Tag: mental health

Zip, Zap, Zop

~ 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

~ 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

~ 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

~ 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

~ 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

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
View all responses

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

~ 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

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
List the people you admire and look to for advice…
View all responses

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

~ 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?

~ 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

~ 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

~ 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

~ 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.

Cute logo from Outerly, of a tree hugging a ghost.

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.

Walking and Talking at Sorkin Beats Per Minute

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What’s the most fun way to exercise?
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Walking while listening to “The West Wing” is my favorite way to exercise because of something my dad said when I was a kid… that the first rap song was in “The Music Man” (with a BIG bass drum… big bass drum). It is from that movie that I got the concept that music and speech are the same thing, and I would bet that something similar happened to Aaron on the way to the forum.

Connecting “The Music Man” to the punctuation inherent in Xhosa comes from Trevor Noah. That Xhosa is one of the only languages in the world where you can hear its punctuation out loud. In short, I’ve been walking and talking since I was a child… emphasis on the talking because I don’t walk that easily.

This is what it’s like to be an empath preacher’s kid in my daily life:

My blog makes me sound like a dick because I am this person in an Uber. It doesn’t seem related, but I have to have a place to vent about everything that happens to me because taking on these stories is not easy. I have rituals for “washing off” negative energy because there’s only so many times I can hear someone is a shit father (usually) or a shit mother (more rare, but men talk more about it because dollars to donuts they’ve found a sympathetic ear who’s a stranger and they don’t have a best friend). Meeting anyone in IC is an anathema to my work as a listener, because I cannot share any of that information. I just have to let it sit and fester inside me. It’s why I felt tortured over world events a good bit of the time and “everyone knows what the group is.” Now that it’s all in retrospect, it’s frightening how well my little company is known, but with great power comes great responsibility. I have situational awareness and I wouldn’t date anyone else in the IC unless they worked in the mail room. That means they have security training, but they won’t have been read into anything truly heinous.

Neither was I. I just have a good imagination so any piece of information and I was off to the Google machine in a way that no intelligence agency would want an untrained autist to do.

There is no bigger danger to intelligence and medicine than an untrained autist. That’s because I’ve had two friends in the IC tell me that I’m too smart for my own good and they have to pull back. Believe it or not, it’s unfair, but it’s love. It just feels like emotional avoidance when they don’t replace it. Ok, so don’t talk about work. How’s your dog? I listen to baby dogs snort and snuffle to avoid talking about anything real. Most people do this, I’ve found. Memes are popular because everyone wants to comment that there is a dumpster fire with emojis and graphics, the modern day eight by 10 color glossy pictures, I suppose.

I have been bucking up against that practice because it looks fake because it is. What’s the Kellerman quote about deep emotional wounds? You need a surgeon, not a barber. Until about two years ago, I thought that if you were CIA you weren’t allowed medication and had a bastardized version of therapy that fits the government’s needs, not yours. Though I do believe that Carrie Mathison was a great case officer, I could have done without all the illegal shit it took to get her the right meds, because the whole bit about her not being able to work for CIA if she was mentally ill was fake. I am sure that it’s true that if you’re caught in Russia, they won’t give you your medication. But I believe they train you not to get caught, and there would be nothing better to help people not get caught then actually addressing their medical and emotional needs.

Is there room for shame and vulnerability in the Intelligence Community?

I think there is, it just looks different for the general population than it does for them. The problem is that lies build, even lies told to protect your friends and family. It gets worse when a case officer is hell bent on protecting themselves, and they really, really hurt you. Even if it comes with an apology, it’s not enough.

One hurt was on Homeland. One hurt was on Supergrover. One hurt was on Zac. All three of them were erased by Mummo, from whom all blessings flow.

Mummo is Finnish for grandmother, and the woman I social masked to figure out who I was in return. I just am her mirror opposite in some ways, exactly like her in others. For instance, we both wear men’s clothes and cute glasses, but she’s a boring cis straight girl and I’m, well… not.

I misspoke when I said Supergrover had made it clear she was attracted to men. I meant that she made it clear she was attracted to cis men. I don’t rate, and that’s fine. She met me when I self-identified as a woman, and she was halfway to married, anyway. Having a preference for cis men doesn’t make her a bad person, nor does feeling love for her make me one. It was just problematic in the way it began, because when IC overshares about their personal lives, you really cannot give consent. You can because you’re an adult, but you can’t because you have no idea what contract you’re signing. You just have to learn to hang all on your own.

I realized I could have had a career in intelligence if I’d bought Duolingo the moment I’d moved to Washington, because I wasn’t interested in Finnish back then. I was interested in Arabic, both MSA and the Levantine dialect. It was all self-confidence based. I didn’t really believe that I could learn Arabic, and now I can conjugate basic sentences in the hardest language in the world:

Metsässä kävelee hirvi.

This translates to “there is a moose walking in the forest.” Finnish is NOT English, however. Metsässä actually means “in the forest.” A direct translation isn’t really possible…. “in the forest, there is walking, a moose” is as close as direct gets.

Hirvi puri kerran siskoani.

Sorry, wrong piece of media. Those responsible have been sacked.

A trick I will give you for Medium is that if you speak a different language, use Google translate. I don’t know what it is about the code, but when you paste from Google Translate into something else, the AI on Medium knows it’s a different language and will read it that way. If I just type, then the AI sounds like it’s lagging, because Finnish is light and quick. It’s probably all the kahvi.

I realized that I needed more to write about than what has happened in the past, so the way my past is affecting me now is starting Modern Standard Arabic on Duolingo. Here’s my Facebook status for today:

Now that I have done several languages on Duolingo, I can tell you that the language support for Swedish and Arabic is better than the other languages I’ve tried. I will have to get on my tablet to see if AI support is offered in MSA, but it is in Swedish and it’s invaluable. Where AI comes in is voice recognition. You cannot pass a level until the AI can understand you. MSA on Duo actually starts you like a kindergartener, learning the vowel clusters and not full-on words. It also teaches you to read by making you identify those vowel clusters in Arabic. Marvelous.

People think I’m interested in MENA so I can walk the Bible. This is indelibly true. Preacher’s kid is who I am. But it is also true that I want to walk John Brennan’s “Undaunted” as well. 😉

I thought I wouldn’t be good as an intelligence officer when I was young enough to get into CIA or the military at all. I have proved myself wrong for my own pleasure. This represents almost two months of Very Finnish Problems, plus Swedish, Spanish, Russian, and Modern Standard Arabic. MSA is how I got the level up to five. I realized that because of imposter syndrome, I’d never tried to learn it when there was someone living in my house that could have taught me for 10 years. But, she doesn’t speak MSA, either. She spoke the Levantine dialect. I’m interested in both, but MSA is what they use on the BBC in Cairo…. which I need to watch…. because I’m a sharpshooter. 🙂

I got Sharpshooter level one a long time ago, then got frustrated with Spanish because I already know it. If you already know a language and you’re like me, the way it teaches will drive you crazy. Once I immersed myself in Finnish, Swedish, and Russian, I got the flow.

Duolingo is worth every penny, but you have to know what it’s designed to do. It absolutely cannot tutor you. It can build your vocabulary while you are waiting to be tutored. My friend Randy taught me that (quote o’ the moment? “is that big oil Randy?” Yeah, I’m not that bright. I’m sure he didn’t know anything about MENA 25 years ago when I was actually IN HIS OFFICE EVERY DAY, JFC).

An autist’s pattern recognition makes everything work backwards. I could have had everything I wanted with the right information, but no one was forthcoming or forthright. Things We Do in the Shadows proved correct, except someone let me in on a few things and then left me there, shining her light on someone else. This is not to say she did anything wrong. She was protecting herself from me. It does not render either of our stories invalid. She’s just not a writer, and I am. It’s funny that it never occurred to her before this week, because she didn’t buy me any fonts.

She didn’t know I was a writer, obviously.

She didn’t make a choice to become enamored with a blogger and then burn them when the flame burned bright on both sides.

Or she did, but that’s not my story.

My story is that everything makes sense. Working for ExxonMobil and focusing on Arabic instead of my wife would have led to better results, but I’m the partner that props up her man. It’s sickening to watch, apparently, because the partner in question doesn’t even have to be male. I react like the minister’s wife, not the minister. That’s problematic because she was not the model I’d like to be in the world, but she’s not not that, either. It’s a process of separating the wheat from the chaff, slashing and burning what isn’t good for me and keeping everything that can stay.

Intelligence can’t, because it twists up my guts. Arabic can, because when I’m walking the Bible, I expect to go to integrated neighborhoods if it’s safe in my lifetime. I would also work for the new inevitable Palestinian intelligence agency once they are a state with verified intel, why we cannot just wash our hands of Israel.

But what could I do at 50 or 55 besides translate documents? Pffff. Like that’s helpful. 😉

Turns out, I never really wanted to be intel. My heart bleeds too much. I want to be where I’ve always been… in my office, holed up, listening to people. Apparently, air conditioning is very important in Palestine. I would also like a pool. No one will come visit me if I have neither of these things except Bryn and Aaron, because they know what contract they signed. I’d never bring them anywhere dangerous; I just mean that they love me and moving to Palestine would complicate things, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

And if you think that my life would be different in MENA vs. here, remember that I could live in Georgetown or College Park. I live in Baltimore City.

That is also a choice, and a calculated one. Because I’m a sharpshooter. I’m trying to get relief to the people who need it. Evey Winters and Shane Torres are in. I just need to pick a venue and decide what I need them to do. Evey even said she’d roll up her sleeves and work for me (she doesn’t know how to cook). Shane was FOH at Tapalaya, which is why I want him to represent “The Sinners’ Table.” I want to name it after John-Michael Kinkaid.

It’s not because he died a sinner or anything cruel. It’s that he was going to be the chef of the whole operation when he was tragically killed on the side of 59 South. It has only been since December 8th, and I still feel dead inside at a loss I’ll never get over.

I treat everyone I meet as if they’re John. Because maybe he’s not really gone. Maybe he’ll show up in a different face. Maybe he won’t. But how am I supposed to know that in advance? I don’t. So everyone is John until proven otherwise.

Isn’t that the lesson they teach about Jesus, too?

I’m doing my best, and trying to make up for past flaws and failures. I can do that better now because there is no part of my life drowning in the dark.

The solstice has passed, and the days are getting much, much longer.

My heart is open. I am buying things I need that I have ignored, like clothing. I wouldn’t spend money on myself. Most of it is nice stuff that just makes me look like a jock. It’s designed to be nonbinary with bras built into tank tops, etc. But I did have to honor B’more just a little bit. It’s a Ravens t-shirt with this slogan:

Flock around and find out.

You just don’t realize the power of a murder until it’s coming straight at you. You’re trained to look at every problem… wait for it, Lamott…. bird by bird.

Why I Would Think That

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I mentioned the FBI in my last post. That’s what happens when you’re an American who writes about CIA. FBI has eyes on. All I’m saying is that I’d rather work with the publications review board than against them, but my attempts at fiction are weak. I wish I was a fiction writer, but the way around it is to change dates and times. So, we met in any city I’ve ever lived at any time IC said we did. This story is not about that. It’s about the stories that don’t get told. The partners who are allowed to know they work in IC, which is an underserved community because people don’t think of intelligence being as dangerous as being in the military. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my great uncle is the legend in my family because his C and/or DIA helicopter went down over Somalia in the 1980s, which cemented my star on their wall. Strange things have always been afoot at the Circle K.

“Chefs are just spies with better tools.” -Anthony Bourdain

I spent my time in the kitchen, so I already had the patois of a spy in the field. FOH and BOH gather information on customers the same way, and it is just like CIA talking to low value targets. Information passes up to the chef, he is rarely seen on the dining room floor unless you give him five or 10 minutes to put on a clean shirt and a fresh jacket.

I made her cry with posts about marriage and laugh with posts about sex. That part, I hope I can still do. “Those that lie, love their audience.” I am no threat to the intelligence community because I wanted to know the color commentary, not what anyone actually did for a living. It’s more trouble than it’s worth for me to know where and when Zac is, but that’s not why we’re not together. I just mean that I know firsthand what it’s like to be an intelligence officer. What is helpful to know and what is not. I once wrote a marriage article for all people, but if there’s an addendum, it’s “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I had to learn the hard way that there’s a limit to how much sensitive information you can hold without being tortured by it. Nothing that anyone has ever said has hurt me on face value. I just didn’t want to be an insensitive jackass and say timeout. That is not what the preacher’s kid is built for; it’s not what autistic people are built for, either. I chose people to be around me that were in the intelligence community because I felt lost and frightened all the time. The stories about my great uncle are not kind in terms of how my family was treated post-mortem. Therefore, I have a vested interest in staying frosty, but excited enough to tell you about the cool parts. It’s kind of like Craig Ferguson deciding that he would get rid of his fear of flying by becoming a pilot. I know that I am not cut out for CIA, because I am their mirror image. I hurt too badly for all involved to be objective, when their whole job is objectivity.

I also don’t want to be the jackass that publishes unverified information, for two reasons. The first is that I’m not a conspiracy theorist. The second is that I’m not an asshole. The jury has been out on that one for 11.5 years and I’m sure has been decided in the other direction by the other parties. It’s fine. I don’t have to forgive anyone but me, and that’s harder than forgiving someone who hurt you. She kept saying that nothing was ever enough for me because she used me. She needed me to be the empathy machine and couldn’t return love in that way…. or wouldn’t, I’m not sure. Because I was never sure if she was reading me in a personal or professional capacity. I was never sure how many times I made her throw up both her hands and her lunch at my illness. She knew all of those things about me, but it wasn’t a two-way street.

The truth is that I can write around a lot of things, but I don’t want to; I’d rather have a team of people tell the real story, but have it be the actual people to whom the story happened…. both what they told me happened and what actually did.

I am not responsible for a Virginia candidate dropping out of a race because I suggested an affair, because the person I said that to provided no background as to what she actually meant and I was not poly at the time. Whose affair were we talking about? The story from the very beginning, because I wrote it as it happened, is that SG! doesn’t have feelings for me. She overshared, and it made me react like a boyfriend who wanted to wrap her in foam rubber and keep her safe from harm. I was devastated because there was nothing that could be done about it in either direction to make it a better situation.

  • She has made it perfectly clear that she is very attracted to men.
  • I made it clear to myself that I was very attracted to my wife, and pretty girls are a flash in the pan. It’ll go away.

But, SG! isn’t the Virginia candidate. Who knows what she said to my ex-wife, the one actually from Virginia? At worst, I said something stupid when I was drunk (or they did, unclear) and I’m forgiving myself because I don’t say stupid shit when I’m drunk. It’s not possible when you cannot generally finish a cocktail but once in a Blue Moon.

SG! does know her, though, thus began a source of humor- updates on our favorite Instagram influencer. We just love her for different reasons. For me, she actually has influenced my clothes and glasses frames. I would pay money to see SG! dressed like our favorite Instagram influencer, but I’m betting they’re both a good time in different ways.

She does indeed love me in a “hell no, I will not pick you up at the airport but here’s money for an Uber” kind of way. She just doesn’t know how to show it because she can’t. I’m betting the story is that I’m going to be sued now, but all I want is to get better, anyway. I am hoping that all of these groups add up to the number of hours I’d get for damage inflicted, if there was any. The internet is strange. I don’t have to learn how it works anymore because no one knows.

Truly.

Meta is my favorite company in the universe, and the next MIB movie should be an interworld Facebook. Of course, aliens can communicate online. Online can also be more than it is to its users, and I live by the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

That would be Mullenweg and Zuckerberg, btw.

Zuck was a dick to a lot of people, but I see a little too much of him in me. Decision fatigue, mostly. Betting he grew a beard to interrupt pattern recognition for neurodivergence. I’m cutting my hair differently. My glasses take up a lot of my face and my hair doesn’t need to compete so much.

I’m finally seeing that no one can fire Cinderella, and I’ve been Hal all along. I’m so sorry.

“She thinks she’s CIA. Has anyone told her?”

SG! finally picked a TV show I like… she’s darker than me and seems to prefer violent trauma porn in her viewing activities, and I’m pretty sure she’s read “The Murderer’s Daughter” as well. I did not like “The Enemy Within” and I loved “Homeland” until I found out something that made me sick. It was all a lie. You can take psych meds at CIA. That wouldn’t mean anything to the general population, but it would have affected my efforts greatly after having been rejected by the Air Force (I’ve never been huge into the military. I was a trumpet player and wanted to be literal “top brass.”). Intelligence seemed easier because I’d gathered intel on people since I was young, which the candidate proceeded to exploit.

She pretended to be someone who catfished me when I was a teen, when I thought she was actually a very nice girl from Swansea, Wales. Because my great uncle (the brother of the hero helicopter pilot) came onto me when I was 17 by sending me explicit messages, I died and was born again online. I killed “LDLanagan” online until I was an adult. Back then, I was “NoPnNoJn,” the slogan for Winter Park, Colorado…. no pain, no [Mary] Jane…. a ridiculous mountain. I had to reinvent myself as a pro-level skier so my great uncle couldn’t find me out of the other teens he diddled with until he died in prison. Therefore, I’ve always had a hero complex about CIA. That if Foster had been alive, Gene couldn’t have hurt me. Foster did not live long enough to see what his brother was doing, which was retreating to CIA’s jurisdiction. He did not live in Wales, but in England.

The reason I think I’ve always been a monster is that I violently hurt two girls when I was a kid to the level where you just don’t see anger like that in untraumatized kids. I believe something happened to me, and I will never know if I’m right… but the clue is that when I was two, I was terrified of men with mustaches. I would go to anyone else; my mother would exclaim proudly.

I have never lied. I found a memory. I will never know, but I have always suspected.