonfiction plus time, I suppose.

Lots of people will tell you that I had hallucinations, and it is up to you to decide whether I really did or not. It has to be fiction now because all of the evidence has been scrubbed, even by me. I wish I had taken many, many screenshots…. but I didn’t. It would have been nice to have the photo of Heytch’s hand bound to mine, her saying that she was my River Song, because even if it wasn’t real, it was beautiful.

I would have been excellent at telling fact from fiction in person, but everything was presented to me over the internet with the ominous phrase “you are always the best.” One version of the story took this literally, a woman laying her heart at my feet. The other talked about all the destruction I’d caused with my blog because I was too arrogant to see I was causing it. Both stories are true, because I have never pretended to be the best at anything and yet, these people are also entitled to their opinion. What I believe to be true is that no one in that bunch believes in second chances, and I could have explained a lot with one, but in person.

Adding more to our internet history was only adding fuel to an enormous fire with no opportunity to put it out.

I just thought “Heytch” was cute once upon a time. I would have cut off a limb to meet Aada. Both were unique experiences, but they were completely different. I’m also in a completely different emotional place regarding both of them, that I will continue to write what I want because they had no shame in absolutely submarining me. I will never feel credible in the way that I did before I was hospitalized, because when I talk about their internet shenanigans, they are written off as hallucinations that never happened…………. all the evidence is gone.

I’m not sure whether I should thank them or not, because I am good at being sober. I was never abusing any substance, but I wouldn’t have given them up if they hadn’t intervened. It’s not that I realized I was an addict, it’s that I got a better offer. I don’t know what that offer is yet, because I haven’t chased it. My cognitive behavioral health counselor says that I’m not ready for a job, and I believe him for now. We’ll be reevaluating that in the future, because I know that I am capable of a lot more than I’m doing right now, and in fact, capable of a lot more than most people when I can give up my habit of assuming everything.

It’s not possible to be an autist in a neurotypical world without assuming things because if you don’t, people will talk down to you as if you are stupid and just don’t get it. I have found that I needed to switch to a neurodivergent workflow, and that was the kitchen at first. It just cannot be now because everything is too heavy, too hot, and too sharp. I am done with the hit parade of injuries at every shift because I cannot move fast enough and my balance leaves a lot to be desired.

I’m not healed enough from my trip to the hospital not to dwell on it here, because it threw me for such a loop. Because it was over the internet, I can tell you that many things were told to me that simply were not true. That’s part of my not making assumptions gig. Just because I was told I was talking to someone over the internet doesn’t mean I actually was. For that, particularly to Dana, I am sorry. She got roped into this because she was there from the beginning, not because I had this burning need to reach out to her after 11.6 years.

I still think of her fondly and hope she is well, and wish I could take back the e-mail I sent her because she did not deserve it. If I could have words with these internet people, I definitely would. They know who they are, and they haven’t stopped reading. I assume that I am still always the best, both for evil and for awesome.

I’m quieter, though, and take up a lot less space in the world because I don’t want it. A writer is a person who wants you to hear all their stories without knowing you’ve actually read them. I will take these running shoes and use them to propel me further away from controversy because I’m done with it.

I got a better offer, but it remains to be seen whether it still stands. We shall find out, though, because I am always the best.

The One I Want is the One I Got

May 24, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

Who would you like to talk to soon?

View all responses

I sent my dad a funny text message the other day, that it was time for baby’s first colonoscopy, so add that one to the baby book (I sent my mother a similar text message the day I got my first gray eyebrow). A few days later, though, I started to panic because I don’t have any close friends in Baltimore. I just moved here in December, and having a colonoscopy requires someone to drive you home and keep an eye on you after the sedative. My dad and my sister are too busy to fly up here at a moment’s notice, so I don’t generally ask them for anything due to fear of hearing “no.” I could hear what my cognitive behavioral health specialist would think of that and he called bullshit in my head before I even asked him.

I chose my sister, Lindsay, because at the moment there was more chance that my sister would come up than he would as he’s already in charge of a million different things, much less my ass.

See what I did there?

So, gathering my strength, I sent my sister a text message asking if, since I could schedule around her, could she come up for this procedure? I was surprised and pleased when she said yes, and I might even get to see her twice as she already has to be in DC for something later (DC and Baltimore are not far apart, about 35 miles….. the time to travel varies greatly by traffic……. pro tip is to always take the train.). She said that if I scheduled the procedure for 10 June, then we’d be able to celebrate my mother’s birthday on the 11th. I told her I had to see the gastroenterologist first, but that sounded entirely doable depending on the availability of the hospital schedule.

I know for sure that it’s going to be my first time drinking the sludge, two years past when I should have done it because the original guidelines were that I didn’t have to worry about it until 50. It has moved to 45 without me noticing so now I’m late. Typical. But better late than never. I don’t have a history of gut problems, so I don’t foresee a problem with cancer or anything else. I just know that my sister’s job is to do some work while I sleep it off or something.

But this isn’t the only medical thing happening in my life. I have to have a Well Woman exam, which I am calling a Well “Woman” exam. Here’s why this is exciting. My doctor asked if I had a problem seeing a male doctor, and told me his name…. but the hospital system isn’t updated and his deadname popped up. Therefore, for the first time EVER IN THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE I GOT A TRANS MAN AS A GYNECOLOGIST!!!!!

I think.

His deadname could be a man’s name, but it would be highly, highly unusual….. like me. There are male Leslies out there, but not many in the modern age. If he is a bio male, I don’t care. Doctors don’t really have a gender to me. Their pronouns are they/them because the doctor and the God inside them live concurrently. You cannot be successful as a doctor if you do not make peace with the fact that you are God every day to the people sitting in front of you…. and that they will think you are Old Testament if you accidentally kill their loved one, and New Testament if you succeed. If there is a gender in my head, doctors are divided into surgical and medical.

I have so little community that I thought about calling the gynecologist’s office and asking if that doctor would like me removed from his service because he needed friends, too. I haven’t seen him yet, so no harm, no foul. But in the end, I decided that I would need an ally inside the system as well as friends in the community. If I am right and the name in the system is a deadname, then I am sure he can point me in the right direction of people who’d be willing to drive me home after a medical procedure because I actually know them well enough to ask. For instance, just pointing me to community resources is enough, and I know he would care about those things.

Gynecology is already set up to take care of women culturally, so I don’t think trans men would be any different. There is a different questionnaire for my gynecologist’s office than I’ve ever seen in any doctor’s office ever. Taking care of women culturally is asking questions like:

Have you ever been a victim of domestic violence?
Are there guns in the house?
Are the guns within reach of your children?

My psychiatrist is also trying to protect me because I told her that as an enby, I had body dysphoria over my breasts and that I had a lot of back pain due to them, anyway, so I would like a referral. The big beautiful bill passed the House, and she has never mentioned trans medicine again, saying, “did you ask your PCP about your back pain?” Coded language. I’m into it. If this bill fails in the Senate, we’ll have a buffer zone with which to work. But we are both preparing for the worst. That’s because I am not lying in order to get a breast reduction/double mastectomy. Body dysphoria is not genetic, but the back pain I experience certainly is.

The good news is that with exercise, I’m losing some of the fat tissue in my breasts on my own. Life doesn’t feel so heavy. Even my mammogram technician said that my breasts were very dense. My stepmother (a medical doctor) told me that caffeine makes it worse, so I have never done myself any favors in this area. If you were here watching me type, you would laugh. There’s a tallboy of Death Wish Coffee next to me (it’s delicious), so obviously I follow instructions to the letter.

Rule following gets you nowhere in my line of work, which is probably why I’m willing to lay out my medical history and future in front of you. You will learn more from me than you will hurt me with your criticisms of what I’m doing, because those will be different audiences altogether. Trans men need to see themselves, and I don’t know what kind of trans man I am yet. Am I the kind that wants drugs to rearrange my fat deposits as well? I do not know. What I do know is that of everything I struggle with in terms of trans medicine, it’s my voice that bothers me the most…. for evil and for awesome.

On one hand, I will tell you that I’m a soprano and when I’m warmed up, I’m cooking.

This is just an example because it’s unaccompanied, a loop for my friend Aaron to use in a storytelling podcast for The Sinners’ Table that’s coming down the pike. Now, let’s turn it up to 11:

This is another clip from a voice lesson in which I laugh about the fact that I do not know what happens when I’m singing. The afterburners turn on and I just go. It makes me wish I’d chosen voice at HSPVA and Clements (though at Clements I was in one year of choir and made All-Region). Now that it’s 12 years later, I can tell you that I was fighting a war in my head, two women battling it out for my affections…. the one who trained my voice vs. the one that deserved the victory lap. When Joseph (Houston voice teacher) says, “are you thinking differently?,” it’s realizing that this piece was designed to serve up gratitude.

Now, my journey is to decide what kind of singer I am, because drugs to redistribute my fat deposits so that I look more like a trans man than a woman will also make me a tenor. Some days, I think that would make me happy. Some days, I lean into my diva attitude because it’s very much like my trumpet player attitude. I have also noticed that most trans men develop vocal fry, and that is not appealing to me, either. Again, priorities.

I think I am happiest with staying in one place for now, moving cautiously toward enby because I do not know what the drugs will do and cannot predict whether I will be happy with them. I have been stuck on the idea of breast reduction or double mastectomy forever because Tig Notaro has my perfect body. She doesn’t identify as nonbinary, but she looks exactly like I want to look.

It makes me feel bad that she got her look through cancer because I can imagine us getting into a huge fight over it. “I got this look through cancer and you want to do this voluntarily? Are you crazy?” Well, now we are talking about a completely separate issue. I am most definitely crazy, but I take medication for that. As far as I’m aware, there is no brain surgery that removes crazy, but if there was, I would have gotten a referral for that, too.

I’m tired of talking into a void, and want to get louder about trans issues. That’s because nonbinary and trans do not mean the same thing, but we are the same umbrella. I can wear either flag…. and in fact I would like Jonna Mendez to know that I got the most fabulous t-shirt for pride ever created. It’s gray and has the enby flag colors across a bar code, with “Assume Nothing” up the side.

The reason Jonna would think it was cool is that “Assume Nothing” is rule number one in her world (she used to be Chief of Disguise at CIA). I could learn a lot from her, I think, because as an autist I have to assume everything. It is what allowed me to compile scripts in my head to be able to respond like a neurotypical………… when I could social mask.

Now, I see that she has the right idea and I don’t. Go into every conversation as if you don’t know anything and join other people’s realities. It is the only way to see all of them with grace. The transition has not been the smoothest, but I am learning. I am certain that everyone in my life deserves my sincerest apologies for the way I’ve acted over the last 12 years, because I’ve been completely alone, trusting in my own intuition. It’s not ideal.

Now, I’m branching out. I’m trying to be more open in hopes of attracting energy to me. I am done hiding in the shadows.

But I might want to hide in the shadows until after my colonoscopy is finished. Nobody wants to see that. 😉

Exercise tells me which way I will go, because I cannot make a decision about my body while I am consumed with depression and anxiety over the way I look. I do not struggle with weight loss or gain, I just needed to feel good about something and I chose having the routine of getting to the gym as something that would help me feel less terrible. I have cerebral palsy, so I chose my workout carefully. There’s a program on the treadmills that will keep your heart rate in the target zone with incline rather than speed. Therefore, every session feels more like hiking than jogging.

It makes me happy because Bryn lives in Portland, Oregon and I’m sure that if I asked her, she’d be happy to drive me out the Gorge when I visited. I do not remember whether she likes to hike or not, but if she doesn’t I am sure she would drop me off at the base of Multnomah Falls and pick me up several miles down the road as I limp toward the car, energy spent. It makes me feel good to be prepared for that kind of hiking, because Multnomah is easy…. as you go, it gets harder. I haven’t made it to Larch Mountain without feeling like death warmed over, but perhaps I will as time goes on. And that’s without even researching hiking in my area, because I haven’t done it yet. I need to, because my entire hiking experience cannot be based on sacred memories.

The treadmill is my hiking sandbox. I can wander as far as I want through the rolling hills of any city in the world thanks to being able to watch YouTube on my phone. It’s a lot more fun to think about difficult questions and answers while also staring at the beauty of Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Oslo.

What is not difficult is realizing that my life is bigger than me. Recording it for other trans people to read is my gift to you, because there’s just not a lot out there. Of course all who show up are welcome, but I am trying to reach an intentionally small audience. We are in a culture war where the focus is on trans women and what they might possibly do to cis women.

The biggest indicator of who the real perpetrators of violence might be is a movie I watched long ago. I’d tell you about it, but boys don’t cry.

Zip, Zap, Zop

May 22, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today in group we learned an energy passing game called “Zip, Zap, Zop.” The object of the game is to make the energy go seamlessly between people, the next person picking up the word in the series where you left off. If you mix up words, you’re out. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve actually felt energy leaving my body toward another person because I actually had it to give. But the game was the end of the session, after we all learned about how to take care of ourselves.

Or rather, what we are doing to take care of ourselves. My answer was exercise, because it just makes me feel good whether I want to or not. There’s no way to avoid the rush of endorphins when I’m finished. I can better handle everything else when I feel solid in my body. However, I have noticed something that is very, very true. If you skip a day, the next day is harder.

So I only skipped a day, Wednesday.

It’s akin to the second lesson I learned. Pausing a program on the machine just makes it harder to start again. That’s because when you pause it to take a drink of water, your heart rate nosedives. I walk on the treadmill because I have balance issues, so as soon as I hit the restart button I go from zero percent incline to nine. It’s ridiculous. Steady wins the race, apparently, because I stopped pausing the treadmill in order to avoid the swings. The incline to get back up to a healthy heart rate was too steep for someone who already feels uncomfortable in a gym in the first place.

Reminds me of something my dad has told me over and over, because Doc Severinson (former bandleader on The Tonight Show) told his band this at SMU regarding practicing his trumpet:

If I miss one day, I notice.
If I miss two days, my band notices.
If I miss three days, everybody notices.

There is no one that pays attention to my body that close, even me. What I’m talking about is everyone noticing my emotions. When I am not secure in my body for any amount of time, I will fold into myself. Autism is an undertow for which I have not discovered a solution except forcing myself out into the world and hoping for the best. I am a different person when I cannot gather the energy to connect with others. I am prone to self-indulgence and I know it.

It is hard to decide what is my story and what is just straight up cyber-bullying when you are trying to show your own mental illness in real time. That’s because in order to show what is genuinely me, I have to divorce myself from my emotions about others. I say things that I would never say in conversation because in conversation, I am not disconnected from them. There are lots of entries, particularly about Aada, that I should take down. But I won’t, because like as not the same entries that are angry will also contain a line she liked.

I cannot take anything back, but I can move forward with other people. I do not know what her consequences were except to say that the thing she was the most worried about has not come to pass because I was never out to get her… and in no universe would she ever send me anything that couldn’t be published. She needed a way out, and I gave her one. If this is not true, she can come back and say that. But my suspicion is that she won’t. She has always been too proud to admit that vulnerability solves anything, and she did not see how her lack of vulnerability beat me down over the years. In that way, I am glad to be free of her. You don’t judge the sum total of a person based on one thing, though, especially when it’s clear they need help.

She did not understand the position she put me in; I didn’t understand hers. I also genuinely made a mistake, because I was working too fast. Luckily, I was able to delete the entry before too many people saw it, including someone who could bring my heart rate back down to normal when she disappeared. I gave her too much power and I freely admit it. I will also not apologize because I trusted her with it.

She did not see how she broke my trust over and over that she would show up eventually. That I wasn’t giving her all this energy for nothing. That, in effect, the reason our relationship crashed and burned is that I was very polite at some times and very demanding at others; it didn’t matter. Nothing worked. There was never equilibrium in our relationship and it was something I desperately needed.

But being demanding wasn’t my modus operandi. That’s the ’tism. I get into “explaining mode” and think I am doing a very good job of it. Then, Aada would lash out at me for questioning her smarts. That never occurred to me in a million years. I just sound like a professor because my archetype is Bert from “Sesame Street.” And in fact, I know someone she loves that sounds just like me when I get going, and they don’t have that relationship at all. I know for certain that we’d have gotten along in person, if only she’d given me a chance.

So much of this relationship fell apart because it was so rich AND ALSO never there.

She was offended by nearly everything because her threat meter was so high. I wish I could have done more to take it down, but I was threatened in return. A piece of my heart was walking outside of my body and she wasn’t taking very good care of it. Neither was I, because it wouldn’t come back to me so I could shore it up. There were no words of affirmation, there was only fear and doubt.

I suppose the biggest lesson for me is that she wanted to save the world, and I wanted to save her, specifically. I thought she was falling down on the job at home because she was so work-focused. But the truth is that I couldn’t see her entire life at home, I could only see my part of it. Her attitude towards me routinely made me cry. There was no solution because her answer for everything was “buck up, Buttercup.” My answer for everything was “we can work on this together.” Never the twain shall meet. Any attempt to bridge the gap was over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.

My job over the next few years is to figure out why I’ve been attracted to that my whole life.

Aada is not the first emotionally unavailable person to charm me, but I hope she’s the last. To be clear, she was never my partner, but I learned how to be…. and not to be…. the partner I wanted to show others I could be if I got my ducks in a row.

The first was giving up any substance that allowed me respite from anxiety, because it was numbing me out too much. No alcohol, no weed, no benzos…. just breathing techniques at first. The alcohol was first, weed second, benzos last. All of them cold turkey because I do not have an addictive personality. Telling myself that I could be a better person if I didn’t have them was enough, and I was right.

Because I quit everything, I was able to add a long-term anxiolytic called “Buspar.” No one really knows how it works except that it interacts with both your serotonin and dopamine receptors over time. It takes about six weeks to get it to maximum efficacy, so I’m looking forward to seeing how my life changes in that time. The most notable relief (if it works) will be not having a constant hum in my brain around which is hard to think. It’s loud enough to block out entire thoughts, which is why I write every day, but often not enough to publish. I have hundreds of drafts on this web site that have never come to light because of this noise.

It’s another way my mental health drags me into the deep end of the ocean. My quality of life is sometimes poor, because my thoughts are quite literally drowning in sound. Imagine that you are asked to write anything and your constant companion is the Emergency Broadcast System:

There is a reason for every single thing I have done, but it is this sound that has isolated me more than anything. I cannot connect to people when I cannot hear them. My head is too painful.

All I can do is run away, on a treadmill that stays in place so I don’t wander too far from home.

That’s because on the days when my Buspar works and my workout is fruitful, someone can shoot me a zip, and I’ll be there to catch. Whether someone is there to receive my zap and their zop is thankfully not up to me. I cannot control any of that. All I can do is put energy into the universe, and hope it comes back to me.

Maybe Aada doesn’t believe in forgiveness. Maybe she shouldn’t. That’s not for me to say. But what I do know is that happiness is found one foot in front of the other, and finding out two friends also go to my gym.

You find angels when you’re not looking for them, and they’re always in disguise. But you won’t be ready if you’re not even looking, and that’s what my mental health does to me. It limits my ability to look for the angels in my midst, because I do not believe I deserve them.

Or I didn’t until I started putting energy into trying to be an angel to someone else. I don’t know who that is, but what I do know is that it’s the purest thing I’ve ever said.

Running Away from Negative Thoughts

May 20, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have all kinds of negative thoughts because I have bipolar. I’m not sure that I manage them all that well, but working out has given me a shortcut. That’s because from the moment I start working out, my body is flooded with all these endorphins that make me feel good whether I want to or not. Most of the time, I am the copy of Bert from “Sesame Street.” I get lost in my own mind, and I forget to acknowledge what is good and positive. I think I draw the Ernies of the world out of the woodwork, because most of them want to save or change me. It has never worked, because I am a bird (pigeon?) with a broken wing. Healing cannot come from external sources, but from my body deciding that my wing has been broken long enough and it is healed now.

What I have learned is that social masking taught me that I should not be happy staying at home with my bottle cap and paper clip collection.

Incidentally, I am 47 years old and I just used a “Sesame Street” reference. PBS funding matters.

I didn’t learn to be happy until I met other people like me, who struggle with the same kinds of issues. None of their people understand, either, because being AuDHD is a rough gig, and so is being bipolar. I need friends who, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel And in fact, the female presentation of ADHD is so close to autism that I’m not sure that ADHD is the right diagnosis anymore, because amphetamines only work half the time. This may also be a function of age. My ability to compile scripts is slowing down; as I get closer to a deadline, that is no indication that I’m going to have the same rush of energy I did in my 20s. Maybe it was always autism, and because I was intelligent, there was no one to suspect I had it.

Being a bio female has as much to do with it as intelligence.

Doctors have pattern recognition on white boys, but they miss women and people of color all the time. New research says that trans and nonbinary people are up to six times more likely to be autistic (NPR), and that queer people are more likely to be autistic overall. Now we are graduating from “Sesame Street” to “Blues Clues.”

But we internalize it, don’t we? We take in all those messages of hate from the Religious Right (who is neither) that there is some kind of moral failing instead of solid science and reason. We are told every day of our lives that there is something wrong with us and that just has to be okay, because there are too many people in this country whose answer is for us to adjust and be cool with all the relatives who pray for you to change. That their prayers are as good as your science.

I should say for the record that I’m a very liberal Christian. I am not knocking Christianity, but unaccepting denominations. My prayers are as good as my science, because they are on equal footing. I did not give up my brain to be spiritual. I need both. Science tells me the “what.” Religion tells me the “why.” Too many people confuse the two and throw the baby out with the bathwater. But what I have found is that it helps me to get my ego out of the way. I cannot change people, I can only change me. I can only lead by people wanting what I have, because it comes from a light that is perpetual except when I put it out.

The way my light goes out the most often is through negative thinking. Imposter syndrome gets me a lot, as does the thought that the world would be better off without me. This message is reinforced everywhere I look because the world is not kind to nonbinary people; the world is never kind to people they don’t understand. What they don’t know is that it took me several years to understand. I get it. But if my brain can expand to a new way of thinking, so can everyone else’s…. because I did not coin the term. The reason it’s new and different is that the word was coined by people much younger than me. People my age and older are dismissive, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but me as long as people respect my right to exist.

It also does not work with my current attitude, which is Southern preacher’s kid who does everything not to offend. I am getting stronger. Misgendering and mislabeling me is not okay. I prefer they/them. If someone defaults to a binary out of habit, I try to correct them because the sound of “she” grates on my nerves. As you and I go through this process (my audience is very much the keeper of my secrets), “he” feels more and more like home because there are too many web sites where there is no option. Changes are coming for me that I need desperately, like shopping for clothes that make me feel comfortable in my own skin. I asked my brother in law just to send me his closet in a “small.” Hey, it might work.

The problem is that androgynous people have been a joke for so long that it’s only now we’re recognizing validity. I remember not liking the SNL character “Pat” from the beginning, my first taste of realizing “ohhhh….. that’s what I look like in my head.” I remember seeing Tig Notaro after her double mastectomy and thinking, “that’s who I want to look like because she’s female but her shirts hang right.” And then I immediately felt shame and doubt about my body because I thought, “Tig got her body through cancer. Is this something that anyone should do voluntarily?” Body modification is also nothing new, but that didn’t stop me from a whole host of negative thoughts.

I get lost in my head about relationships because being autistic makes my thought processes different than the rest of the world, even other autistic people. They don’t understand, they get upset, and I get upset because I don’t understand what I have done. I am trying to slow down…. and speed up. The more I run, the more the endorphins make the bad feelings not so “extremely loud and incredibly close.” Well, technically, I just walk really fast. Me running on a treadmill is my balance at its shakiest. I control my heartrate through incline, not speed.

Making friends with the gym as a lifelong nerd has come with the perk of not concentrating on anything but what’s right in front of me…. namely, the imaginary hill I’m climbing. My headphones drown out everything but Maury Povitch, Steve Wilkos, or whatever trash TV the gym has streaming.

It makes me happy to know that I will never be the father.

But it does lead me to think about the life I’ve come from, and the kind I want in the future. No more partners where I enable their drinking because I go into it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, believing everything an alcoholic has to say. This is not a slam against Dana, because it has happened over and over. I think it is my personality. Drunks are charismatic people, and so am I. Drunks are loose-lipped, and so am I. Drunks make their signals toward you overwhelmingly obvious, and I don’t notice smaller ones because that’s what an autist tends to do. We miss social cues until they’re unfailingly large, the realm of drunks and narcissists.

I know what I want, and it isn’t that. Love needs to be quieter.

I’m much quieter, that’s for sure.

I go into the valley of vulnerability when it’s just me and salt and sweat…. but I don’t think about meeting people at the gym because of Aaron Sorkin. Every time someone cute walks by, I think about C.J. Cregg from “The West Wing” saying that she’d like to go to the gym to meet an interesting man and then falling off the treadmill in front of him.

Something happened today that was very different and out of the ordinary. I was walking home, and I saw my reflection for the first time in weeks. The running is already making a difference because I’ve gone every day. I thought I looked good.

It’s a start.

Game on.

Feeling Like a Woman is Not My Vibe

May 19, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The featured image for this entry is the last time I actually felt female. I can pinpoint it because it’s the last time I wore that suit with a shell showing off my cleavage; I was not in a hurry to button up to my collar like I do now. In retrospect, I’ve always been nonbinary and switch hit my social masks depending on who I needed to be.

That day, I looked in my closet and the only thing I had to wear that would look appropriate in the Mexican Embassy was something I’d never wear now. I don’t wear jewelry unless you count the CZ earring in my left ear, only there because the hoops I got at the tattoo shop had to be removed for an MRI. My hair is cut much shorter, and I don’t wear makeup to compensate. I don’t make an attractive man or woman, in my estimation, so I’m working on how to fix that. It’s not about what would attract other people, but what would give me more self confidence in leaving the house. This look isn’t it anymore, especially since I would like to meet more people who are excellent at what they do in hopes of becoming one of them.

Yes, that is Pati Jinich from Pati’s Mexican Table. My dad bought tickets for us to go and see her, then called and said he wasn’t coming because he didn’t feel well. “Careful, dad… I’ll steal your girlfriend from you,” I quipped. That’s because my stepmother has called Pati my dad’s girlfriend for many years. I have told this story before, but it bears repeating because it’s entirely representative of who I am as a person. I will say anything to anyone not realizing the gravity of the situation because I don’t pick up on social cues. This is to my detriment, but in this one instance, it worked out. I tell Pati this story at the beginning of the dinner. The shock and amazement is that she remembered the story and remembered to prank my dad after it was over. I got the picture because I’m 5’2 and biologically female, decidedly not Pati’s actual type…. but we’re both old line cooks, so anything goes, apparently. Hey, she’s the one that told me to text the photo to my dad immediately because she wanted to see what he said.

He thought it was hilarious, of course.

It’s a good memory to go out on, because since I’ve joined a gym I’m trying to get into guy mode about it. Female mode at the gym is my mother’s voice in my head counting every calorie both up and down. Guy mode is focusing on results. I had no shame about Taco Bell afterwards because it’s the Universal Guy Meal of Working Out, that chicken bowl. I used butter at breakfast even though I had high heat PAM ready to go. I’m not going to change everything overnight because I’m grieving. Going through all these changes without the one person who used to listen to them is breaking my heart, as I am sure that in some sense it is breaking hers. It did not have to end this way, because here’s what she wanted me to say that I did not:

I was angry that you lied to me. You do not see the fallout. But you are not more important to me than someone who has juice. You’re all the electricity I’ll ever need.

She thought I chose someone with celebrity over her quiet spirit, when I chose them because they’d never lied to me and she had.

That’s because I was able to explain nonbinary to her and she listened. Not many people will. My line about it is that “I do not roll out of bed wanting to be a man. The phone ringing is the biggest reminder that I’m a bio female. It does not make me crave masculinity, but gives me a reminder to perform femininity.” Nonbinary is just that, picking and choosing which gender goes with which situation. How often do you actually think about it?

I am not over losing the emotional connection we had, but it’s something I strive for in this new life without her. There’s no replacement, but she is my mirror image. We are sewn at the spine, each facing out in different directions. I’ve been awfully hard on her because I’m so hurt and enraged. It doesn’t make sense that she ran away from me because she lied. It doesn’t make sense that she lied to me for 12 years because she thought that I needed something from her that I didn’t.

Everything I’ve ever loved, it started with loving a girl first. I picked her special interest so we’d have something to talk about. Over time, she didn’t want to talk about anything else, which she construed into “Leslie wants to know about this thing.” No, baby Aada. I told Michael today that if you’d turned out to be a Sandwich Artist at Subway I would have helped you make better sandwiches, along with telling him that I’d always told you if you worked in a car wash I would love you just as much as I do right now.

So much so that I know I’m losing femininity just by talking about it. I just seem so pathetic because women are strong. Men are the weak ones. Men are the ones where you can rip their hearts out in front of them and they have to pretend not to care while they’re still breathing, but it’s lucky they still do. There’s so much unexplored territory in our relationship that just has to rest in peace, because I know to the very core of my being that being yours was the real fantasy all along. That I didn’t want all of your heart, just a piece. That I wanted more until I realized it was impossible. Be happy that she loves you for who you are. And I was.

The only reason I have this blog is to explore all the millions of emotions coursing through me because I am not easily understood no matter what I say. Writing volumes doesn’t often help, especially when you’re getting blowback over things you’ve said without defending yourself. I didn’t need you to defend yourself. I needed you to show up for me like I’ve always shown up for you. As I’ve said previously, there will be no thank you for the 12 years of silence you’ve already gotten, just annoyance and anger that I could not keep quiet forever, genuinely or not so genuinely losing my mind depending on who is telling the story.

You did not cause my misfortune, but you did not help it dissipate, either. We have different ways of handling things and you were so convinced that your way was correct that I ended up in a psych ward twice over. At what point do you not take responsibility and say, “well, that could have gone better.” Why are all the pricks I’ve left on your skin? Do you not see the ones you leave on mine? You can tell by the way I write that every entry starts out as universal and filters out into all the things I didn’t get to say, won’t get to say. They’re not for you anymore, they’re for everyone.

I wanted to have conversations in private before I wrote my blog entries forever, because I’m a writer and you’re an editor. But even that conversation needed to happen in person, the bane of your existence because you weren’t brave enough to admit that I was your friend. Or perhaps you were afraid of what would happen had your husband and I had our yellow and red string conversations because he didn’t want to hear me out. Whatever the case, it’s not worth exploring because that is only pain for me. I have said many times that when I lose you, I don’t know who I am for a little bit…. that’s because the mirrors talk to each other.

Red light, blue light…..

Your overwhelming cis femininity showed me who I was. I could be an enby because with you, my inner trans man was always on full display. I would have liked more of that, just you tousling my hair instead of saying it looked cute in a photo.

I never wanted to be more than you wanted to handle, but I couldn’t be a disembodied voice anymore, either. Not connecting with you led to not connecting with anyone. Not connecting with my dad and sister until I had to call them, embarrassed from the Sinai ER, was the last straw. That’s because you’ve already said there’s no reconciliation between us, that our journey is over. I do want you in my life, but not with that attitude. If you change your mind, I will not say “how dare you reopen that wound?” I will say, “welcome home.” That’s because you are not a wound to me. We have wounded each other, and we deserve the chance to apologize.

In short, I’m sorry for all the things I’ve said and done that enraged you, and know that it’s up to you whether forgiveness is real. You say that I wonder why you don’t trust people. I don’t, actually. You never trusted me from the beginning and didn’t understand how different we were. I had to learn to sink or swim. I noticed you were drowning and I stayed with you until far past the time when I should have cut bait to save myself. I am hoping that you got something out of this blog over the years, because I said something 12 years ago that has never been more true than today:

The hottest woman I know taught me to be a better man.

I have grown, not all the time. Not every day. Sometimes, I am a miserable sinner and I know it. Sometimes there are things I have done, sometimes there are things I have left undone. But what I don’t want you to do is mistake the part for the whole. I loved you every day, all day, not expecting anything in return. I did not get truly angry at you until I found out about a lie that cost me a relationship with someone else and you had the audacity to downplay it.

You’re not going to cost me any more relationships with other people, and my hope is that eventually, you’ll be healed enough to see that we both did a number on each other. No one won here. We deserve each other, both for evil and for awesome.

How do I know this? The picture with Pati Jinich means less to me than the photos I took for you just to show off my new haircuts.

Balance

May 18, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am seeking a new balance to home life and work life because I know I’m a writer and need to keep at it. I’ve been the same character for 12 years, and now is a time of explosive growth as I no longer have a hard shell around me keeping me from connecting to other people. I have hid not only in my one house, but one room of one house, trying to avoid the simple act of being a blabbermouth. Now, that restriction has been lifted and I can tell what I want, when I want, within reason. I just had to choose. Do I want a relationship with Aada, or do I want a relationship with me?

I chose me, because her idea of choosing me was simply to write to me over the internet. I would keep living in a small room, my life incomplete, while I stared at the ghost in my shell. I think the nickname is apt because we slowly hacked each other from the inside out. I say that I fell in love with the wrong woman all the time, because she did not fall in love with me. I was stuck, because she loved me in the way that she could…. deeply, grabbing for approval at times. She just didn’t need my approval and didn’t trust in her own instincts. Her last interaction with me was a huge fight in which I fell asleep and I woke up to, “you know what?”

If someone starts a sentence with, “you know what?” then you don’t have to read the rest to know someone is going to take a bite out of your ass. I told her not to assume that just because I was taking a nap that meant I was abandoning her. Just recently, I went back and re-read our conversations and what I found is that I did not want to connect with her anymore. She was offended by everything and I could not find a topic that made both of us happy. Michael told me that I would be happier without her, and he turned out to be right, but not for the reason he said. He calls her “the fraudster.” But the things she lied about were inert. Nothing that couldn’t have been forgiven because I liked the goofball she was inside when she let loose.

But I wasn’t allowed to see that person. Every sentence I wrote caused defense, and I became an angry person in response. I hated being that person and so did she. I can tell because she has blocked me on everything as if I never existed. That’s how she gets through life. There’s no working through something and coming to resolution. There’s just moving on. I don’t do that. I work hard at changing what was wrong. I commended her for being vulnerable. And yet, her e-mail to me was still a flame war in which her therapist supposedly said that I was responsible for manipulating her for 12 years. Maybe that’s true, because her therapist will never know my side of the story unless she’s reading me here. I hope they are. Because I am as angry as I was in “Dope” and as sweet and sentimental as I was in “All the Things You Never Knew.” I do not have one attitude when it comes to Aada because there’s not a single day that describes our relationship except the distance of never working together in person. I believe it would have solved a lot, and there would never have had to be a flame war in which I felt threatened.

The impossible position she put me in was that she wasn’t real. She just taunted me saying that I wanted fame and fortune by publishing something she wrote, when in reality I was starting to look like a crazy person, in love with a ghost who never showed up. In love with my own imagination. For one shining moment, she was there in all her glory and it didn’t matter that I looked like a manipulative asshole. It didn’t matter that she thought that. I could deal with those consequences easier than I could deal with my friends and family always saying that she was a figment of my imagination.

Now, the whole world thinks I’m an absolute lunatic and that just has to be okay. There’s a reason I am the way I am, and it’s because it was revealed to me how the Internet actually works. I cannot speak to that, either, except to say that I discovered that the mirrors talk to each other. We are skating on an ice rink in which the machines underneath control the hardness. While you’re “elbows up,” everyone underneath is making sure you don’t fall through. It was a wild ride, and I talked how I normally talked…. I’m sure managing to offend several people in my life because I thought I was only talking to “my girl.”

It was a dream, all of it, a conspiracy to get me to the hospital. I needed it, but their methods were absolutely cruel. I will never forget thinking that my night was going to be flying to Finland with someone I hadn’t seen in 12 years and really liked, after 12 years of sitting alone. She was already married, but was telling me she was poly and her husband was cool with it. I didn’t want a full-time girlfriend because I’m working on myself. This seemed like the perfect solution because she doesn’t even live in my state. She works in media, or did, anyway, and would have been good as a sounding board no matter whether the date lead to something else or didn’t. I wasn’t ready to commit; I was ready to hear her out.

This is because I wasn’t sure she was out as poly to anyone but her husband. There was a big chance she’d hide me away in Africa or Asia and I had to know if it was worth it first. All of my emotions were stirred in a way they hadn’t been because I’d been so cut off from feeling anything that it was nice to feel something genuine. My move to Baltimore had just been one more way to isolate myself because I was having trouble taking care of myself in light of all the pressure I was under. It was just more social masking so that no one had to see me suffer because I didn’t want them to. And in fact, they wouldn’t have without Aada’s access. She’s the one I told everything, and I don’t regret it. I regret that she is too angry to see that me publishing her e-mail is not her biggest problem.

Her biggest problem is that she crushed me for 12 years and I just took it. I just fell down and let her, because it wasn’t my secrets that were killing me. I got to where I was fucking feral. I can’t apologize enough to make a difference, because I’ve already done all the apologizing I’m going to do. So has she, because every time she says, “I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know,” I know it’s just words to placate me. She’s never going to actually do anything different.

“I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know” would have been “I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

In the immortal words of my friend Aaron Brown when I asked him if he was making room for grief, “I don’t have to make room for grief. It makes its own.” I’m just sad. Everything I’ve known for 12 years is gone and I am going to be blamed for it ad nauseam. I should, in a lot of ways. I was the one that sexually harassed Aada over the internet 12 years ago, when my marriage was ending and I was trying to make Dana angry, not Aada. But Aada decided what kind of person I was from the very beginning, and treated me like a jackass even when I was on my knees praying. There are some sins that cannot be forgiven by another person, they can only be forgiven by God. I didn’t take the hint. I wrote volumes. I sent presents. I changed how I thought of her because you don’t think about your heroes that way. Anything I could do to move on from that one time in my life was positive progress, and she accepted me for who I am…. eventually…. without telling me that she’d never see me in person just in case.

We could have started there.

We could have started with honesty, but that’s not her policy. Her policy is a web of lies in which no one can get through. Try, and she’s the spider that has no problem injecting poison. She won’t listen to reason, that vulnerability is necessary to survive a relationship with someone who is all vulnerable, all the time. Because I was never angry she lied for a living. I was angry she lied to me.

I justify publishing what I did because there’s no way to unpublish it, not because I actually meant harm. They’re all the lies I tell myself to keep myself alive. She didn’t deserve to have her e-mail published in its entirety because I was a dumbass and didn’t proofread, but there’s a million reasons why it was necessary to save my own sanity. It’s a sacrifice I’ve made along the way, and now I think I’m getting it back.

I didn’t choose to stop smoking weed when she said I should, or when the twins said I should, but when I was given actual anxiolytic medication to replace it. I didn’t decide to start taking care of myself until my anxiety was solved. When I was trapped between her lies and my silence, I didn’t know my next move and staying in my room was the only one I could think of that wouldn’t cause damage. From the Internet, I could be watched. From the Internet, there are no private conversations. From the Internet, she is “from whom no secrets are hid.”

The problem was when I treated her like God, I treated myself like a worm.

It was a bleak outlook for the rest of my days, when what I wanted was freedom with her. She hid from me when it would have delighted me to see her flash a smile in my direction at least once. Even the picture she took for me only has a hint of a smile, but I’m glad I have it in my box of treasures from that time in my life. I cannot look at it, but someday.

Maybe when I get my smile fixed, I’ll be able to return one. My medications have ruined my teeth and I haven’t done anything about it. I only now think I am deserving of a new smile. I only now think I am capable of growing into the person I was meant to be, because the last 12 years have been so stunted. I was trying to take care of someone else’s inner child, and ignoring my own while she cried.

All I got in return for that was lots of defense and anger. That’s not my bag. I own that I did sin against her, and what I said was not small or easily forgiven. But what should have happened is blocking me on everything immediately and letting this process happen 12 years ago if she wasn’t going to put on her big girl panties and work it out. She just got the chance to snipe at me every day instead.

I put up with it because I thought I deserved it and didn’t have enough strength to block her…….. until I did. She noticed and sent me two e-mails reading me the riot act over shit I never said. That should have been even more of an indication that this was going to end badly, but I did not pay attention. I just let her have her say….. because she only pays attention to the ways in which I hurt her.

She’s never really taken in my pain, and never will. That’s because she cannot see it. Having boundaries means teaching people how to love you, and she’s a people pleaser. No one knows how to relax around her because she does not give them any directives. If you tell her that it doesn’t matter what she does now, she takes that as “you hate me.” When I literally meant “I can welcome you or I can push you away, but the next steps are on you.” She chose to step away, as I knew she would. Abandonment is the only skill she’s actually practiced.

I have grieved this relationship over and over because she doesn’t want to work on it. She would like to say she worked on it. But she’ll get to three internet exchanges and get so heated that she tells me to fuck off before I can even breathe. I have done the same, but less and less over the years as I have dealt with my trauma and learned how to breathe.

Bryn and I have a code phrase for this… “HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?!”

I used it on Aada, and she said, “100%.” She understands that she’s the one standing outside the group of people who will accept her for who she is and catering to the people who see her for the way she’s curated.

She doesn’t like people that are fucked up because she cannot admit that she’s fucked up. She has to believe that she has it all together. I could have offered her friends and a future not based on social masking, but based on who she actually is….. a six year old covered with layers of PTSD that made her invincible to the outside world while she’s dying inside.

I’m in this position because I wouldn’t join the narrative that she’s fine. I’m in this position because publishing her e-mail was just the last thing that happened. The real truth is that she was never going to unmask.

She’s a trademark, and she likes it that way.

I’m a spoonie, and I don’t have the ability to mask anymore. As I got more and more into finding my true self away from other neurotypicals, she became more defensive. Because as I’ve said, I think she’s neurodivergent and a spoonie as well. She just pushes herself to the very limit of her abilities and explodes when it comes to her personal life. Or, at least, I hope that’s only my experience of her. She makes me think that everyone around her is in danger of the cold disconnection I got. I wonder if her divorce from her first husband years ago actually happened the way she thinks, or if she didn’t know all the things about herself that she does now.

Because in Aada’s life, everything happens to her. She doesn’t cause anything. Everyone is toxic but her. If you view your life that way, you will end up only talking to yourself, only connecting with yourself, and thinking that’s normal. For instance, I’m toxic because I hurt her, but she’s not toxic because she hurt me. I have a more nuanced view. We both caused each other damage that could be resolved and our relationship healed.

But there’s no room for nuance with Aada. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that her trauma causes me pain. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that she causes problems inasmuch as I do. It’s so much easier to “blow ’em off and keep goin’,” but at what point do you just run out of people to lean on? I hope that in our conversations, it led her to let other people in to everything that I know, because the disembodied voice of a stranger on the internet didn’t help me over time. Hugs might have, though. Since I can’t hug her, I hope someone did.

I chose to move to Baltimore so that there would be no one around to hug me. I chose to be alone because I thought I was doing the right thing. Now, I’m trying to leave my house as often as I can, because eventually I hope I’ll find someone to love that is actually available.

No internet connection needed.

Something Completely Different

May 17, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I decided to change my life, and I did. I wrote down a laundry list of what was wrong with me and why, then went to my primary care physician and got referrals. We were just establishing a baseline of care, but I needed to get the ball rolling on several things, most notably my CP assessment since the last one I had was in 1978. I do not really need to know I have CP. I can tell by the way I move. It’s just for my own peace of mind…. needing a doctor to say, “I see you.”

I’ve been referred to a breast surgeon to talk about trans medicine, dermatology to talk about a rash on my stomach, and back to my psychiatrist to talk about autism and ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder in college, but those records are long gone. I need to redo the assessment because no one is going to take my word for it that I need amphetamines, or that I’ve tried Stratera and we can try it again but it didn’t work the first time……… there’s just no record of that, either. If no one believed me that I took benzos for anxiety, they’re not going to believe I took amphetamines, either). I do think my therapist has my back, though. Or maybe it was someone on my care team at my cognitive behavioral health program.

Two days ago, I went to pick up something else at the pharmacy hospital, and Buspar was waiting for me. That’s not enough to get it to full efficacy, but I can say that I feel so much better now. I’m not as anxious, not as ready to be lonely the rest of my life because I think I deserve it. Or, at least, I won’t think that forever. Falling in love with the wrong woman was a complete disaster for both of us, and I can only hope that with time as we both do therapy and move away from each other that we both feel better about our separate paths in life. It would be nice to reconnect with a healed Aada, but not the one I have known for 12 years. She’s so cut off from her emotions that she uses fear and intimidation as her only tactic in fighting. She doesn’t understand being more vulnerable. I tried and I failed. Maybe I won’t always, because I didn’t actually cost her anything. But being realistic, I’m betting she never wants to speak to me again. She’s not the type that forgives. She’s the type that moves on and carries every slight.

I don’t want to be that. I’m clean, I worked out today, and I am fixing everything that’s actually wrong with me both physically and mentally. I couldn’t do that while we were friends, because her intimidation tactics included “no mutual friends” and “no therapist.” Then she was surprised that I crashed and burned.

I wasn’t.

I’m just glad that the Buspar seems to be taking my own threat meter back down to a manageable level. It may even solve the sound in my mind in a few weeks, because I’ve been having brain zaps for months. That means it sounds like a refrigerator is whining in my brain at all times. It’s due to lack of serotonin, which happened when my Lexapro was ripped away. It’s not as bad when I have on headphones, so I try to keep mine charged and carry them in my backpack. I use brown noise to drown out all of the unpleasantness, of which there is much.

I was able to work out without them because the stereo was loud enough in the room, though. Then, after my workout I had a hydro massage on one of those tables that shoots water at a silicone covering so you get the hydrotherapy without getting wet. It worked so well I wish I had time to go back before they close. It’s an undertaking to walk to the gym and walk home, so I’ll save that for tomorrow. I didn’t want to overdo it on the first day, because that’s the easiest way I won’t go back.

I will walk longer tomorrow. I need to build up endurance and my core, because when I got there I couldn’t even stand up straight. The massage literally felt like it was stretching me back out. I have been cramped in chairs and over my laptop for years, so it probably was.

I got away from my phone completely, another change because I wasn’t constantly getting Facebook notifications. I need to remember to put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” so at least my family knows I’m not available and not ignoring them on purpose. Now I want to be close to my family because I don’t have anything to hide. I didn’t really before, because it wasn’t a secret that was bad… just knowledge that wasn’t for them until the hospital called. Lindsay and my dad were on the first flight up to come and bail me out of what has been a clusterfuck of mental illness because it’s so deeply ingrained now.

I just have to remember that I didn’t get this sick overnight, and one workout isn’t going to fix everything, either. But by putting one foot in front of the other, I can move away from this situation. I never want to contact Aada again because she is so convinced that I am the source of her problems. But I will also not turn her away if in her own discoveries, she realizes that she actually did give me something that was too hard to bear and it requires rethinking her own part in all of this. She has not given me any indication that she’s capable of such a thing. So, I will let our relationship rest in peace without slamming the door.

I have misbehaved. So has she.

I haven’t liked her on some days. She hasn’t liked me on others.

But the bond was real.

All of Them

May 6, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?

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Managing you was like having a golden retriever work for you. Excellent at fetching dead birds but ….squirrel. -Randy, my actual former boss- it’s the most accurate thing I’ve ever read about my career.

There are so many things I haven’t tried, and one day is about the stamina I have for 110% effort. It’s also not enough time for me to develop compensatory skills, so me doing a job for one day would not reveal my weaknesses. It would not reveal my strengths, either. The one possible job I could think of that might fit me is field officer at CIA. With only one day, I’d have enough time to talk to people, but not enough time to do all the paperwork that ends up out of order and on the wrong desk…. either late or with coffee stains on the top because I never left the office to prevent something being late.

Staying at the office until something is done might be the one quality I could contribute.

I’m reading The Hunt for Red October currently, and what I love about it is the anachronism and the advanced technology. For instance, the new computer for the submarine fleet is “the size of a small desk” and also 64-bit architecture. That did not become available to businesses until the 1990s and consumers outside of the business realm until 2003. The hardback was published in 1984. It has allowed me to dream bigger as to what is now possible in computers just based on that information alone.

I’d like to be a submarine commander for a day because I would like to see whether my predictions have come true… that tech on a boat now is wilder than anything I could dream. That’s because “most enlisted men don’t know how to steer the ship.” One day is enough to know I’d be both great and terrible at my job…… mostly because I’m great and terrible at my job no matter what it is.

Autism sucks.

So do ADHD and CP, but autism is the driving force behind meltdown and burnout to the degree that I have it. Most people with ADHD alone have the same issues as me, but the mark of autism is severity for a lot of symptoms. This is not true in all cases, but for the majority of them, the canary in the coal mine is the degree of the deficit. Executive dysfunction makes it hard to regulate yourself, and coworkers do not have time to help you. I know that I can be trained with occupational therapy, but the only advice I’ve ever been given in my career is to grovel………. until now.

I had to figure out this meme:

This does not mean that autistic people cannot work. It means that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. Autism has never stopped me from working, but ableism sure has. There was no way for me to perform as efficiently or as fast in the kitchen as an able-bodied person, and no allowances were ever made for it. Dana and Kinkaid constantly covered my lack, but I didn’t figure that out until I was on my own. They both taught me how to cook, but neither one were there to trade me jobs I could do. It was sink or swim. I couldn’t carry a full bucket of mop water up three flights of stairs, nor did I have enough strength in my upper body to work a potato press. Therefore, making French fries was a large part of being a dishwasher when there were no dishes to wash. This gave everyone ample opportunity to see me struggle and call me lazy.

You get called lazy a lot when most of your energy goes toward keeping yourself alive. You cannot see it today, but you can clearly see my deficits in this video announcing my birth. It was made by my grandfather while I was in the NICU and in the days afterward, but the phone call is not real. My mother went into labor five weeks early according to my grandfather and eight weeks early according to her. There was no time.

John-Michael Kinkaid called me a lot of things, but lazy was never one of them. I know that I am capable of working with a chef to find the jobs I can do, but I am not capable of changing myself so that I don’t have cerebral palsy anymore. This lying there, looking at everything and soaking it in, is the classic picture of an autistic kid with CP.

A few years ago, I attended a party at my sister’s house. We were reviewing the drone footage in which I didn’t know I was being filmed and was shocked to find out that I did not move a muscle for three hours. I am not a different person than I was in this video. I have never changed. My entire strength as a human is sitting there and soaking up what other people say…. and in fact, I am frustrated with my medication protocol because drugs for mental health are known for seemingly lowering your IQ points. It goes away once you get off the medication, but I did not have this problem with the last set of drugs.

What makes me think I’m AuDHD and not bipolar is that I was stable on Lexapro for 20+ years. Bipolar and SSRIs do not mix. I also have a strange hum in my brain from lack of serotonin now, and there’s nothing to be done for it except grit my teeth until 11:00 AM, my first psych appointment in years. I haven’t needed it because being stable meant my GP could refill my drugs.

How is today different from all other days?

Today is the day that hopefully determines more of my future than my current hand. At this point, I only have the hole cards. By noon, I should at least have the flop. Thinking about the turn and the river is getting ahead of myself, because right now it feels like fourth street and fifth street are perpendicular. My strategy in poker has always been to fold early and often, because letting a good hand go is better than losing my bankroll.

Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.

I could sit at any poker table in the world and have a good shot and not because I know a lot about poker. That can be trained. So, perhaps a job I’d love for a day is “card shark.” What I mean is that someone can teach me the rules. You don’t play poker by knowing the rules, though. You have enough soft skills, as Michael McDermott accurately points out in “Rounders,” and you can read the whole room blind. You don’t play the cards, you play the man.

In this way, being a poker player is not that different from being a field officer or a cook…. and in fact, in most countries “field officers,” “waitstaff,” and “cooks” are the same job, because front of house and back of house employees at a restaurant are the least likely to get “made.” There is no reason to notice any of us, and all intelligence agencies exploit that fact.

In a perfect world, culinary school in Vaasa would lead to a job at Supo, the Finnish intelligence agency. I know I have the skills to make it because I have it on good authority that I am excellent at fact-finding. This is because I do get social cues, but I do not get fake ones. I pick up on the way you carry yourself, your “I’m fine” ringing hollow. I become confused and dig deeper, and that’s when I become rude and intrusive according to other people. It’s not because I’m actively trying to be obstinate. It’s that I am not participating in the lie that you’re fine.

HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?

For instance, I wouldn’t like to be a therapist or a psychiatrist for a day… but I would like to help people understand why social masking isn’t helpful. Wait… that was a lie. I would love to be a psychiatrist because then I could nerd out on crazy med pharmacology without digging deep into other people’s problems. It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that in order to be a good therapist, I would need to resolve all my own issues first. Otherwise, I would be capable of letting someone else get their crazy spatter all over me without being able to walk it off, and my boundaries would not be as firm as they need to be in order to keep crazy spatter from getting on my clients.

I just don’t think I have the stomach for medical school, and I mean that literally. One of the things that autism does for me is heightens my awareness of bad smells. I vomit early and often. I wouldn’t last 15 minutes at The Body Farm. However, I am assuming that if I can only have the job for the day, it’s like The Matrix. I would absorb every skill I needed as if by magic… including the secrets held by dead bodies without the inconvenience of having to work on them.

The problem with having a job for more than one day is all the ableism I’d have to endure. I mentioned what it looked like in the kitchen. In an IT help desk, it looks like winning two awards for customer service and then being fired because you “can’t remember to write things down.” This has never been true. The autistic brain does not have the ability to process someone’s voice, compile the scripts needed for an appropriate response, and write down what the person is saying at the same time. And in fact, most of the problem is that I don’t process people’s voices well. I seem to do fine with Internet chat and e-mail, but conversations are land mines. I will not remember because my retention and recall with people’s voices is so poor… unless there is a musical quality to their voices that sets what they’re saying to a beat.

I just don’t remember whole pieces of text. For instance, I do not retain lyrics to an entire opera, just the bits and pieces that resonated with my soul. I cannot tell you everything Chandler Bing and Joe Quincy ever said, but fragments remain. It is the same with Lorelai Gilmore. It is most acute with CJ Cregg and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s not always what they say, but the way they say it.

What’s with the quite?

Aaron Sorkin single-handedly changed the language we use around the government by not using articles in the script. For instance, you do not work at the CIA, you are “at CIA.” You do not work at the State Department, you are “at State.” Or, at least, this is the answer that Michael came up with, because he moved here before I did and saw the change in vernacular up front.

But it’s amazing how the change in speech pattern allowed me to retain so much more, because when something is written in neurodivergent patois, I am more likely to recall it.

Just like I’ll remember Randy saying that I was his first neurodivergent employee and he would have handled everything differently, and I will remember saying that at the time, I didn’t know I was neurodivergent and would have handled everything differently, too.

So maybe the job I really want for a day is just being his admin assistant again. Except now he’s retired.

It’s the thought that counts.

Fear

May 5, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have known truly gripping fear most of my life. The first was when I was 11, and black smoke started pouring into the living room when I opened the door to the hallway. Being 11 and home alone, I thought it was all my fault. It was later confirmed to be an uncapped wire smoldering in the attic, but that was after the firemen had come and the house was a total loss. I let myself off the hook when a fireman said that the fire had started over my sister’s room. It was lucky that the fire started during the day, because if she’d been sleeping, she would have been killed. Unfortunately, my sister also heard the fireman say this, and I’m not sure she’s slept soundly since.

(Who needs sleep?)
Well you’re never gonna get it
(Who needs sleep?)
Tell me what’s that for
(Who needs sleep?)
Be happy with what you’re gettin’
There’s a guy whose been awake since the second world war…

The problem with being the oldest is that I didn’t realize I needed coping mechanisms for PTSD worse than she did. I was in sixth grade. She was only in first. The horror of my house burning down has stayed with me at every event involving fire in my life.

When I was a youth director, I took the kids on a retreat to Camp Westwind. I was in my college years (“you look so twenties God lesbian” -Chason), so 11 didn’t seem very far back then. The campfire smoke reminded me of burning upholstery, and I panicked inside my skin. And in fact, that was the problem. I’ve been panicking inside my skin for so long that I am only now beginning to break apart.

That’s because trauma builds in the body. I did not realize just how much I was carrying when my apartment was broken into. I cannot sleep with all the lights off anymore. I leave them on in every room of the house except for where I’m sleeping. I have lights that don’t cost much to run, and there aren’t many of them, anyway. My entire apartment needs more lamps, because the complex (in their infinite wisdom) has taken out all of the overhead lighting and you must provide your own. It is cheaper, but at what cost? There is no way to turn the lights on and off easily.

In the middle of one night
Miss Clavel turned on her light
and said, “Something is not right!”

I was sitting in the dark, writing Facebook messages

I ran after the thief carrying my TV because I had no idea what would happen if I caught him… I was just unafraid and working on instinct. When you have lived with trauma since you were 11, you ignore it. I don’t look over my shoulder anymore; it’s absolutely pointless. Either my house will get broken into again or it won’t. Either I’ll get hit by a stray bullet or I won’t. Worrying solves nothing. However, I did manage to tell Bryn about this before I started writing. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have started writing about fear in the first place. I had to identify the source of why I’m so afraid to leave my house, so afraid to relax here…. so motivated to find a housemate even though I don’t want one and wish I had the meanest dog on the planet when it comes to preserving my well-being. And by “meanest dog,” I mean that I want the sweetest, most caring dog on the planet until you cross them…. and to have markings that make him look like I rescued him from the Capital Wasteland. Dogmeat has been my constant companion in Fallout 3, and I am stymied as to why I didn’t think I deserved it in real life.

I was glued to the Internet because I was dealing with a situation there. I couldn’t do anything until I heard actual noise, because the Internet at the time was scarier than real life. It’s not anymore. It never will be again. That’s because I’m not supposed to have a moratorium on what I can write and what I can’t. It’s not like I’ve been friends with anyone who didn’t know I was a blogger since 2001. I’ve been through multiple hospitalizations to prove that I’m not an authority on anything, especially fitting into the constant workings of my city. There’s no sleep for the unprepared, and I am not a prepared sort of bitch (that was an Aaron Paul genderless “bitch,” by the way). I am faced with fear and uncertainty about my future in all areas except for the possible rescue of SSI and SSDI.

I know for certain that I will always be a writer, but whether I’m successful at it isn’t up to me. It’s up to the people who read. It’s getting my work in front of the right hands. It’s about constantly woodshedding so that I see my own manipulations for what they are. Autism has led me to explain and intellectualize emotional situations, when I should just tell you I’m afraid and I don’t know what to do. I am checked in every direction except one, but the safe square moves turn by turn. I will never reach mate, and I will never fall, either. That being said…

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man crumble.

No One Matters But You

May 4, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

List the people you admire and look to for advice…

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I don’t look to anyone for advice because I can’t… and that’s true for every single person reading. You are only getting someone else’s read on a situation in which they have no experience. That’s because even if the particulars of a situation seem familiar to them, the combination of factors that make you, well, you are absolutely unique. My divorce wasn’t the same as Dana’s, for instance, and we were married to each other. I am blessed not to know much about what happened to her after I left Houston, because once I was done, I was really done. I wrote about her fondly and I meant every word. She’s still dear to me when I think back. But I’m not planning a future with anyone from my past. That’s because I asked them for their advice, and it did not work for me.

What works for me is being alone with the spirit, and that comes to me through classical music. Today, the thing that brought me to absolute tears was the a capella singers in the back of the church at Washington National Cathedral, because today it’s Nerd Church. Nerd church is where I have stuff to do at my desk, but church is going on in the background… or, it is until I think of something and have to write it down.

Some would argue that I have church on the wrong screen, but there’s nothing wrong with my tablet. It’s my desktop that needs work. I bought a gaming laptop with an NVIDIA video card so that I could use GPT4ALL in private conversations (basically Microsoft Copilot built for your PC and not cloud computing). It came with Windows 11, and this desktop is not that advanced- it came with Windows 10. A computer capable of Windows 10 with 16 GB of RAM will scream with any version of Linux you throw at it, so my nerd church has been finding out that I love my desktop more than anything AND ALSO I cannot stop crying.

There doesn’t have to be a sermon to remind me that I am a sinner.

There does not have to be a sermon to remind me that there are things I have done, and things I have left undone.

They are grievous unto me, to the point where right this moment it feels like I’ll never recover because there is no one to ask. It was my choice to be alone, because there is no way that the buck doesn’t stop with me. What I will say is that I needed to move on with my life instead of thinking that it was over. You think that when your only choice is lying or being hospitalized. That when you tell the truth, someone calls your care team and says you’re having an episode.

I often wonder if that’s how my life was always supposed to turn out. That there’s no combination of manipulations both by me and against me that wouldn’t have landed me here. I’m never going to see friends I dearly love ever again, because ““life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” -Soren Kierkegaard

I don’t push blame on others, because I know that I am not innocent. But I think that maybe a friend was too hasty in saying that she’d never betray me…. because the betrayal wouldn’t have been leaking my e-mails all over everywhere. I do not care. At least people would understand why things flying back and forth were so emotionally volatile. No, the relationship floundered because our ways of communicating and giving each other advice were, at the same time, perfectly perfect in every way and also diametrically opposed. She was raised by the almighty hand of the military. I was raised by the Almighty. Kidding, my dad was a Methodist minister when I was a kid and joke that “Jesus is the son of God and I was born to middle management.” These two things are very, very different.

And yet, not different enough because we clicked on a level that was unusual. I often think that our love for each other must have been something fierce if we could also fight that hard. But what I learned is that just because I was younger didn’t always mean I was dumber. I just felt like that on a number of occasions. I feel it now, as I’m trying to close out this chapter in my life and feel no energy for writing because it’s not like I have anything to say that will help anyone.

You can read me all day long (and you do), but comprehension is a whole other level. I was telling my therapist that because of my stats, I can safely and confidently say that many people have broken up with me, but no one has ever broken up with my blog. That people either fall in love with my writing, or they fall in love with me. Rarely do people love both. I am constantly comforted by the fact that my therapist is reading, because she does not know anyone in this blog and was saddened to hear that I wanted to delete everything. Just push the red button and kiss it goodbye. Losing the character of Supergrover made me lose the will to write.

Yes, it was all my fault.

Yes, I mean it.

That’s because our little echo chamber provided me with the love I was missing on the ground, in real life. She decided not to meet me long ago, she just wasn’t going to tell me. That looks like betrayal to me. This is not a story of every wrong I’ve committed, but also her plan to extract herself without ever having to do any real emotional work.

“Do you ever think this is all for the cameras?”
“Well, they’re getting the ratings, I’ll give ’em that.”

We are both back to our public transportation, nondescript government layer cake lives. Except that in my case, it’s figuring out whether I should file for SSI or not, because I do not know what my financial future needs to hold. I was diagnosed with hypotonic cerebral palsy when I was 18 and one-half months old. I was diagnosed as bipolar in college, along with ADHD. I have not been diagnosed with autism, but my therapist is helping me in terms of getting me the referrals I need. The question is not whether I can work anymore, but whether I ever should have entered the workforce as a “normal person” at all. AuDHD is so hard to catch that I could have used services in elementary school, and the problems with my muscles were evident…. when anyone bothered to pay attention to the fact that I was struggling.

The way I moved to Baltimore was a mistake, because I tried to go it alone and failed spectacularly. Now I know that what covered my autism was being married. I’m a wreck without Dana, but I do not mean that I am not over her. That ship sailed a long time ago. What I mean is that I am a wreck without the safety and stability of being in a relationship where someone else takes care of me. I leaned on her too much without knowing that’s what I was doing. It’s a gift I’ll never be able to repay, and it weighs on me not to be able to apologize.

But I just did, because people break up with me, but they don’t break up with my blog.

Speaking of which, I was telling my friend Ken that Dana had paid $20,000 for her culinary school education and had given it to me for free- another gift I’d never be able to repay. He said, “ah, but gifts by their very nature aren’t meant to be repaid.” So many people have walked around giving me gifts that I haven’t noticed because autism pulls me into my own little world. I have to be dragged into understanding how my actions affect others, because I will not even leave my house if I don’t have to do so. I would rather be alone with my thoughts, because it is so much easier than feeling like a drain on everyone else. I have found that a lot of autistic people feel this way… particularly if you are undiagnosed and have no idea why people seem reticent to tell you things.

I was left to figure out everyone else’s quirks on my own without them communicating, and I chose………………….. poorly.

My hospitalization was directly tied to my autistic quirks and how I was so misunderstood. That’s because I am of the opinion that in any conflict, I can only own my half. When I see more than that coming at me, I retreat. I haven’t written for several days and that in and of itself is emotionally constipating. But there’s nothing like a fresh computer install to invite me into writing because it all looks so new and shiny. It also helps that it takes less than 15 minutes to get up and running because so many things are in the cloud.

I found old e-mail from Supergrover that made me realize we were better off without each other. That she’d stabbed me with words when I showed up unarmed as many times as I had. That even her “dramatic e-mail” was all about my manipulations and how I’d hurt her. Absolutely no accountability for anything she’d done. I let it stand because I got what I wanted. I’d already explained her manipulations in detail; turnabout is fair play.

Then she set me up to fail, and I did.

My own words echo in my chest daily… “so which is it, after you block me?”

I’m sure the answer is over the rainbow, but at least by my count there’s six.

That’s the first time I’ve even been able to say I wanted to look for them. I know I deserve the storm.

I know that without any advice.

The Ones I Can Type

April 27, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What are your favorite emojis?

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We’re going to switch gears a little bit and go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s for an entry. I do not think that anyone has exactly my history on the internet, but it will resonate with you that are the same age. I am 47, which is just the right age to have seen the change from analog to digital. My first technological device was a beeper, and I did not have a cell phone until college.

With a beeper, the best you could do early on was type in your telephone number. You couldn’t even add your name until alphanumeric pagers came out, and those were mostly used in business. For instance, I had one at University of Houston, but I carried a Nokia personal phone.

My first Finnish present was from my dad.

In 2000, I found out that you could buy Red Hat at Best Buy because you could download it for free, but if you bought it you got access to all kinds of support and I was a new learner to Linux. So, I tell my mother this and off she goes to the store. This conversation ensues:

Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas.
Clerk: Wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.
Mom: She’s 20.

My second Finnish present was from my mom.

Through my phone and Linux, I learned what’s called “Netiquette.” This is etiquette for the Internet, and though I have lapsed and been a jackass many times, I’ve somewhat returned to being even keel. But it’s important to talk about because the rules are changing from “when I was a kid.” For instance, when I need a heart emoji, I just type it. < 3 without the space renders as a red heart. Now, that means I’m actively interested in people. I have a few people in my life who I hope don’t “figure out the code,” because I didn’t know it. Awkward. It’s just good that my friends are the same age as me so it’s unlikely that any of them are going to think I’m interested because they type red hearts, too.

I am confused by young people, but I am learning…. except about that. Typing is easy on my computer. I don’t get the addiction to your phone, because typing on it is so inefficient for me. I hated typing on the screen from the moment that “feature” was introduced, and wish I had an old Blackberry with a thumb board. That’s the last time I really thought I had the hang of texting. Lanagan Media Group will tell you that I am also terrible with voice dictation because I don’t see the errors as fast as they do. Nothing is bad, it’s just word salad when Siri is driving the bus. Google Assistant and Alexa aren’t better, but I have had the most luck with Alexa. It’s just too bad that Amazon tried making a phone and it flopped.

Interestingly enough, I have the most luck typing with Amazon, too, because my Kindle is the perfect width. I have no idea how one would approach this, but my perfect machine would be Amazon’s 7-in tablet with the hardware specs on the Max. That’s because I have a Max and a basic Kindle, and typing on the basic Kindle is better than my phone and tablet combined. And yes, I do put emojis in my notes. Tom Clancy has gotten a lot of them lately, because I’m knee-deep in “The Hunt for Red October.” The latest thing that got a smile was “a non-descript building, government layer cake.”

America, we in danger, girl. The Soviets can indeed reach the president from the ocean because Washington is a mere 100 miles from the Atlantic. I assure you that President Trump has been given this information, but Putin would never lie to him, right? They’re friends. So, this book I’m reading has emojis on every note, most of them surprise except that Clancy is so funny that he catches me off guard. He died in 2013, but if he were alive I would certainly have sent him lots of hearts by now….. JUST NOT RED.

So know that all things being equal, I would give up everything except the basic Kindle with e-ink and my laptop. Of course I would need a phone, but many years ago Dana and I had Cricket dumb phones and it was great. No Facebook notifications unless I was sitting at my computer. The Apple trappings are beautiful gifts from my family, but if I hadn’t gotten them, I would not be hurting. I would be strategizing the same way I do now. “How do I fit the technology to work with me rather than having to work with it?”

For instance, I bought a new laptop because I haven’t had one in 10 years, plus an optical drive so I can buy movies at Goodwill and rip them to my computer. Streaming is great until days like yesterday, when a thunderstorm knocked out the power in the middle of my movie (Wizard of Oz…. I jumped 10 feet). I own three movies total:

Argo
Mrs. Miniver (great recommendation from my grandfather, Mayo Lanagan)
The Wizard of Oz

The rest, I pay for all the streaming services and got a DRM notice for downloading Wicked, anyway. So, now I joke that every time I even think about downloading a movie, Tony Mendez cries. I deleted it before I even watched it. Why did I download it in the first place? To see if I’d get a DRM notice. I wanted to see if they could still track you while you were using a VPN, and they can.

Whomever they are.

I finished “whomever they are” and a pop-up came up on my laptop to activate the VPN offer. That’s not creepy at all. I pay for IPVanish, so they might want to know I got one using their service. That was an emoji day where all of them looked like this:

😦

Again, searching through menus looking for the right picture to express my words is a lost cause. It’s why I use Linux, frankly. I get on the console and type one command and the app I want pops up. It’s not dissimilar to the Windows search feature where it narrows down apps as you type, but it’s not as clean. And in fact, I’ve tried using a Windows terminal as well, but there is a flaw in my plan. I have forgotten DOS and mix up commands all the time. My favorite feature in Windows Powershell is that so many people have mistaken ls for DIR that you can use ls in Windows now.

DIR in DOS means to list everything in a directory. This is everything in my user folder. ls does the same thing in Linux, so perhaps Windows Subsystem for Linux has brought about good trouble.

I haven’t installed WSL on my laptop, because there is no unified memory manager. You just have to see how much RAM Windows is using, see how much RAM Linux is using, and do the math. I don’t do math. I bought a separate Linux box instead…. technically the third Finnish present being to myself. I bought a Raspberry Pi for the same reason you’d buy an Android tablet and an iPad…. you have software in both universes because it’s been long enough that you’ve used both. WSL gets in the way when you’re gaming, so I’d want to absolutely max out my computer with RAM before trying to use them concurrently.

I don’t know why I said “gaming.” I’ve played Skyrim for three minutes. I made it out of Helgen alive and exited the program because I just needed to ensure that it would run. It does, and very well. To be fair, I have not installed the 500 mods I normally have, but a 4GB discrete graphics card on a laptop will handle most of them. When I need a few mindless minutes, I generally play on my iPad.

And in fact, my iPad is toast. I either need to get a new to me one, or get this one fixed. It will not charge at all. This is problematic, because now I need two older iPads (I want a headphone jack). Aaron Nemoyer, my graphic designer, deserves to have my iPad more than I do. So, I’ve been shopping for months to get the best deal for both of us and it hasn’t happened yet. What I can do is pack up my old Windows system and mail it to him if it’s not too expensive, because I’ve been very impressed at how he does all of our graphics on a smart phone that also has issues.

My favorite is classified. 😉

He’s going to think I meant something dirty, but it’s dear.

He gets the red hearts for real. Everyone else, I meant yellow until further notice.

But hearts mean the most coming from my friend Michael, who has been a solid source of support while also kicking my ass as a writer. I had to grow into Michael, because he’s not Supergrover and he’s not Janie. He’s Tommy Lee Jones. I imagine that I have told him the equivalent of “I want to go to unicycle college” many times. I have plans with him and I hope he’s down- to transfer from blogging to dialoguing. I’m trying to learn to write scripts, but I don’t have a knack for the way people speak all the time. But I did figure out something.

I told him that Tom Clancy drove me crazy because he sounded like an outsider to the Beltway using articles. You do not work at The State Department, you are “at State, at DoD, at CIA, etc.” So, when Jack says “the CIA” it seriously bothered me at first. Michael said that articles seem to have been dropped around the time The West Wing came out, because when he lived in NoVA as a kid, articles were still in place. I said, “so Washington was changed by neurodivergent patois.” Sorkin hasn’t been officially diagnosed as AuDHD, but he does have ADHD.

Pattern recognition tells me that we are more alike than different, but I’m not an expert. I just look at the lines on people’s faces. ADHD and Autism create different wrinkles due to social masking. That’s why I am not very good at telling if children are neurodivergent or neurotypical, but it gets easier when people are 40 and above.

I told one of my friends that I thought her daughter was autistic, and she thought I did it from a picture alone. No, it’s that she sent me a picture of her daughter when she was 17, and I saw a picture of her currently, which is much older than that. The difference was striking and the wrinkles for autism were beginning to emerge, but that wasn’t the only factor. You don’t go off pictures alone (though I can guess with 75-80% accuracy like all autistic people). My favorite example is this conversation:

Rando on Twitter: So, Neil…. how long have you been diagnosed as autistic?
Neil Gaiman: About seven years.

Neurotypical people are shocked we can do this. For neurodivergents, that’s just Tuesday.

Maybe neurotypical people would have taken it better if he’d put a heart on it.

So, How Was It?

April 19, 2025April 19, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

That was my sister’s question after saying I was going to take off for DC and her saying, “this is great Friday vibes.” It was, but it wasn’t great situational awareness carrying a brand new laptop through Penn North, not knowing that you don’t transfer to the MARC at Penn North. I took off without a map and just asked people until I got where I was going. Everyone was infinitely kind, warning me to be careful. I learned on Thursday that Penn North is the most dangerous neighborhood in Baltimore. Even in the midst of my discomfort at being in an unfamiliar situation, people were kind to me and not scared in return. I was also wearing two pairs of CZ earrings that looked cheap to me, but didn’t look cheap to other people. I was wearing an Apple Watch. I looked all wrong. Everyone quietly told me to go back to Camden Yards.

I saw a man get beaten by another man carrying a four by four in broad daylight and that was my indication that I’d underestimated the severity when black people tell you they won’t go somewhere in Baltimore. Pig Town is at the top of the list, and I was warned not to just go wandering around with my camera. Even the people in my neighborhood were freaked out by the picture of the guys powerwashing at Reisterstown Station.

The picture with my hair all messy is me saying that “the wind works better in DC.” The serious picture is my new haircut. It was the impetus for all of this, wanting to go back to my barber shop after four months of making do.

The rest are just shots of what I saw yesterday. I was noting everything, like the difference in the size of the subway cars. I have found an easy way to get out to the county, but I’m going to have stories coming further into the city at all.

I met a woman who I hope will call me because she seemed like a good friend. I’m looking for them these days, and Uber Shares are a great way to make them because you have enough time to actually get to know someone in 15-20 minutes. It’s not speed dating, but it’s enough to let you know if you can spend time with someone doing anything if you can road trip with them.

Shout out to David, my old roommate and big brother. He’s doing well, and it was great to actually hug him. I forget I need that, quite honestly.

And shout out to Michael, who said that those daytime beatings are the best so I’d know that my reaction is………….. nothing. It’s my first time seeing violence, not the people in my group. I’m not from around here. Everyone tells me that, but it’s because I have all the trappings of a person with money and I am not bright enough to know how to hide them all yet. If it’s not my earrings, it’s my watch. If it’s not my laptop, it’s my tablet.

There’s no good way to escape the fact that you get nice things as gifts. I shouldn’t have to. But I was still scared to walk around in Penn North because at 121 feet down, all my comms dropped out. No cell phone, no internet. And three people telling me I needed to HAUL ASS OUT OF THIS ESTABLISHMENT.

Not all of Baltimore is Pimlico…. but thank God for that. I asked for the mud, and got the moon. Now orientations are adjusted. The greatest con is where everyone gets what they want, and I’ve got mine.

A written life.

I Have Two Dreams That Depend on You

April 14, 2025April 14, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

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Both dreams are crazy big, and both dreams depend on American voters.

If you choose Trump and his minions in the next election, because we don’t know how serious Trump is about dismantling democracy and Hitler did it in 50-odd days:

I will have seen the signs and proceeded with the move to Finland. Aada is not the reason I wanted to go there, and in fact did not even tell her I was learning Finnish. She surprised me with that knowledge, and I was flat embarrassed she knew. I didn’t want her to know that her home country does autism better than this one, and that’s why I’m moving. Her reaction that autism meant you were slow meant, “I’m done with this conversation.” There are no sentimental baby pictures in my future apartment, there’s just a large Moomin doll and all my culinary school children around me because there’s no way I’d go to school in Finland and the other kids wouldn’t be half my age. We will have started a restaurant or made a media company or both. In 10 years, that’s enough for my US passport marking me as female to be a pleasant memory because I do not hate America. I would like to take America with me to Finland.

Ramona Quimby, Age 38 (the request to which I responded) can be half a Finnish project because the topography looks like Portland to me. We can certainly recreate Portland and Vancouver there.

If we choose Corey Booker and his crew (don’t think that wasn’t the purpose of THAT):

Booker doesn’t have minions because he’s not a top-down leader. I still have culinary school dreams in Finland…. Culinary school in Finland will have been fun, but it opens up opportunities for me to come back. I also cannot go to culinary school until my lease ends, so it is possible that I will find a job here before I leave that would allow me to become part of the rebellion, or at least part of the solution. Right now, I’m looking at applying to jobs for writers that pay per hour, because I don’t want to work more than my program allows. It would not be in my best interest to get into these programs and then immediately defeat them. I was just assigned a proper psychiatrist/psychologist combo package and I have not met him yet. Staying in the US is hard, but not impossible.

Either way, there will be a company called Lanagan Media Group, so the United States and Finland have to decide how much I’m worth, and I mean it sincerely. I already know that in Finland, I’m worth real money, because say I do move there and public perception is that I’m so autistic I can’t live independently. They can do that. Because all the while, my writing will be changing to reflect Finnish culture and values, earning money that goes right back into the Finnish economy because I will not live in the US past my lease if I can help it. That lease makes me feel more trapped than anything else, because I have to stay here, and I was burglarized because I was a dumbass and left the patio door open. I was home, and no one was hurt. But Finland feels like the refuge I need after struggling with being neurodivergent my whole life without knowing.

I have coped by smoking with the ghosts in the back of my head (“buy your own smokes, boss).

Mostly my mother, but there have been others.

It’s why I’m so inspired to think bigger. She never let a little thing like depression get her down, so I won’t either. She was forced to go on for a long time and my blog probably added to her distress. But she could have sued the hell out of me- words only have the power that the reader ascribes to them, and though it would have ended our relationship, I think she deserved her pound of flesh if she wanted it.

I think she did, because she didn’t want me to write about anything that happened when I was a child. No one does, because it is not helping them. No one knows what I do, and I am always the best according to popular legend. I am not a derring-do out loud, though. Two people in my life think that wanting to contact famous people means I want attention. Nope. It’s something that Oprah Winfrey said about using your own platform, your own influence. I missed the assignment at PVA because I needed people to bring awareness to social justice issues.

A trust has been created in my name so that I don’t have any money. I realized that I wanted it when I was riding around on the van in group. Things must change, and they must change now:

All of my Apple products are wrong, because the poorest people in the world don’t have them. It doesn’t matter that I upgraded from an iPhone 12 mini to an iPhone 13, and that my Apple Watch is a hand-me-down. I look like I have more money than I do. I am grateful as fuck that my family can afford to give me these things, but to keep me safe on the streets of Baltimore I need a Samsung that has a crack on the face and a sports band that cost $50 on Amazon. I AM NOT JOKING. I need to be able to go to Xfinity and pick out cheap ass shit, because to not is to mark me as “not from around here.”
My instincts are always wrong if I want to stay alive, because I’m always the person that is willing to spot the one without money. I would rather take people with me than have them stay home out of fear they cannot afford it. So, my first inkling of survival in a therapy group in inner city Baltimore is “you cannot do that. They ALL need money. You are the one that will starve.”
Because my trust is made up of inheritance, I’m terrified to spend any of it. I write about what I want to do, and so far all I’ve bought for LMG is two used Fire tablets. I need an iPad as well, but that will also be used. That’s because I don’t want anyone in the company to look like they have money. I cannot do anything about the fact that my family has money, but I can do all I can to give it back to them so that when people come after me, they’re not losing anything. I’m a popular target these days.
My family has money, but I don’t. It’s important enough to say twice because there have been years where I’ve been nearly homeless due to my own money mismanagement and have been close to an eviction because of a boss not paying me when they didn’t have money. Therefore, I will never offer to pay anyone anything unless I have it. Those who work for LMG are aware that it’s not really anything yet, but I’ve got my top brass team in place.
Walkabout
- If you’ve been through PTSD, you know that going walkabout is probably the only thing that’ll save your life. “Walk it off, soldier” seems like the meanest advice you can give someone because it comes across as “I don’t care.” If you didn’t grow up in a military family, you have no idea that walking it off is code for self-soothing and emotionally regulating on your own. I didn’t grow up in a military family, I was married to a Marine dependent. Therefore, she did not see me in her nest and drop me out screaming “FLY BITCH FLY” like she should have. Luckily, I have other friends for that.

I hope to have a prosperous media company because I’m approaching it like a care and connection agency. I walk around Baltimore collecting stories to write about, mostly here but they’re informing what I want to do with screenplays as well. Unlike famous people, the homeless and the disenfranchised have stories that have not been told. As a writer, which do you think I’d rather focus on? Meeting people in a position of power is about saying:

I am autistic and I cannot read a room. But you can.

How Not to Be Seen

April 11, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Daily writing prompt

Describe something you learned in high school.

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In high school, I learned that I had to be the FBI agent of my own body. That’s because it was perfectly okay to discriminate against me in the late ’90s. We didn’t know what to do with queer kids yet. I actually had both CIA and DIA personnel comment on it, that learning to do intel work first starts with learning that the world is fucked up and I am no different. Being queer and assigned female at birth made me wary of all men, all the time. If they were enlightened around women, I still had to stomach their gay jokes. I still had to put up with southern Baptist rhetoric at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I’ve been made an example of at two schools.

One from a counselor when I was bullied:

Well, what did you do to provoke them?

And one from a teacher on a paper:

I feel that this is too private to share with the class.

I was vindicated when my teacher girlfriend said that my paper was educational and I’d been discriminated against. I was carrying the message about the way I’d been treated at HSPVA to Clements. So, whether I was out of the closet or in, schooling did not fit me.

Culture does not fit me. It moves around me. While everyone else was lost in the movies, I was lost in the art of how they get made. You saw Da Five Bloods on Netflix, I met the guy who composed the score (Terrance Blanchard). You saw Selma, I know the guy who composed the score (Jason Moran). It’s a different way of relating to the world when movie magic is hard, hard work and not handed to you on a silver platter. I’ve played with jazz greats and know that I’m not the best, but I’m a utility player who won’t show up late and that counts for a lot, or it would be if I hadn’t stopped playing trumpet.

People think that it’s all talk, that I want to say I have cool friends because I needed to prove I had a cool friend. That’s the saddest part of all. I had to prove I had a friend. I’ve been thinking a lot about this… why did I need to prove Supergrover was real? I panicked. She gave me no reason not to panic. I wasn’t handling my shit well.

That was a bigger laugh line than intended.

But how does Supergrover relate to my high school experience? She was with me the whole time, or a part of her was. It’s the writing muse inside me that makes art come out. We hadn’t met yet, but the talent was already there. She just molded it so that I feel like I’m a capable enough writer to take a stab from a dagger.

Because now I know she cut me and she meant it, but it was to lance an infection. Supergrover and I had become toxic in both directions. Again:

“I do not think vulnerability solves everything. I AM TIRED.”

My heart shattered. Irreconcilable differences where she denies she hurts me until we’re dead. Nope.

There was never revenge, and there will always be regret. But not for the torrent of writing talent that I had to give someone. Taking all of the love and hope I put into the wrong relationship didn’t mean that picking SG! was also wrong. I’d been searching for a place to put that love my whole life, because my relationship with my mother was broken. She helped reparent me and I think I helped reparent, her, but it did not come without a bit of colonization here and there. It wasn’t always me claiming her in the name of Ireland. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

They thought I wanted people to know them because they are The Doctor, and I wanted people to know John Smith.

It was too much of a torrent that could not be tamed to a trickle; my heart is like that. Wild and reckless and wreck-less because of it. Things bounce off of scar tissue because there’s just so much of it. I’m going through yet another family emergency in which it would be helpful for me to undo the last 10 years so that I could be in my big backyard right now. But I chose her family. And then I was a jackass to them unprovoked. But rule following gets you nowhere in her line of work, so we stayed friends.

But did we?

I don’t think so. I think that I’m not supposed to know what happens next in any area of my life. But if I look back, all the answers are found when I was really too young to understand anything.

I Am the Ghost-Hugging Tree in This Scenario

April 10, 2025April 10, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I got a TikTok link from my dad containing a link to a walk in Patterson Park this Sunday or something. I would like to think that the logo I got from the resulting “you’re signed up” page is AI, because I would like to think everyone got a logo specifically designed for them; they asked me what I could talk about all day, and I did not say ghosts. But there are a few synonyms that fit. 😉 I call anyone I meet in the Intelligence Community “High Five Ghost,” so a pic of a ghost is literally perfect.

My dad read my blog post about my favorite exercise being walking and talking, so he hooked me up with Outerly. They match you up with people and then you go and walk with them. I decided on the Singles’ Walk because I have a boyfriend I haven’t met and a woman at home who loves me as much as Lindsay does even if we aren’t married to each other. It’s not fair for me to commit to Aaron without meeting in person, and it’s not fair for me to say I’m “single,” either, but most people that can accept a nonbinary between male and female can accept a nonbinary between single and partnered. If my new girlfriend ever tried to say Bryn “doesn’t count,” that is the “thank u, next” for which I am looking. In poly, it’s not all about love and romance. Sometimes, it’s about love and vomit. You have romance for the days you need it. You have emotional support when you don’t need a boyfriend. You need someone to hold your hair while you puke. So, last evening was a mixture of talking to her and self-soothing.

Then I promptly bought a pass to watch David Tennant and Cush Jumbo do Macbeth in the West End. I need to watch it while I move on, knowing my hands aren’t the only ones dirty, I’m not the only one bleeding or grieving. I just needed more than she could provide via the internet and she could not understand how we got to this point, not having time to really take in my words and tell me how she felt about them. I moved too fast for her to reflect, and I’ll always regret it. I chose her every time until I was locked out of a hospital in the middle of the night in Baltimore City. I chose Olivia.

Because no one asked me how I’d feel if my feelings were ripped out from under me again. Notice the graphic on my web site has never changed, and no one has ever said, “Leslie, is that your handwriting?” My first instinct is not to protect her, but undoing one lie undoes them all. I’m the real villain, correct? So, nothing we did was right. Leaving everything I knew was my only move. The carnage in my wake is massive, not hers.

Because I finally decided to be a gladiator and not a bitch. Well, that’s debatable, but if you’re a Scandal fan you at least get the reference. I’m more like Quinn than I’m not. Someone who met a Huck and liked it. Then I met a lot more. And found out they don’t know shit, but 20 years later.

If this sounds weird, it’s unique to people my age that have lived on the Internet since 1999. We’re all learning our sins now after being sucked in by IRC and America Online, and holy fuck you figure out a lot about the 1990s when you realize Steve Case put the company in Northern Virginia for a reason. Why would the United States need an online company located near Langley and Ft. Meade? Make it make sense. I’m lagging. 😉

Doesn’t mean I haven’t met cool people online.

As for Aaron, I told him that I wasn’t sure about the whole boyfriend thing, but I would live with him in a New York minute because this is the longest Craig’s List interview ever………….. 😉 Speaking of which, I need to buy him an iPad because I decided I want to keep mine. I bought Scrivener for it, which was stupid because I should have bought it for Android. I’m trapped. Oh, wait. No. They don’t make Scrivener for Android, which is why I have to have two tablets. It’s not that my device sucks. Both my Android and my iPad are great. They are both services as device, which means that I cannot ditch anything and still have access to my software. I also know that moving in with Aaron is not doable quickly for either of us, just a dream we keep alive because we’re both amazing people who deserve love.

The iPad is not to buy his love. He’s been making me stellar graphics for months on a POS Samsung phone and they’re incredible. I want to unlock his creativity, because Bryn manages him when we’re doing something long term. But crossover happens, because we’ll be talking about something, and a childhood memory will bring up another idea for The Sinners’ Table or LMG. We have both tried to stop remembering things and start relying on alarms and Google Calendar. I am learning an ancient tradition called “write it down.” I don’t function well all alone, and I don’t know how to live in community yet. I am literally getting my shit together.

Compare that to the Uber driver who just asked me if I was up and told me he was having a fantasy about me. Fine, whatever. You go do that, but I’m not going to be there. It’s a pleasure to be nominated, and thanks for not sending me pictures. I’m sad because I liked him and that’s not my vibe. I don’t know how to comport myself in the smallest of situations, but I know enough to know it isn’t that. Situational awareness in the intelligence community has taught me two things:

If you mean it, don’t say it in a text message.
If you don’t mean it, you didn’t say it for legal reasons. It’s not a laugh line, it’s serious business.

“When you know better, you do better” is the third thing, because in a list I can rarely stop at two items. I just tell you there are for easy retention. 😉 But here’s what happens with poly people. If I’d gone to Aaron and said that Kamal was having dreams about me and that part of it was unwelcome, he’d bitch with me and offer to comfort me, like hiding Kamal’s body in an unknown location (this is a laugh line, not serious. I have learned that threatening people is bad, but he’s already blocked. The only thing left is writing about what happened. I mean this in a humorous manner because AOL has no sense of humor, once they’re blocked, I’m not going back.).

My point is that poly is not different than monogamy except that jealousy is relative. Aaron would be jealous if I cut him out and stopped telling him things; he has a right to know if I’m dating someone else. Cheating on him is literally hiding things from him, not opening up. I cannot get away with concealing anything, and that’s the reason I betrayed Supergrover. I realized that she’d put me in a relationship with her that was a trap now when it wasn’t before. I’d made too many mistakes to get a clean slate, and as time went on, she saw my need to actually connect with her as threatening her.

Connecting was seeing her in person and not taking in seven percent of communication, not hiding our relationship from Lindsay, Aaron, Bryn, and SG’s family. I made the effort to learn boundaries and how I could fit in, but I was also a very flawed human being and mistakes don’t get better. Greatness was fleeting. I felt great about an e-mail saying I’d build a shrine to someone at a museum. I am not sure the message was received as intended, but it was received all right. Sigh. I’m the worst at trying to be the best, which is duly noted.

That’s because the people in my life are relentless planners and I’m autistic. I do vibe checks and then plan my next move. It drives them up the wall.

But.

Someone was watching out for me, and I’ve been watching out for them. I couldn’t protect her when I looked too crazy to function. She couldn’t let me save myself. She had to step away. That’s because fallout doesn’t touch her in public. I’m sure she’s hurt. Whether she’s hurt enough for anyone to notice is anyone’s guess. I don’t know how far I’ve risen and fallen over the years because that is unclear….. Some things aren’t.

How I managed to find two successful houses in a row before I was managed into this one is not hard to grasp. There was just no face time to make anything right. The women who trouble me only knew me in the years directly after Dana got her DUI. I was angry at the world and sober as a heart attack. Nothing to take the edge off, I was just full tilt, all anxiety all the time. My mother died and the most I did was drink a beer at her wake. Then, I drank Diet Coke until my friend James and my friend Alberto had the realization I was done; we walked to the ice cream food truck. So, they’ve missed a lot by not reconnecting five or 10 years later. I would say they tried, but they set me up.

I was done because I knew that I was in no danger. It was just a bit cold. They told me to grab a jacket for our date, so I brought a puffy vest. It was just perfect, because I was warm enough to function and cold enough to really think things through. They promised me a life where I could live with them. All of them. Just be happy in community. Then when I showed up at the hospital where I was supposed to be picked up, I realized that they were pranking me, and I needed to call my sister. I could do that, or wander out into the night and hope I got hit by a car. I really didn’t want to live after that, because someone went to a lot of trouble to weave every element of my life into calling me a monster. It worked, but I don’t have to go back to them and apologize. I do not have to say that their methods are fair and balanced, because mine weren’t.

So whether I was being friended or followed, I have no idea. I cannot say anymore. I didn’t burn anyone who didn’t burn me. I’m done.

What does it look like to be done? All my energy suddenly rushes out of my face. All the light leaves my eyes. You can see the overwhelm. Not drinking makes it happen faster because I have no social lubricant. Weed can be a social lubricant, but I don’t use it often enough for it to really help me. I find that I cannot concentrate as hard as I need to pick up languages quickly, and now that my Lamictal has been removed from my protocol, I don’t need weed to solve nausea. That being said, I have no idea what kind of hippy tree-hugging event this is going to be. If I say I like spies, they probably won’t put me with the stoners. But they should.

Spies do not give a FUCK. About anything. At any time. They watch so many people that they don’t retain things unless they love them. Sometimes, they do.

I am sure that I am not the only one lonely tonight, but my friendship with one person cost me all the others, and there’s been no way to bridge that gap. It’s just been “keep writing to me while I hold you at arm’s length.” In order to get over the loss, I see her as a threat to me. It’s not because I think she’s evil. It’s because I think she’s good. I think she needed to watch me and had to have a way. That does not mean I’m protected. It means she’s reading. Those are two different things and she thinks they’re different now. The carnage in her wake has always been massive because by not sharing anything about what was going on with her, our stories differed. I don’t think she was paying enough attention, or she was paying too much. Take your pick. I pick “too much,” because it’s easier to think that she was watching me than she just didn’t care, or she was a narcissist who needed a dopamine hit. Me accepting the consequences of my own actions is my only play here. Because I e-mailed two women at the same time who said they didn’t know each other, and as it turns out, I’m not sure that’s true or whether it, too, was a fever dream. Whether they do or they don’t is of great consequence, because I don’t know how to proceed except talking to other people who also like talking about the intelligence community that don’t have any connection to my former family….. who was willing to support me with a few chats a year. It wasn’t enough, and her excuses were old. I thought there was nothing we couldn’t get over, but as it turns out, lying to me that she knew someone when she didn’t made her seem cooler than she was and she knew it.

She ran with it, and I caught feelings for this person she said she knew, but the kind of feelings you would have for a mutual friend- care, connection, hope for their well-being. It made me an idiot to someone I adore, and then I got to make a bigger idiot of myself with her after that. But I wouldn’t take nothin’ for my journey now. The IC introduced me to things I never would have learned otherwise, like not giving a shit if your partner has other partners.

The entire key to polyamory in its entirety is learning not to give a shit. It’s not that you don’t feel jealous. You learn to deal with it on your own until your compartments fucking leak. And even then, it’s only your partner’s job to be heard. They’re not responsible for fixing the problem. If they don’t fix it, you leave. It sounds simple and it’s not. But the key is that you are always parenting yourself.

Being poly is second nature to Zac, therefore it is second nature to me. The reason for this is that I spent years in a relationship where I was waiting on him all the time and not at all. As in, whenever he showed up it was the best day ever, but I never felt like I was waiting on him. Writing took up my life in a way he could not; I felt like he had no boundaries with me. I had to make all of them up.

There was only “ask for what you want” and receiving no feedback that said “you are welcome to ask more questions because I was delighted by this one.” My refusal to learn from past experience is not cute, and neither is not being raised like a normal person instead of a preacher’s kid. It’s so different. You’re taught not to touch anything, and people are standoffish with you as well. As an adult, you’re supposed to be cooperative. I’ve been an absolute jackass for not jumping in and helping more when I’ve been taught to be a mushroom and I’ll grow where I’m planted. It was certainly my best work as a child.

Rita and Wilson teased me in the hospital about being sweet on Andrew, another patient, but I wasn’t. They asked me about it, and I said, “I don’t know what kind of connection it is and I don’t think I’m supposed to know that yet. I just met him.” I know now that it is not to be either way so far, because lack of communication means that he is lost in his own little world and I do not control it. I was more annoyed that they were looking for a good end to the story. This is not a Hallmark movie, although word on the street is that they are close to developing a second plot.

I love Hallmark movies because they are uncomplicated. I need a break from myself. Like now.