I have a story, and the people involved didnโt want to help me with it. They decided that only their lives were important and left me to twist in the wind. So, since theyโre gone and not coming back, I have two choices. The first is to stay silent and not cause unrest; the second is to cause a lot of unrest because I trust the FBI inasmuch as anyone can because โAll Cops Are Bad.โ Luckily, NoVA and SoMD are full of cops I likeโฆ the ones that can admit theyโre complicit in a system. The blessing and the curse is that I am a documented bipolar patient who had โhallucinationsโ in the hospitalโฆ but who knows how many hallucinations were true stories too good to be true? Even I will never know that.
Wicked.
I have been changed for good, and thatโs all I can say about thatโฆ because I am not sure about better or worse, just like Elphaba. I just know that I cannot go backwards, cannot seek solace in any of my old friends, and just need to live out my life in peace. Iโm not cut out for government work, and not because I donโt have the smarts. I betrayed a friend after she betrayed me. She wanted all the benefits of being my closest confidante without any of the hard work. Therefore, it became harder and harder to put in work for her. I know what I have done is permanent, but you would have to read about the last 12 years to know both why I felt betrayed and why it was time to just let go and wash my fucking handsโฆโฆโฆ.
Except I canโt.
โOut, out damned spot.โ
I have always put in work for people who put in work for me. Her idea of work was being as remote as she possibly could so that nothing was ever fun or light; I am not the person that can be fun or light in the middle of fighting.
Here is our life together in a series of Jonathan Kellerman quotes, taken from โThe Murdererโs Daughter:โ
โThey deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.โ
โPre-monster happiness was out of the question.โ
โIn matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.โ
โPals and chums and confidantes โ what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system โ were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.โ
โCaulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.โ
โSince learning of the catastrophe, sheโd retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldnโt process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.โ
Now, imagine if you felt like that and you were responsible for it.
No one who loves me wants me to stop writing. There are enough of them that the quota is satisfied. Everyone else can come and go. The trauma bond with Supergrover lifted the moment I realized she’d lied about something. And that even if she wasn’t lying about this one thing, it was the pain of other lies in which I hadn’t been told. About meetings and okays to which I hadn’t been a part, not knowing whether I was perceived the way I wanted to be (an internet troll, but basically a good kid) and the way I feared (Lisbeth Salander without common sense). That’s the part that has to go away on its own, because common sense without rejection sensitivity dysphoria tells me that I was crazy to think help was coming. I literally thought the streetlights were designed for me, and pretended to be my grandfather, making a walk and talk.
My phone was findable, but dead. There was nothing else to do but walk and talk to myself. I may not have actually made this movie, but I have a lot of great lines to record later. Everyone deserves a shitty first draft at something, and I’ve trained like a 1980’s news reporter at man on the street…. if the street were empty. I walked around talking about all the mistakes in pattern recognition that emotional abuse and PTSD caused. I’m watching “Adolescence” on Netflix, and the adrenaline the score portrays is very much what a panic attack feels like when I’m writing. Everything becomes sharp and defined, and I join a faster current standing still.
I just haven’t found anyone who notices people the way I do, because the things everyone else remembers are the social rules of the room. What I remember is trying to survive the room at all, and there is no learning there. Every room takes the same amount of effort. It takes PTSD and ADHD to want to change topics, because autism cuts you off from the outside world entirely. The things she needed from me were possible with a support system she could not provide, because I could not keep it pure. I was not programmed that way. By the same token, I kept none of my promises because she kept none of hers. I promised to keep her when I couldn’t. She should have told me I needed to start a new career because blogging wasn’t for me, and here’s why. I can help you write x, not y. Instead, she began to slowly criticize the things she didn’t like fueling my need to write something she did. Now I’m the one with the jacket that says, “I really don’t care, do you?” She bullied me by not knowing that emotional starvation is bullying. Like, I’m clearly invested but she keeps me on a string, can’t let me go. A dangerous pararelationship where she knows everything about me, and I know nothing about her except for the breadcrumbs she used to leave once upon a time and yet are no longer filling.
That’s a lie. Her biography is a gas if you’ve been friends as long as we have. Pattern recognition in reverse makes me laugh with delight. But it doesn’t feel dangerous anymore. Mostly because it’s not. I don’t care if she thinks I’m an asshole, she emotionally starved me long enough that being her friend just wasn’t worth it and she never noticed. Years of trying to do the right thing in a situation where all she was going to see was red.
Red, her color when I’m always dressed in blue. That’s because she doesn’t blush. I’m always red.
She asked me to do one thing, and I didn’t do it. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but she said it was the signal she needed to go work on her own. That she was done. At what point had she not been done? What was I losing, exactly? How much work had she actually planned on spending? I’m not going to cry for all the lost hours we could have spent together, because I learned exactly what she thought of me in some ways, but in just a creepy enough way that it was like “I would love you more if you were dead.” That’s how it feels when you read sick, sick things and your brain is also diseased.
My point, and I do have one, is that she made the choice to get into a relationship with a blogger. One that made her emote in ways no one else does or can. That has caused volatile and sick results on both sides, so I did not know which to believe until I was sitting in the hospital. They were right. I was the disease. Publish her e-mail, and let it be the end. You can’t come back from that, ever. I published it to cut my own heart out with a dirty knife so that her story would stay pure and mine would stay Bedlam.
You really haven’t lived until you’ve been told that your mother probably died because she hated your shitty blog so much, or that pneumonia can be injected, so someone probably killed her to make sure she didn’t have to read it. Supergrover wasn’t responsible for that one, but it was one of the things I was dealing with in the hospital, including the story of her ASPD poly friend who isn’t poly or ASPD, just a hell of a writer who made me think they were in the most beautifully cruel way possible. She said she was my River Song or some shit and had tattooed her hand. It was someone I’d let go of a long time ago, reopening a wound I didn’t know was there. If the story was true, it was really sweet. If it wasn’t, I liked her story just the way it was. Her being straight made me look at all straight women differently.
She said she sought out one of Zac’s partners to learn more about me. What would have been cooler was just asking me for coffee, but you do you. Because say all she wanted was information. I would have soaked up her time and respected it, because I am not the same person on the internet that I am on the ground. Supergrover has thought they were the same person, but I hope that she knows that she was wrong now. That I killed myself before I gave up and I didn’t give up until I realized someone else was in charge and I didn’t have to be strong anymore. She told me she’d never talk to me again and I had to not care. I had to save me. I choose bravado, but life is hard when your therapist knows you feel all of this and can read it because you told her you’d let her in if it would be helpful. Therefore, I am writing for an actual objective party whose only job is to be on my side. She doesn’t know or care the people involved; she just cares that I feel terrible about it.
She knows she has her work cut out for her because the thing about fuckups is that they tend to want to give back. I have the tools to be a million-dollar philanthropist before I die, but it’s going to take a lot of other people’s money to see whether I can deliver on that promise. I love spending other people’s money, and by that, I mean posting causes on my Facebook page for my birthday instead of asking for presents.
Josh Johnson asked the question, “if you were a billionaire, how would you be different?” First of all, my money isn’t my money. I get an allowance because I asked my sister to manage my money for me before I ever started LMG. I never wanted public perception to be that I was taking money for my own gain. Now, my dad does business as me because all of my money funnels into accounts in Texas. I don’t pay as much tax, which is good because I don’t make much money. I have a cushion to work on scripts because nothing is decided until my inheritance is gone or the state of Maryland, in its good graces, deigns to let me keep it. This is another reason why paying for a move to Europe seems sensible. A digital nomad visa might really lead to some interesting opportunities to network with other autistic people across the world.
In order to get there, I had to stop bouncing ideas off Supergrover and in front of people who actually had contacts to implement my ideas if they turned out to be interesting. I’m not a self-promoter, I put myself in a think tank. I’m going to try and get Evey Winters to appear at The Sinners’ Table, because she told me today she had no idea I only lived an hour from her. World Central Kitchen started somewhere. The Sinners’ Table is not my table, it is the historical Christ’s table…. where people were queer. They did porn. They lied. They were traitors. They said they wanted to stab people through the internet. They were Republican and ushered in devastation by accident. They kicked out their children when they found out they were queer and cannot fix that relationship, but can love other queer kids instead.
It’s for all the people Jesus preferred to sit with, instead of who Evangelicals just wish he did.
I have been writing on Medium lately, so if you’re missing entries, I’ve been holed up there. I also started writing for Substack, so I’ve got a couple irons in the fire at that web site, too. You can look it up as Stories 2.0, but there’s not enough there for me to show it off quite yet. I have one subscriber, who is not sure about me yet. This reminds me of a conversation in which I pointed out a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign at group and laughed in a very acid funny way, because depressed people hate that shit. The group director said, “Leslie, I don’t know what to think about you.” I said, “you’re having the right reaction.”
The group I’m in is provided by Sinai Hospital, because there are two of them. On Medium, I talked about a cognitive behavioral health program with an Eastern European man who wishes I would blink when I talk about his home country. Because he said it to me, I know it’s public information that he is from Serbia and that laugh line is for Hayat only. Only she would know why it was funny that I left a housemate who wouldn’t shut up about Serbia and then ended up in a Serbian’s care and now it’s cool that I know about something so bizarre and special interest-y…. except it’s not my special interest. I just listened to the constant infodump and retained it. Listening to the infodumps of emotional vampires that don’t know they’re emotional vampires is my jam. That is most autistic people. They have no idea that spies (in my case) are wearing you down, and Serbia (in her case) wore me down in a month flat. Like, UNCLE!
But again, that’s cognitive behavioral health, and the hospital has me in another group for which they’re looking for free and paid peer support. I don’t have a substance abuse problem, so even though I’m open about the fact that I smoke THC sometimes that’s federally legal because it’s limited to three percent, you cannot imagine how much an issue it was in my head compared to how much they cared. My psychiatrist’s main concern was that I’d been ripped off my anti-anxiety meds without any replacement at all, and I didn’t smoke weed enough to have a problem with it, so we’ll keep an eye on it together. Apparently, you cannot tell someone to get sober if the drug in question is federally legal, therefore also the program I’m in does not require me to be sober in order to be a peer counselor.
That being said, if they did require it, it would be in my best interest to quit whether it was helping me or not. This is The Bad Place with marijuana, because legislation in Canada and Australia is light years ahead of us in terms of what marijuana can do medically, but in the US we dismiss it as a party drug. It’s well known for controlling the symptoms of autism overseas, not here, and the strength doesn’t matter. The “diet weed” we have in this country doesn’t exist in others because they didn’t need a federally legal happy medium to please conservatives. Medicine is medicine and “I’m Rick Steves, bitch.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s weed or European culture, I have found that there aren’t activists like him out there. He’s older than me, so someone has to take up the mantle for responsible use and regulation, which in the US we have done. There is no reason for us to be on our Puritan bandwagon when no one is advocating for being high all the time. Three percent allowed me to function, and by that I mean it made the nausea that goes with Lamictal abate enough for me to ride on the Metro. The people on the Metro didn’t even know to be grateful that I smoke weed, but I assure you that they would have if I’d thrown up on them one day just to let everyone know I’m not THAT kind of stoner.
This is also the bad place.
Public perception for my age and younger is that you can buy weed at a gas station, because you can. Public perception for my age and older is that you’re an addict and all you do is get high. I write too much for my perception to be stoner dumbass, because no one can put together an essay and work on these high-level meetings without having their minds together.
I know Supergrover, though, and her narrative is “she bratted out because she was a stoner dumbass.” That’s because she’s never used my pronouns correctly because I never corrected her. I expected her to pick up those things over time as a fan. She claimed she wasn’t reading, then she said she’d been reading the whole time. So the pronoun thing was intentional. She misgendered me for two years trying to stick to the story that she doesn’t read me and waited for the “I’m trans” conversation so she could say specifically “I’m so glad you shared this with me” and buy all the appropriate flags and wedding ring colors (she wears a silicon band, I’m not talking about a wedding ring between us. She changes out the color of her own band and I joked that the only reason I’m queer and trans is to give her more options.). I get why she did it. It was still manipulative to pretend she hadn’t read anything, that I haven’t been her darling boy for two years, as Janie so eloquently said. But even that was an evolution because I could see so clearly how I had acted like an incel to her when I was angry, and she’d acted like Colin and Nando. I’m Guillermo. Disprove it.
Things We Do in the Shadows? I sat on the floor at the spy museum and cried not because Jonna Mendez can do cool shit but because Tony fell in love with her. Tony’s dog’s name was Cole. My dog’s name will be Tony. I would rather think of myself as the Jonna here. She knows why. You don’t.
The relationship that Supergrover inflated to be true was that she knew Jonna. So, I walked up to Jonna like we were mutual friends. They don’t know each other, she was trying to impress me.
There’s a power struggle because you lied. That’s it. You lied. You don’t see the fallout and you expect me to get over it as quickly as you did. Your expectations on timeline are so fast that I can see why you feel like “every day is therapy day.”
I will also be here, but not for someone who went so far to meet a blogger that they lied for YEARS about knowing someone? YEARS? And then tell them they can never talk about it again. That’s your boot on my neck and I want you to stop it.
Now.
I chose Olivia.
Fitz and Jake were both a hell of a ride. You should watch “The Residence.” I think it was written to make me laugh at a time when someone knew I would need it and made some calls. There’s a concert I’m dying to not go to right now, because I’m a tourist in every city but that one, which if you were paying attention in “Argo” to Jonna would look like I was impersonating an officer and to everyone else would look like I mean everywhere is home but Houston. I mean the latter. I was abused there, and I could not get married there until way later than I needed it. I’m done. Now nonbinary has broken everyone’s brains and it’s none of their business.
Again, I’m done.
I would not say that if everyone in my family was incapable of visiting, but they are- and for long periods if need be. Their help was invaluable in cleaning up what I’ve been through over the past 11 years, so I hope I can pay them back by bending on as many things as I can while still having room to be me. Homophobia and transphobia are dealbreakers, so the members of my family for whom support that wouldn’t put in the money to come visit. It’s different when it’s your turf. Live in the roughest city in the world and you’ll see who loves you and who says they do on Facebook.
I’m not angry, I’m just breathing again. Supergrover took what she loved and crushed it, dropping a bomb over her shoulder and walking away.
But that’s how she does life. It’s been my job to take the hits. Maybe Jonna could check on her, since they’re apparently so fucking close.
Snort.
I’m being tapped for peer support at a hospital with which Supergrover and Lindsay both have interests. Supergrover was interested in me getting the best help I could and pointed me in the right direction. Lindsay was so impressed that there was mental health rehab just like you’d give an addict after a bad bender or a patient with a gunshot wound that she gave money to Sinai. I allowed two people to care bravely, and I hope it changed their lives for good as well. Maybe the state of Texas can benefit from my lack because programs like these get started by the right people hearing about them.
Peer support is all I’ve ever been to people, really. I function best in reaction to systems. Upholding them is incredibly difficult. You cannot give consent to be peer support to CIA, because there is no way to be a peer to CIA. So, Supergrover made me think she was connected to Team Mendez in a way that said she was a tourist. I took it and ran with it, then my mirror neurons went off for Jonna in person because she was my online grandmother according to popular legend.
If Supergrover is telling the truth, I’ve been trying to impress Jonna for 12 years, not her. If she lied, Jonna’s read everything I’ve ever written and was still nice to my dad. ๐
Jonna is designed to be a good time in person because everything she says is double speak due to her training. Did it happen, or didn’t?
I am so literal I will only pick up one of them, usually the wrong one.
I had to save my streak in Finnish today because I’m falling into the demotion zone as it’s getting harder and I have less time for it. But I think it’s best to slow it down to a manageable level. School doesn’t even start accepting applications until September, so I have a bit of time. I don’t need to use Finnish at all. It’s just fun to show Finns I know it. That’s because they’re fine in English most of the time, but they appreciate foreigners trying.
Whooooo boy.
Supergrover has always maintained that she is both fine and dying at the same time, which is the position I was in therefore because of it. Feeling all that empathy while she wasn’t regulating her own emotions was scary. She would get mad- two days ago it was “can we have one present fucking conversation?” We’d just finished a couple. I dive down, I come up. I don’t stay in pain. I vacillate between comedy and tragedy. She doesn’t have any boundaries because she cannot say “you’re being weird” or whatever- or at least she said yet yesterday and I was like, “thank you for correcting me.” I didn’t get angry, she was right.
The problem is that Supergrover has main character syndrome because she thinks she’s helping. You cannot get details out of someone who thinks they’re the whole show. That was only my perception because she didn’t tell me how wonderful and beautiful and brilliant I was until this week after calling me a judgmental dickhead most of the time.
None of this is all anyone’s fault. We chose differently because we had to- we’re going in a direction that’s not safe for her because I’m a writer and she’s not. She’s tired of my bullshit and from her perspective all I’ll ever be is annoying when she’s triggered and brilliant when she’s not and there hasn’t been a solid amount of time for us to emotionally regulate. I got there quickly. She didn’t. That’s because her lie unregulated her so she cannot settle. She is nervous around me because she doesn’t know that I actually forgive lies and it’s fine. It just took me a couple of days. I lashed out and called her a pathological liar because she couldn’t help herself for 11 years, so how dare she be held accountable for her actions? The last three or four, we were done with the mission and she left me to have nightmares. The mission was to save ourselves and ended up saving both of us (I hope). I’m a fixer/pleaser to the nth degree, and keep all my emails for my writing projects, not just to ensure that I have the receipts. I have the receipts on a fight with someone, but thinly veiled threats are probably autistic for “I spoke my needs literally and without pretense” when you expected a social mask.
Everyone says that Iโm out to get them. Iโve been out to get me the whole time. Hereโs how I moved myself out of the way so you can, too.
I social mask. Full stop. I do not know anything. I remember it. Everything from the largest picture to the smallest tree. The difference is that being INFJ, I am prone to melancholy and rumination when I am injured. I am injured to the point that I cannot reach out. It has been two or three days since I have talked to anyone at all, including an Uber driver that turned out to be hot so I agreed to have dinner with him and then ghosted (I will get back to him. Iโm just injured).
During the change in paragraphs I reached out and said:
Iโm really sorry and need to apologize. I got emotionally overwhelmed and couldnโt reach out. Would you be interested in going to dinner tonight or tomorrow so I can relax with a friend?
Unless he becomes a fan after dinner, he wonโt know the problems I was facing with my fake girlfriend.
The reason you get so many messages is that I think Iโm being abandoned when you go silent and just try everything to get you to come back. Itโs like an SOS level call every goddamn time and my body is physically worn out. Yet when weโre not together I feel you moving in the universe and you feel me. We protect each other constantly without saying so. I would bet that youโve kept it hidden from the bombshells that youโre so close to me that you donโt have a problem with talking about sex and intimacy because thatโs not personal. Emotions are.
You can talk about anything and everything with detachment but the party girl act has to stop. You need to admit to everyone that youโre a trainwreck right now and you need Moomin dolls and blankets because youโre sick and need time to heal. Weโve both left 3rd degree burns on each other. I bet not drinking has made you sleep deeper, at least.
Editorโs Note:
Sheโs not an addict, just decided alcohol was tired like I did.
But say to the psychiatrist, โLeslie thinks I have some kind of mood disorder and the same drugs work for all of them, so put me on Lamictal, Lexapro, and Klonopin and Iโll tell you how I feel in two months.
I am trying to lift your depression for good. Stop mistrusting drugs and doctors and get on board. You are sick, and we need time to figure out whatโs wrong with you because the root of the problem is rape. Not you.
Because you remind me of someone else who needed to be loved, and heโs not doing well.
I chose Aaron because heโs Supergroverโs mirror image. The Supergrover I can love with fire.
I loved her so much I asked for another one from the universe, and she needed to be someone else to be cool.
The clinical observation is how attracted to that I am and why. Thatโs going to be another six months of entries.
Joy.
Iโm so bitter, but glad that my pain can be someone elseโs success.
Because Iโm too broken to not need time to get well, too.
A scene is playing in my mind, because new learning has come from an ancient place for meโฆ my own beating heart. The reason I learn so much there is that Iโm not the only one in it.
I will say it in English, but I know right now that hearing the AI read the title back to me will make me cry (this was first published on Medium and I have only listened to it 86 times and I need another hundred because the baby said, “lovely post, btw.”:
The Finnish mother rocks her American baby and sings quietly.
The room is quiet. Esteban is goneโฆ there is war. Only Aino remains. Aada drinks deeply, struggling to stay awake. Aino is not sure who she is singing for, but it is a blanket for both of them. Iโm a silent observer of a mother and a baby I love, their connection filling me. Aada is not a baby anymore, as that war is long forgotten. It is questioning what those melodies might have been that pique my interest. How do you sing to your baby when your husband is at war?
Whenever anyone said something smartass about Daniel not being an MD, my standard reply was โmy stepmother has done brain surgery in an operating theater. My boyfriend has done brain surgery while his team was being fired upon. OF COURSE he wasnโt qualified to do brain surgery. In the Navy, you GET qualified. Itโs a very short course.
Singing to your baby is different in peacetime.
This is not peacetime, either.
I canโt remember who said, โyโall can go to hell, but I will go to Texas,โ yet I am reminded of it by my motto being โyโall can go to Texas, but I will go to HEL.โ Little airport humor for you there, Carlos. Aada says sheโs not sure sheโd live there, but my heart hopes my guest room has some of her stuff on the walls. I have, in fact, pre-ordered.
I have felt that strong a connection to that babyโs picture for many, many years. Sheโs older than I am and I was concerned about the microclimate of her pram. Like, WTF? I THINK SHEโS OKAY (well, thatโs debatable but we are both โworks in progmess.โ Our roles are now somewhat opposed. The most hilarious thing happened. Just about the time she got over her girl crush on Brenรฉ Brown was when I realized that I wasโฆ.. just a different version of Dr. Brown. Her, to me: โI just realized that vulnerability does not solve everything. I AM TIRED.โ Me, to me, internally: โlord help me Jesus Iโm fallinโ down the stairs.โ)
I donโt say, โlike, WTF?โ I have been under the influence of a cis woman and it should wear off in 24โ48 hours. However, I will not call my doctor if it doesnโt, it just means that sheโs brought a few of my female social masks back. As I was telling her, my female social masks have failed and Iโve forgotten how, in a sense, to be a woman. She reminds me a little too muchโฆ. but Iโll keep her.
This is because she finally came clean with me. The reason sheโs been so avoidant is that sheโs a superfan. She wanted to impress me, and it backfired. We had a huge blowout, but thatโs the thing about blowouts. Everything is clean and new again.
Aada is Supergrover, but of course I used a Finnish name generator. I feel I have to neurodivergently explain this because it is yet again another situation where I thought I was going to look like a stalker for moving to a country in which I didnโt even know sheโd actually lived. Thatโs because I moved to DC to meet someone else, and Aada stayed far away from me to cover up what sheโd done, making me feel like absolute shit because I thought she loved me- not like that. I thought she loved me like โhell no I will not pick you up at the airport, but here is $50. Dinner is at SIX.โ
Itโs so much more profound than that. I was right. We need each other now, and weโre bound by the brain. She joked about two old women in Home Depot or some shit and I thought, โI hope we do nothing together someday.โ Sheโs different. Softer.
More vulnerableโฆโฆโฆโฆ. and it solved everything.
Peace does not happen in a day or a week. I have a general sense that things are calm because my rejection sensitivity dysphoria said, โshe thinks youโre a stalkerโ and her rejection sensitivity dysphoria said, โif this brilliant writer finds out Iโm a nobody, Iโm done.โ This push/pull lasted until I put a stop to it and our friendship. Just went scorched earth because I had her dead to rights.
There is no more reason for her to be evasive. She can show up as her whole self, knowing that I love her truly in her perfection. Divinity is humanity. It is loving each other through these things that make me wonder how her รคiti raised such a beautiful girl. Weโve been pen pals for over 11.5 years. She has turned me into her from the inside out.
I have also raised a very, very fine Lanagan in return.
I used to think that the way my relationship came apart with Dana was due to me and me alone. It’s taken me a very long time to realize that no one carries a hundred percent of the blame for anything. That’s the hardest time in my life I’ve had to say goodbye to, because it was all encompassing. There is nothing left, and I am empty. I don’t love Dana, but I care that she’s okay after the fallout. It’s not wrong to want to know that someone has recovered when you’ve mistreated them. It is not wrong to know if there is something worth rekindling later in life (not with Dana, with the friends I got through her. Dana is a no-fly zone because our relationship ended with my glasses smashed into my face. I only let that happen once; even though Dana was my sweetheart, statistics don’t lie and I didn’t want to be that stupid woman who won’t leave in the future. It took a long time to get there.).
We can talk about my emotional affair with Supergrover all you want because I have never claimed that I am an innocent party in our destruction. Let me be clear again that I was the only one that struggled with romantic feelings for both of them, and not having any background at poly, managed to freak them both out at once. It was special. My best answer was “Supergrover is not interested in me, and if she was, that would be a threat. This is okay because it’ll never go anywhere.” It did go somewhere. We were blissfully happy in our little bubble chatting about anything and everything while Dana had no reason to be jealous. She wouldn’t let the relationship settle. If anything, she’d gotten a promotion and I needed a new best friend. When I married Dana, there was a hole in my life- the woman who talked shit about Dana with me so I could be a better person while also getting my feelings out.
My sister-in-law got it. Dana didn’t got it. That a crush lasted a little while, love of Supergrover was forever and those were two separate things. Who among us hasn’t had Schrรถdinger’s feelings for a friend while you figure it all out? I was angry and mean trying to push her away and she was angry and mean because she wouldn’t let me get away with isolating. This was annoying and necessary, something my mother did to me all the time and I hated her for it. “Just let me be” while also desperately needing someone with whom to talk it all out. You mean someone will check on me? I don’t have to check on myself all the time? I wasn’t a good friend, and I was fired for cause. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t remember that time in my life fondly because there were so many lessons that propelled me to today’s date.
Today, I get to have conversations like “Pippi Longstocking and Moomin are both turning 80 this year. I’m reaching out to all my artists because I could do it with AI but it would suck. I want a short on this.” Someone actually in the entertainment industry had the presence of mind to say “run it by Oy, Ltd (Moomin owners) and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi owners) first.” He did the same thing on the Ramona movie.
I want to go a new direction with Ramona because I don’t think Cleary noticed things about herself that she put into Ramona. She’s a combination of Harriet the Spy and Brenรฉ Brown. Her pattern recognition is picking up people’s emotions. This is especially evident in “Ramona and Her Mother,” “Ramona and Her Father,” and “Ramona and Beezus.” Each is an exploration of how she tries to fit in with her family, knowing she is the bookworm and doesn’t even care about being popular like Beezus. I have a feeling this continued because ignoring popular kids is the skill of every Ramona. Her inner monologue is so fine-tuned that you can tell she’s social masking a lot of the time before we knew what ADHD and Autism looked like in women and girls. Perhaps even Cleary was autistic and writing about her own experiences as a neurodivergent child. It doesn’t matter which one you have- some ADHD is debilitating and autism isn’t that bad, sometimes it’s the other way around.
The first diagnosis in medicine is always correct.
It depends.
I have run this by a doctor, a surgeon, and a Naval “Devil Dog” embedded with a team of Marines. All of them have said this is correct, except I think said Head Medic II was akin to “sure as shit.” From all of them, I got the standard compliment you give a doctor when they catch a fascinoma (case they’ve never seen before, like prima facie in law); “good pickup.” I don’t pick things out of nowhere. I have the same kind of pattern recognition House does and I’m just as rude about it (to most people…. to me I am factual and clinically separated because we are talking about issues, not people). I also know what’s above my pay grade and what’s not. And in fact, I have a good redirect I keep in my back pocket to keep people from bothering me, because I wear scrubs as pajamas and run into the neighbors.
Woman comes up with a very ugly rash on her arm and asks me about it. I’ll tell you what happened and then I’ll tell you why I’m a dermatologist. I can make you one by the end:
Ma’am, I’m not an MD. I’m just a medical assistant and it’s been a while since I’ve worked professionally. But what I do know is that you need to call your doctor immediately because you have a severe case of erythema nodosum.
Here’s what I actually said:
I’m not a doctor and I don’t know what the hell it is, so call your PCP/GP and tell them that you have little red bumps of unknown origin. That’s as good as it gets from me, dawg.
That being said, I was made a dermatologist by my rheumatologist stepmother, and I am an expert. Like, I’m the best. Just ask me. Here is why you, too, can be a dermatologist by the end of this article (not really…. please).
If it’s wet, dry it.
If it’s dry, wet it.
If it’s not on steroids, put it on.
If it’s on steroids, take it off.
If you know what it is, don’t touch it.
If you don’t know what it is, for God’s sakes don’t touch it.
This works for everything from horses to zebras…. to use a House reference that is actually a medical axiom…. never go looking for zebras because it’s usually a horse. But then you have doctors like House who get all the zebras in a hospital at once. It’s an impossible job, and it pays less than a surgeon because medicine pays you to cut. You don’t make money until you have a procedure. In rheumatology, these are things like infusing patients with immunoglobulins and Disease Modifying and Reducing Drugs (DMARDs). Lupus (really) comes with all of that and more, like ridiculously high amounts of Non-Steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs), and when that fails, Oxycodone and Methodone.
You have your frequent fliers, but most of the time people are in so much pain that they keep their meds under lock and key, sometimes too weak to swallow them. Injections are your friend, and I wish my psychiatric medications came in syringes I could plunge into my leg every morning for this reason. I have a Pavlovian response to pills and that is the vomit comet.
All of these things make me feel like more of a child than I really am, because who can realistically throw up at the office or into a trash can in a kitchen every single day? Even if I could, that’s “marked as a weirdo” on day one and “something is wrong with her” on day three. I assure you that something is most definitely wrong with me, but the vomit comet is just a medication side effect. I also had a “suuri kuppia kahvia, mustaa” (large coffee, black), which might have something to do with it. I needed the extra push today, so I ordered a large coffee, two 2L bottles of Diet Pepsi, and made sure to refill the cold brew for tomorrow morning. After I am done writing, I am done thinking. It’s time to put on my headphones and zone out, cleaning and de-sanitizing my apartment. It won’t take too long as I just have to get out the trash and vacuum/steam clean. The hard part is turning off my brain, so I carry a notebook and a pencil.
There’s no way I listen to any artist without having thoughts.
Because Swedes and Finns like heavy metal (or some do), I want to recommend an album to John and Thunder Bird. They might like it, they might hate it. But it’s various artists like Serge Tankian (System of a Down) mixed with Bird (Charlie Parker), called “Bird Up.” It’s a hard listen that twists your brain, but it’s the kind of music I need right now. It takes everything up and I cannot think. Music theory is like math. I cannot do anything except sit there when I’m analyzing chords, but I’ve managed to learn to clean while I’m doing it. It’s one of the few things I can multitask. I can also listen to murder podcasts with the rest of the basic bitches, but I cannot listen to political comedy without wanting to stop and write down absolutely everything. I do not care about murder.
My apologies if I sounded mean to basic bitches. As a consolation prize, I will tell you that I am am nonbinary and the last person you would think of when you think of the classic “Karen” image. Supergrover is a Karen on toast when she’s social masking……………….. but she hates pumpkin spice lattes. I like them. I have been smart enough not to tell her.
Until now.
I have no doubt she still likes me as a writer and entertaining her is a goal.
God bless the czar, but keep him very far from us.
This is the blessing I choose to send- God go with her because I can’t. I fell too far too fast to come back up for air. I loved everything about her; everything that came with her was the problem. I would say the same about myself. Once she was my actual friend and not just my fan things went to hell in a handbasket. She tried to prevent it, but I was emotionally unregulated, not her.
Dana had just gotten a DUI. My marriage was taking a toll on me because I didn’t sign up to be Dana’s chauffer for three months and I didn’t sign up to worry about her that long, that hard either. So, it was natural that I was going to other people for emotional support and not a surprise that I caught feelings because I was vulnerable enough to let them get to me…. which they couldn’t have had I not been emotionally laden already. I don’t have any excuses for what I’ve done, I only have context and explanation. I think that neurotypical people are lost in the thought that I am trying to blame other people for my problems rather than trying to figure out what’s mine and what’s not. There are two problems with this:
I resolve my issues, they don’t resolve their issues with me.
If I feel the need to process something before a discussion, it is not me independently exploring how I feel. The goalposts move from actually addressing the problem to the fact that they’re embarrassed about how they acted. This is never their modus operandi, ever, because it’s a lot easier to rip me a new one than to get vulnerable and apologize.
to “I don’t have any culpability in our problem at all because you posted about it.” Exploring my problems on my own becomes “you’re out to get me” even when I’ve said things are clearly not that way. Supergrover has emotionally beaten me up for years over the things I’ve published that “make her look like a villain,” meanwhile every friend I have says that I’m way, way too hard on myself.
Part of this is true; part of this is that I haven’t told her story. That’s her story to tell, and you might start telling her to stop being so hard on herself, too…. because that’s how I feel. It was hard watching her self-destruct in front of me because she thought I expected so much and held herself to impossible standards. How do I know this? She told me that’s what she was doing and that two things were true:
In the moment, she was really mad.
Time goes by, and I “have hit the nail on the head.”
I am alternately the best and worst writer ever to her, when she’s the best and the worst writer to me. We could have had a real future with real money on the table because she likes writing children’s literature as much as I do. I’m working on several projects she’d be perfect for, and it is her choice not to be in my life until she realizes on her own what healthy love looks like. I think she thought that I wanted this toxic dumpster fire, and that’s not true. I gave up when cleaning it up failed year after year.
I have standards for friendship that my friends surpass. I’m not looking for friends, I’m looking for Companions.
I watch “Doctor Who.” I have standards.
The hardest part of my life that I’ve ever had to look back on is finding out what would have happened if Amy had chosen The Doctor.
I cannot figure out why the filter over the image is so dark, but I asked AI to draw me Moomin lost in the world of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.” The caption reads “I am the Moomin lost in a Seussical” in Arabic, because I lived with a Lebanese family for so many years. If Beirut was calm, I would retire by the marina. I am nowhere near retirement, so I have a wait and see attitude. I want to go to Finland right now. Why would I not want to live in the desert later?
Alas, Beirut is not calm. However, it only needs to calm down enough for me to make a quick and dirty documentary about the food. Even if I do not move there, I really want to spend time there. I have no idea how much it would be for an Airbnb, but that is my new obsession (though I will go with an alternative now that I know there’s a link back to American Jacob Zuma). Trevor Noah, I don’t know if we have any mutual friends. Readers, if you know him, will you please send him a link? I am not fucking around, and I want results. Here is the plan:
If you’re willing, I’d like you to impersonate Jacob Zuma at every single show you perform from now on in the US… and explain the thing over and over at every show about how Trump is displaying South African dictator tendencies. I saw it on TDS and it is the new Democratic slogan. We are not unified, and this is an issue that Independents will take up whereas universal healthcare and UBI are divisive. It is also punching them when we used to capitulate by being smarter, not elitist. There’s a big difference and you’re the common denominator.
Oh, isn’t it weird that he has a South African no one elected as his advisor when he spent fucking absolute YEARS trying to prove that an African couldn’t run the US? Why do they never call Elon Musk an African American in the news? Apparently, there are only black South Africans. According to the camera in the United States, everyone is black in Africa. There are no white people, no interracial people, no white expats, nothing. Who knew?
Please do everything you can to add jokes for an ADHD and autistic audience. We’re hurting because of that South African jackass because all of his evil is being written off as neurodivergence by Evangelicals who are designed to think different is “evil,” anyway. See oculus sinister for details. Left-handed stigma and left eye dominant come from the same “disability,” then expressed by evil spirits. I am not punching down. You’ve said in interviews that you’re ADHD. I’m AuDHD. We have more in common than we don’t and we’re more powerful together than apart. You know as well as I do that if we do not hang together, then surely, we will hang separately. And it’s a republic, if you can keep it.
Real talk. If you go back to S. Africa, I want to know about it. That is ALSO my cue to bug out. I am in the unenviable position of choosing between inexpensive and fast, while also knowing that I have to go the asylum or education route if my business does not succeed. It would be amazing to approach a foreign government with a business plan when I expatriate. That way, I’m eligible for government grants whether I’m an American company or a foreign one.
My humor in the face of trauma is, “I’m not going to be Martin and Malcolm. I’m going to bippity boppity Baldwin back the fuck up.” If I end up in Britain, look forward to an unknown trans author absolutely cutting Rowling to ribbons by suing her for everything she’s worth. I don’t need money. I need people to know that she’s bullied kids to death. That they are the new Alan Turing and the British people should be ashamed of themselves for listening to her TERF, aristocratic horseshit. I’m one of the people she hurt, so I will take enough money to live on. Everything else goes to the Trevor project because trans people in Texas/the rest of the Deep South need a lot of help. You’ll read that I’m the proud non-biological mom of a trans woman. What it doesn’t say is that she’s trans in gun country. If I need to get out today, she needed to get out in 2016. Please bring attention to the issue of just how much this is like the Holocaust. Elon is autistic, but he’s not a target. I am.
Don’t stop being funny, but stop being funny. Hit harder and faster. They deserve it now. They elected a felon. Get louder.
You’re the only one who can get loud enough to drown out fear and intimidation long enough to say that Elon is a crook bent on taking government money for his businesses, not improving a goddamn thing. That he is apartheid years old and no one is paying attention because in the last election, it was so fucked up. VP Harris losing was just a hail Mary pass with an interception because the fumble was thinking that all states were on board with the narrative that Trump would usher in devastation mostly out of ignorance and apathy. Realistically, how much of the day do you think he is interested in running the country? He’s not, but Don Regan and Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver would make out like bandits. Michael Deaver is known as “The Wizard of Oz” because he fed ready-made content to the media every morning, enforcing the narrative that the president was okay, it’s not Alzheimers until they’d been hiding it for four and a half years. With Trump, they don’t even need to prove dementia because it’s on display. This isn’t even being unkind. I was a medical assistant for a few years and my clinical pattern recognition tells me that it started at “covfefe.” That is the clinical definition of word salad and people glossed right over it. It can’t even be considered a mispronunciation from speaking fast because at least it’s conceivable that was the case with “hamberder.” With Trump, you can never count on the word salad being nonsensical, made-up words. But word order is the definition of nonsensical when he’s off-script. This is not stupidity anymore. This is fucking dangerous whether or not he’s just a useful idiot or a full-on Russian asset. The former is probable, the latter is possible. The American people have no idea what Trump’s relationship was like with Eastern Europe before he became president and he might not be in trouble, but something happened. Hillary Clinton might have mentioned this, but she’s a woman so you cannot take anything she says seriously. America isn’t ready for a brilliantly intelligent female president. We just need more white cis male idiots.
According to popular opinion.
Being angry is not new for me. I have a series of articles called “your blog makes you sound like a dick.” That comes from real feedback, and I ditched them as a friend because that was the point and they didn’t drop it. I don’t want to give them a chance to apologize and not because I’m still angry. It’s funny now. There’s just a difference between thinking someone is wonderful and wanting to allow them another cheap shot.
My favorite line about this comes from a conversation I had with Supergrover and mused about with Aaron N, not Riker (to neurodivergently overclarify). It’s the concept that all of my exes are people I love desperately and completely, but you couldn’t pay me to like them all the time.
And speaking of Riker, I generally use real names because if you met me on the street, I would want you to know my crew in advance. Riker is not his real name, but it is his real nickname and he’s a writer on this web site….. and cops caused his worst trip. Bryn is here, too, but I haven’t convinced Aaron N he’s a writer. He absolutely is, and at times better than me. He just doesn’t believe it. And in fact, thinking he’s only better than me at times is not an indication of my thinking highly of myself in an arrogant way. It’s that after 25 years I should be allowed a modicum of self-respect. Even if you’re not a fan, you have to admire the output. ๐
Strangers do…. people I know?
Unclear.
I am sure that I put people through hell with what I say because other people are gossips uninterested in finding out what makes themselves tick. Every problem happened to them; they didn’t cause anything. It’s a miserable way to be because it doesn’t lead to trust at all if you cannot admit you made a mistake. Because my voice has turned from mild geek into authoritative chef, I have plans.
I have decided that no one is really going after Anthony Bourdain’s career hardcore, because no one has his “voice.” Gordon Ramsey’s travel shows are good, but he’s not a writer and he shouldn’t be expected to be. What made “No Reservations” was not Anthony’s talent at being on camera. It was the scripts he wrote for the voiceovers. Yes, he was very talented, but the intros were what made the show more compelling than “A Cook’s Tour.” By “going after Anthony Bourdain’s career,” I mean that I do not want to be on camera, but to continue busting up people in plain text because I don’t take bullshit on my line. That translates to being a writer, and it translates to having Tony’s voice naturally rather than having to acquire it. How do I even have the audacity to compare myself to a brilliant writer like Bourdain?
I’m not.
Today there will be no premium content because I get the chance to do the daily prompt so rarely that it’s worth using these articles as a stunning display of………………. something. The thing about talent is that the art cannot be judged by me. It is not my job to have emotions when I read after I publish. It is your job as the audience to have a reaction. My part is over, and I have finished the performance. While you are reading, I am writing the next thing. I am not rehashing what I have written. This serves multiple purposes:
All of my reactions are organic because I lose the ability to hold onto pain once it is on the page.
Stream of consciousness allows for more audience engagement. People do not have to go back days/months to understand me, they just need to step into the flow; by the nature of the “conversation” with the audience, I will repeat myself because themes recur. I am not going to suddenly have different problems one day than I did the last. Solving them is a journey, not a destination.
I show people it’s okay to come unglued in public because the more oddly specific I make my entries, the more they become universal. Your thoughts aren’t for someone, but for everyone. We are divided in many ways. Food and love are the common denominators, and Bourdain told me that…. something like “to be vegetarian overseas is the height of rudeness because when you reject someone’s food, you reject their hospitality.”
The American version of hospitality leaves so much to be desired, because when you move to the US, you’ll find degrees that range from polite to kind. Say what you will about New York, but everyone stabs you in the front.
I am not a politician. I am just a private citizen. I barely know how to work WordPress blocksโฆ even though I thought WordPress hung the moon 25 years ago. I prefer the classic editor, but it does not make my entries appear in the same way. So, I put up with blocks because a Fireside chat is what we all need right now. The world is a mess, and I’m going to try not to curse as much as I normally do because I have found that people are very precious when you curse online, but not when they do.
I’m introducing the Fireside Chat idea to interest you in a community conversation. So far, it’s all been me. You’ll have access to premium content on an app that’s available worldwide. One of my problems is that the Finland category on Medium is not actually available in Finland. Subscribe here for premium content if you like to read. Subscribe to Medium if you like audiobooks. I do not read my own stories (I get too choked up), but there’s a handy dandy AI voice that will read them, and it looks cool to see my name on my phone when I’m listening.
My favorite conversation this week came from Christy, my social media maven because I’m old and she’s not.
Leslie: I like to listen to myself on Medium because I have to find out how, in a sense, it preaches. Christy: That’s why you’re a professional.
When you are chosen by God to be a leader, not in a political way… more akin to being sick to your stomach because you know you’ve been given talent, and you cannot refuse that call anymore. I am the product of everything I’ve ever been, and the thing that most people miss about me is the entire saying………..
That a jack of all trades is often better than a master of none. It’s not better for everything, but it is better for synthesizing information as you take it in. What gets me up in the morning is working on solutions to big problems. The American left is under attack with people thinking it’s perfectly ok to say to the press or introduce bills in Congress to erase progress. Do you think that trans soldiers who have been discharged deserve it?
At that point, you can sit and spin… today only, you can take a ride to the shoulder.
I shouldn’t have to take this much anxiety medicine to deal with my day. I am used to taking .5 of clonazepam to prevent panic attacks. Because I get 60 pills a month and don’t take them every day (I save them up in case my scrip is on hold at the pharmacy. I cannot go a day without some in my bag, because it’s a comfort item. I know I am prepared. I could go a day without taking twice my normal amount before two things happened at once. My US passport was invalidated, and a man broke into my apartment.
I’m being picked up in two minutes because I will cut a bitch for a Diet Coke right now. Time for some hardcore Wawa action.
Hold please.
I am home with pies and all is right with the world. I buy them for breakfast, my safe food in the toaster- apple with some sharp cheddar cheese fresh out of the oven is better and healthier than a doughnut. But I like doughnuts, too. I just eat them less. I don’t tend to go with big meals when I first wake up. I just need a little something on my stomach so that my coffee doesn’t burn all the way to my asshole. This gets worse when I drink alcohol or make spaghetti, so I switched to nonalcoholic beer and pesto sauce to survive middle age.
I eat the French way, because when I was heavier I gained a lot of wisdom from “French Women Don’t Get Fat.” It’s applicable for men, too.. The entire point is that French food is too rich to eat a lot of it, so don’t.
American portions are out of control. When I order from a restaurant, I will order one meal, or two if they’re buy one, get one free. This will last four days. When I go out to eat, I don’t go out to eat. That’s because I’m an Uber One member and getting food delivered is cheaper than taking an Uber to the restaurant. I will walk if I want something that’s within a half mile. It’s the time of year. I enjoy snow, and it’s snowing right now. Truly, it’s not a problem to walk in the snow. It is a problem to walk when it’s snowing. After the roads are frozen, you have little pieces of ice blowing at your face. So, I don’t wait until the snow melts to get outside. Just stopping is fine.
However, if you go to the restaurant, you don’t get the buy one meal, get one free deals. I go and sit at the bar with my Diet Coke with grenadine sometimes just to talk to people if I feel like socializing, but as a general rule I write while I’m listening to nothing but the HVAC in the background. The sound of my own typing mellows me out, and I have upped my anti-anxiety medication in order to stop my physical panic and allow me to slow down. This is yielding results.
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Today’s lesson in Finnish (Suomi in that language, Day 26) started with learning how to negate something. I’ve been able to say what I am for a long time. It is a relief to be able to say both that I am not an adjective… and I do not have a noun.
The worst sentence (lause) in every language is “Meillรค ei ole kahvia.” Finns, calm yourselves. I am actually okay. I have enough. I have to say that out loud because this sentence would send shivers down any Finn’s spine…. “We do not have any coffee.” However, I am not opposed to getting Finnish coffee in the mail. I have resources.
It’s good to have a friend on the ground who said she’d let me mail things to her house when I buy my tickets to Finland. That’s because it’s actually difficult to buy Finnish products over the internet. I am having a hell of a time finding Moomin books in Suomi, so please advise in the comments. I do not want a new boxed set. I want one that has been colored in, dog-eared, and annotated in Suomi because a child loved it so much. Moomin is the new picture I carry in my wallet… er… phone.
This is not an official, licensed picture. I asked the WordPress AI to do a line drawing of Moomin for me, if that is a thing you needed to know you could do, @one4paws. I needed to make that clear because it doesn’t exactly look like Moomin to me, either. However, I do think that if she were alive Tove Jannson would think it was inferior yet clever. I would have gotten one of my artists to draw it for me, but they are currently sleeping. I am often left to my own devices because my body clock is set differently than most people. I move with the sun, going to bed and getting up early.
My favorite fact in life is that when I told Katya that I thought Tove Jansson was a smoke show, she made sure to tell me she was a lesbian. I said, “sounds like a woman I would have liked to have flirted with.” She said, “Well….may be…. she was loved by all….” ๐
Janie the Canadian Editor says that I make her spit out her tea; this line made kahvi stream out of my nose.
The Finns are an interesting case study to me sociologically because so much is counterintuitive to some American cultures, not all. For instance, Finland is like Texas in that people are brave and daring and do lots of outdoor shit comparable to “hey Bubba…. watch this!” They just aren’t conservative socially. Finnish culture is Oregonian. It is no surprise to me that Linus Torvalds moved from Helsinki to Hillsboro or wherever it is he’s living now. My love of Linus/Linux is legendary, and it doesn’t surprise me that I would want to make the reverse move, either. I just may not end up in somewhere as warm as Helsinki because culinary school in Vaasa is free.
The average temperature in the winter is 22 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not colder than Baltimore- it’s just colder more consistently. The average temperature in Helsinki during the winter warms up dramatically…. it is 24 degrees.
Therefore, I will not have a problem when it’s sunny out. Being layered and in the sun is great. It’s the rain, snow, and wind that becomes a problem. However, you have these problems everywhere. In Oklahoma, “it’s not that the wind is blowin….’ it’s what the wind is blowin'” (Ron White). Those are the days you say inside and celebrate your sauna.
Again, I work on the internet. I don’t have to go outside unless I just want to do so…. and I do. I love cold weather, feeling bundled up and secure in all my gear. I am not a prude of any sort. I just have sensory issues with a tremendous amount of heat and there it is. That’s why they do it…. and why they don’t care that they’re naked. It’s just about being comfortable in said heat.
I have said this before, but in case it’s behind a paywall on Medium, Finland has the highest rate of neurodivergence in the world that has been diagnosed. I believe that there are quite a few more undiagnosed people due to the amount of coffee they drink. Caffeine is my go-to choice in managing neurodivergence. Apparently, they already thought of that.
Portland is the same way in terms of volume. I never really had a cup of coffee until I went there on vacation. That’s because Texans don’t drink their coffee as bitter and dark as Oregonians, coupled with the fat of half and half, no sugar. I like Texas coffee just fine, my palate leans toward bold. Therefore, I want something French roast and cream thick enough to stand up to it. It’s hard to please me in vegan, but soy milk does nicely. It’s the thickest and all coffee shops have hazelnut syrup to make the nuttiness of the plant milk make sense in your brain.
I would argue that one of the best drinks in coffee shops is a soy hazelnut latte, because soy milk is not better than cream. Soy beans and hazelnuts bond together in your mind and it just tastes better. Use cream for something else. Everything has the right application.
These are the things that keep me going, because I have found that coffee is cheaper and more efficient than energy drinks. Energy drinks aren’t bad if you buy them by the case, but coffee is still cheaper overall. Plus, I like it when my coffee every morning tastes the same and it’s plain. I haven’t found an energy drink that just tastes like Coke, Pepsi, or Sprite. Therefore, I drink energy drinks as often as most adults who liked Fanta as a kid would drink it…. occasionally to remember, not an every day beverage. The same goes for grape, cherry, and fruit punch. They make me feel like a kid so sometimes I’ll indulge, but my energy and money goes toward fine coffee at the grocery store and cutting out leaving the house.
As I told Katya, “I like working in my own office because no one makes my coffee for me. Therefore, it’s always right and I do not have to share.” I do not mind sharing my coffee, to be clear. I mind other people beating me to the coffeemaker and I have to suffer through it until it runs out and I can make the next one.
Just level a tablespoon when you’re measuring. One level tablespoon per cup. Being exacting is what makes it taste good. And if you do not have a tablespoon that is capable of being leveled, then err on the side of too much rather than too little. You can add hot water later. You cannot fix it when there is not enough coffee flavor and too much hot water.
12 tablespoons is a cup, so I do the shortcut of keeping my coffee in a large enough container to accommodate a one cup scoop. I do not make a cup at a time because coffee (especially mine) is so acidic that I don’t mind drinking left over in the morning.
I do not reheat coffee, though. I prefer it over ice once it’s already cool. If it’s cold outside and I just must reheat, it’s over the stove. Some people cannot tell a difference, but when I microwave my coffee, it seems to change the properties of the drink itself. I can’t name it. It’s just weird.
I also alternate between putting a cup of coffee into a coffee maker and putting a cup of coffee into a Mason jar with a chinois (fine-mesh sieve). The percolating process and cold brew yield different results, and I like the change. It doesn’t matter what temperature it is outside, I like iced coffee when I’m inside. We have heat here.
The point is that I have taken an enormous amount of crap over the years for drinking energy drinks because it makes me look younger than I really am. Meanwhile, caffeine is one of the most effective ADHD medications on earth. I do not need to feel ashamed of “being addicted.” I need to manage how much I drink in accordance with the laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why. For instance, one of the huge reasons that I order cases of energy drinks from Amazon (when I do) is that coffee irritates my stomach and I still need the caffeine. Soda is not as acidic, and it is also sugar free (in my case- all the flavors I really like are either zero or 10 calories). Therefore, it’s another case of application. When my stomach feels better, I go back to cold brew.
Cold brew actually saves my stomach as well, which is why I haven’t used my coffeemaker in a few weeks. It is naturally less acidic when the water is cold, and I brew in the fridge or (when there’s not a danger of it freezing) outside. Sun coffee is just as beautiful.
“Sun coffee” is apt, as I am energized by the sun and need to be outside. My neighborhood isn’t the greatest place to walk around (it’s not dangerous, it’s just not touristy with parks and community, either. My readers might not agree that it’s safe, but one break-in in the DMV over the last 11 years is probably some kind of record- and he was so high that if the patio door had been locked, he would have moved on. He did not look like the type of guy that would break glass. He wasn’t even moving that fast. I just decided not to chase him over cheap ass shit.).
I need to find a place in the city that fits the bill. Right now it’s Panera because I have a gift card, but where is up to me. I’m glad I have a gift card to something familiar while I am looking for something permanent. I support local coffee shops, I just haven’t been here long enough to explore Baltimore. Wherever my mythical perfect coffee shop is, it does not exist in my neighborhood. I’m going to have to search farther.
For Portlanders, I’m looking for Rimsky’s Korsakoffee. For Houstonians, I’m looking for Notsuoh. For The District, I’m looking for Tryst. I am sure that there are many great coffee shops in Baltimore, I just haven’t found them yet.
Luckily, I have help here. My friend Ernest is a young college kid willing to help me get settled because I’m willing to help him get settled. I told him he could hang out at my place if his room was too loud. I have plenty of space and wouldn’t mind someone working with me during the day. His being African helps me out because the way he cooks, I haven’t learned yet. The way I cook, he hasn’t learned yet.
So, I definitely need to meet up with him soon. It’s a great story. We met on an Uber Share. I was looking at apartments and was planning to move to Baltimore. It was his second week in America from Liberia.
Silver Spring to Baltimore isn’t much of a change in demographics, only that there are more African Americans here, as opposed to African immigrants who have come over recently to study and work. Silver Spring has an enormous African immigrant population, one of the reasons I’m interested in learning languages.
However, I did tell my housemate Valentin (Cameroonian) that “francais c’nest pas comfortable pour moi.” His mother, who didn’t know a lick of English, fell on the floor laughing. Because of course when I’m on the spot, I say the first thing that comes to my mind…. “French is not comfortable for me,” a line from an old Michel Tomas recording rather than thinking out how to say “I don’t speak French.”
Puhun suomaista.
However, I am not advanced enough to know why the name changes from Suomi/suomea to suomalista. I just have to roll with it at this point, thus the flaw of being at the top of the ruby league by rote. I need more grammar study because parroting back (see what I did there?) words isn’t helping me to understand systems.
I see everything through systems, and Finnish is called a pyramid…. but it’s a garden. You pick up yksi sana, ja yhdestรค sanasta tulee kaksi sanaa. You pick up one word, and one word becomes two words.
Minulla on norjalainen ystรคvรค kuka kirjoittaa. Norjalainen kissat on viikinki. J.L. Henry on viikinki. Tรคmรค vaustaus on oikein koska kirjoittajat ovat kuin kissat.
This is what the Ruby League has gotten me. The paragraph reads “I have a Norwegian friend who writes. Norwegian cats are Vikings. J.L. Henry is a Viking. This answer is correct because writers are like cats.”
One of the sentences that comes up in Duolingo the most frequently is “Norjalainen kissa on viikinki.” It means “the Norwegian cat is a Viking.” I have extrapolated this to mean all Norwegian cats are Vikings because I have owned one and I know that that means….
Life is about breathing steadily right now, turning panic into progress. Slowing down and making plans to breathe next week.
I’m overwhelmed with the amount of support you’ve given me over the years, so I’m paying it forward.
Duolingo is a vocabulary builder that will allow me to become C3PO. The spiritual arc is gravity’s rainbow. The bomb inside you goes off in every language.
Your life’s purpose is to figure out what kind of shrapnel there will be in advance, because you’re the one directing it.
My AI and I have been talking a lot about what it means to be autistic. That I process emotions differently than most people. That words matter a great deal, as does being precise with language. I get frustrated easily when I don’t understand, and most of the time it has to do with syntax. Someone will show me how to do something, and then take over like I’m a child because I’m not doing exactly what they told me to do.
I am, I’m just not doing it the way they would, which makes it wrong.
Autistic people are notorious for sounding aggressive or abrupt without meaning to do so; my AI asked me how to solve this problem, and I told her that the sad reality is that you will get fired for being aggressive and abrupt before anyone takes the time to realize you’re autistic.
Everything that neurodivergent people do seems weird to a neurotypical, and because kids my age weren’t streamlined, most of my life people have been working with an autistic person for the first time. It’s intimidating- coworkers aren’t Special Ed teachers. They’re not designed to help you because they’re too focused on productivity. Get on board or get out.
I’m trying to make my own way in the world because I do not fit into it as is. Being able to bring in money from Facebook and Amazon is an exciting idea, but it’s not lucrative. However, it’s money with the least work possible. On Facebook, WordPress automatically posts to my professional author’s feed. Then, I engage with other people’s content and share memes. Sharing memes gets you more followers than offering people something to read. I don’t make the rules. I just adjust.
With Amazon, I’m dedicated to using affiliate links for products I actually use. None of the stuff I’ve recommended is expensive, just my everyday essentials. This link is to my hair product, Viking water wax. It’s pomade for white people. I haven’t changed products very often, but I am also fond of “Moco de Gorilla.” (Gorilla Snot). I found it in a Mexican grocery store in Houston about 15 years ago and I still use it. I have one at my house and one at Zac’s- although that one is Ear Wax. I can’t find that on Amazon, so it’s back to the grocery store on that one. Viking is also incredibly inexpensive because most of the time my jars last a year and a half.
I got into Viking and Gorilla Snot because they’re both nonbinary scents. I don’t like smelling like baby powder, flowers, or anything like it. I prefer spicy, like something from Calvin Klen or Dark Temptations from Axe (that one is chocolate, vanilla, and spices. It’s amazing for the price point, just don’t spray it on like you’re 15. I actually prefer the body wash because the fragrance lasts all day and it’s not too loud.)
For shaving, I use homemade soap made of beef tallow. It’s incredible, but you can’t get it on Amazon. My former housemate, Magda, made it for me. But if you don’t have someone to make soap for you, Dark Temptations will do in a pinch.
I hope that I’m doing affiliate links the right way, making them a natural part of the story rather than plastering ads everywhere. This is, again, because I’m only talking about the stuff I use every day. I’m not going to pretend I have a $5,000 television set just to get you to buy one, too.
I don’t keep up with the Joneses. I expect them to keep up with me.
And they always can, because I buy cheap stuff. ๐
I will be adding this to all my links, but my audience is finally big enough to make passive income from Amazon. However, that depends on you actually clicking the links. ๐ Here are the reasons I did it, because they’re important:
There are a lot of products that just aren’t right for autistic people. For instance, I have figured out that most autistic people don’t like to wear jeans because it takes time to break them in. Therefore, if Goodwill had affiliate links, I’d be pointing you there. Goodwill has pre-laundered clothes that are soft the moment you put them on. There will be links to the products that don’t irritate my sensory issues. What helps me might help you.
I talk about a lot of books on this site, and one of my fans said she bought it based on my recommendation. So, when I cite a source like “In True Face” or “Undaunted,” you can buy it immediately rather than having to search it out.
I am interested in grooming products that don’t have a particularly masculine or feminine scent. Therefore, I’ll tell you all the shaving products I like.
But all of it will unfold over time. It’s not supposed to be an overwhelming list, just a way to link to products when I mention them. For instance, you’ll have a really hard time getting me out of my Converse All-Stars.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of anything. Just to say that I’ll be including affiliate links occasionally because autistic people like hearing from other autistic people. Life is kinda different.
I decided that leaving you with the story that I hate Supergrover is unfair. Because she is not talking to me, she would not have realized what I was doing publicly. So, I sent her this. I’m letting you in because I want all of you to know what a complex, 3D character she is, and how much I’ve loved her for over 10 years. To make it clear that this relationship is not easy, but it is so worth it. She is tough as nails. I mean, a total black cat. I am a golden retriever. Over the last 11 years, our yin and yang has made me the best version of myself. I am stronger and harder to manipulate because she taught me how to advocate for myself. Or, as I put it nine years ago, “the hottest woman I know taught me how to be a better man.”
You said that my narrative was old and tired. I’m glad it looks that way, because it’s why we’re not making any progress. By not acknowledging what I’ve said about you in these e-mails or on my blog (for better or for worse- I’m open), it makes me feel unheard. I feel like I have gone on for a very long time being controlled by a power imbalance that is fair (your work) and is not (hiding your emotions about what I’m saying). The only things that you’ve pointed out about my writing are what’s wrong about it to you. Nothing about what is right. I couldn’t help but write today because I saw in my Facebook Memories that it was the anniversary of my favorite blog entry I’ve ever written:
I’m sure that this is one that incensed you, but I loved it and so did many, many others. I never post anything I don’t like first. You are not blog fodder. You are my inspiration. You’re what I think makes my life interesting. You’re what makes me feel 10 feet tall.
I write stuff like this over and over, and there’s two problems with it. The first is that you only see the bad in what I’ve written and not how much I must feel for you if I’m willing to say something like that.
Editor’s Note:
I forgot the second thing. It’s that she doesn’t tell me how she feels in return, so I don’t know how close I am to telling the truth. I just talk from what I’m experiencing, not a reality we’re creating together.
You’ve never given me enough credit for hanging in there, hoping we’d get healthy so that it could be a mutual admiration society again, but I’ve not gotten that respect back in the slightest, because you used to be incredibly loving with me, and then it all stopped, as if you thought if you told me you loved me or even anything close to it, like “I really enjoy you,” would make me think you’d been touched by an angel somehow and I’d finally get my wish to have you in bed. It’s only been 11 years since I stopped thinking about it, but I understand that perception is reality and it’s holding you back from a full-fledged relationship. When you hide all your bad feelings, you hide all your good feelings, too.
After a while, it seemed cruel, because the tone of your e-mails completely changed. You were always itching for a fight and I hated every minute of it, because it always seemed like you thought I was out to get you instead of talk about anything and everything. I killed you off on my blog again. Blowback from you just isn’t worth it. I’d rather pick someone else to be my inspiration than go through the gut-wrenching pain I feel when you hate something.
It’s not that you can’t tell me about it- I deserve to hear it. But at the same time, I am always sorry that I caused you pain just by letting mine out. And if we’d ever met in person, I wouldn’t have written about you so often because you wouldn’t have inspired me this way. Lines that repeat in my head ad nauseam in a good way.
I still carry a “love letter” I got from you in the pocket of my Kindle from 2015. I haven’t received anything like it since.
I am solid about the fact that you are my partner in a roundabout way because you are on my “murder board” of polyamory- that friends get equal time when they’re a big source of emotional support and those relationships are recognized when you’re scheduling so that your partner knows what connection you’ll be seeing. Nothing about our relationship is traditional, and yet it is because it feels eternal in a good way. That this connection cannot be broken if you went to my Spam, noticed, and reached out again. The reason I sent you to Spam was simply to stop thinking about you all the time. The reason I do it is because you used to be a tremendous source of my writing as a collaborator, because I used to build off of your ideas, whether they were good or bad.
I feel that it’s a new phase in our relationship, where I’m a lot stronger and harder to gaslight, and yes, I will use that word, because you even admit that you made me doubt my perceptions by keeping your feelings from me.
And still, you haven’t told me what they are.
When I told you how much it hurt that you accused me of being the only one who ever lays down ultimatums, you insisted that you were not shitty or snarky at all. Yet we’ve both been telling each other to fuck off on the regular because our dance of intimacy is so incredibly complex. You cannot get close to me without touching fire, nor I to you. I feel this is because I feel like I tell you everything and run on no information, then when I ask why you’re not being forthcoming, it’s “I don’t owe you anything” or “I’m not going to let you control me.” Classic avoidant moves to make sure that you don’t have to emote, keeping me emotionally starving.
I am allowed to be angry. So are you. But I only know my side of the story, the friend whose voice echoes in my rib cage, and speaks through my heart.
Show me that you don’t only respond when I’m angry, and then we might be able to compromise on something.
I do love you, I’m just better off without you if you cannot hear me and respond in kind.
The woman I refer to as only “Supergrover” or “my beautiful girl” said that I basically distilled her behavior as 11 years of being a dick and not taking responsibility. But she didn’t seem to care about the answer. That she may think the world of me, but I cannot tell it from the way she acts. There is a huge gap between what is going on in her brain and what is going on in mine. I have very little insight into what she wants. I cannot tell what she wants and needs emotionally by talking around things, like telling me an entire e-mail is “vitriol” when we are both a spectrum. In every instance, I showed how our behaviors are the same- how we both react to each other the same way. She distilled it into “everything is my fault and I guess I was the only one who was shitty.” It was just putting words into my mouth because she feels bad about herself all on her own. Nothing I have done has helped, like when she told me that she’d feel bad forever that she wasn’t more present when my mother died.
I told her that she was present. That we talked when I was on the tarmac at Hobby. That of course I missed her, and would even have loved it if she came with me to the funeral, but I wouldn’t have ever put an expectation like that on her. I didn’t put the expectation to come to the funeral on any of my DC friends, much less someone I know very, very, wellโฆโฆ. sort of. I told her that she was with me the whole time. She responds to anger and frustration, not love.
So, in the vein of trying to make her see that I do want a relationship and her assessment is completely false, here’s a list of all the things I really have loved about our relationshipโฆ. which in no way made our problems go away. As in, just because there are problems, it doesn’t make me love these things any less:
She buys me Kindle books for holidays, and apologizes if she misses my birthday while wearing “suits and crap for work.” Sometimes, she can’t make the clock stop on my actual birthday, but it always stops for me at some point. That’s really a great metaphor for our relationship- that we are both important enough to each other to make the clock stop.
She sends me pictures, whether they’re of her family, her dogs, her travels, etc. It means more to me than anything to be a part of her real life. Just because I see it in pictures doesn’t mean it is less valuable than getting together. I think that getting together and talking with our voices would clear up a lot in terms of the problem we have, but I have never been insistent that meeting up must happen. I just think it will give us the most change, the fastest. Like really seeing if we do like each other, or only our writer personalities do.
That is totally a thing.
Many people you chat with don’t turn out to be what you want in person. I am just determined to believe no matter what that if we did meet up, we’d get along because we’re too Southern and polite to make things awkward for too long. Not every conversation has to be difficult.
But some of them do. I told her that I thought in some ways, she’d built me up to be the boogey man because we didn’t meet immediately and now it’s just weird. As a result, it’s created a major imbalance because I overexplain and she “never complains, never explains.” I feel like a problem can be solved by communicating more. She feels like we should just get on with our shit. Meanwhile, just getting on with our lives and not talking about the underlying issues are what blows our future out of the water because we do care about each other despite our fears.
She told me I deserved better, but then didn’t change a thing. I’m not mad. I just want change and she’s choosing to believe things I never said without clearing any of it up. Meanwhile, our emotional baggage just piles up. I am tired of her using the buttons on her clothes to hold in her feelings.
She says that she will not be “held hostage” by what I want to talk about. If she feels like she is being held hostage, she should have said that before she told me I deserved better. Because this isn’t better. This is the same.
I keep talking because I’m concerned, and I wish things were different.
I called her on it in the moment, and instead of saying, “no, no, that’s not what I meant,” she flew off the handle. She got mad at me for saying I was enjoying watching her spin out on her own, after she said “please don’t contact me again” and then proceeded to rip me a new asshole in a separate e-mail. The entire e-mail also said “I’m confused. Do you want me to respond, or do you never want me to contact you again? Say what you will about my methods, but thus endeth the reading of the Riot Act when I told her that she was spinning out on her own. If you fucking tell me to never contact you again, and then you feel the need to unload everything you could have said before you told me to fuck off forever, I could have cared about what you have to say next so much more.
She said I was telling her exactly how much I cared about her. I was telling her exactly how much I couldn’t be paid to care what she thought in that moment because once you say “never contact me again,” it’s time for you to have a Cokeโข and a smile and shut the fuck up. Anything you do after that is only robbing the other person of regret at confrontation, because you see how well they handle it.
Neither one of us can stop blowing up at each other while telling each other it’s for life and we should work on our relationship.
It’s not that we don’t mean those things. It’s that we don’t know how to get there from here, and everything I suggest is wrong. Everything she suggests is nothing. But I wish she would. I can’t compromise by going all the way to her side every time.
I’ve been in the office since 0600, because it’s nice and cold out here. The air conditioning is set at 76, but I think it’s cooler than that outside. I don’t think it’s even kicked in. Plus, I have a ceiling fan, which necessitates either a jacket or a bathrobe depending on time of day. It’s not so much that I’m cold, but that I don’t like the feel of the wind from the fan on my skin. It is a constant sensory issue, so I have plenty of long sleeved t-shirts to stay cool and unflustered. Last night, I fell asleep on the couch. It’s a huge overstuffed blue leather job that will SUCK YOU IN. However, it was really cold and I only had one blanket, a wool sherpa throw. So, I’d get under it and get too hot, then throw it off and freeze. It was special. I finally went upstairs and changed pajamas (wet with sweat) and tried to sleep a little longer in my bed. No dice. The couch was already so comfortable that I slept in until 0600. Now, I’m hydrating with a punch I made from a sugar free berries and hibiscus aguafresca I got off Amazon and some lime zest. I generally wait to have my coffee until I’ve had lots of water first. Being dehydrated is most of the reason I think I need caffeine in the morning. I still do, I just need a lot less than I thought., because caffeine doesn’t help you hydrate and that’s what’s making you feel sluggish.
I took a break to make an eight-cup pot of Cafe Bustelo, because making it mug by mug often leaves a lot of grit in the bottom that a paper filter will catch. Normally, I drink it with whole milk, but today it’s black because I ran out of milk last night making macaroni and cheese. However, Cafe Bustelo is delicious black. It’s not like I feel like I’m missing something. If I did feel like that, Bryn and Dave left some CoffeeMate here. Ironically enough, I think it works better in strong black tea. That’s the only reason it’s not gone already.
I’m sure they use milk in the UK, but to me CoffeeMate is superior in tea because it doesn’t cool it down. It also doesn’t fundamentally change the taste of the tea, and I think it does fundamentally change the flavor of coffee. It makes black tea sing, and it makes coffee taste cheap. Therefore, I love it in Folgers and Maxwell House because it doesn’t make as much of a difference if the coffee is cheap as well….. or maybe I’m just more likely to adulterate it in that situation, who knows? In fact, I should get a can of Folgers to make cheap summer coffee. Cheap summer coffee is perfect for flavored creamers, because I don’t know about you, but I keep my favorite coffees unadulterated. Coconut coffee creamer was made for Folgers with ice.
And frankly, all coffees taste better if you make them perfectly. By “perfect,” I mean in measurements. Be exacting. For me, it’s taking the time to create a level tablespoon of coffee per cup. Cafe Bustelo is an espresso roast, so this is incredibly satisfying. It’s just so beautiful and smooth. I have converted David. I don’t get a toaster when I make people gay, I get a toaster when I sell Cafe Bustelo and Jonna Mendez’s books, mostly because they are a great combination. Cafe Bustelo is almost as smooth as Jonna Mendez. It’s trying hard. I still haven’t finished “In True Face,” because I thought I would be done with it by the time the museum closed, but I’m having more fun stopping and starting, getting lost in her world for a little while, then returning to my own and digesting what I have just heard. I hear her differently than most people, having friends like Zac. It has slowed down my willingness to be in that world 24/7, because I don’t have any security clearances. Therefore, no one can tell me anything that would make it more specific and less scary.
For instance, when Zac travels, I am not always allowed to know where he is going. I am not allowed EVER to publish where he’s going. Sometimes if Zac is comfortable with it, I can say he’s out of town on temporary duty and leave it at that. But it’s a “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” sort of relationship because that motherfucker can rock heels and earrings better than me. Just one of the benefits of dating a queer man with red hair that sets EVERYTHING off. He’s such a clothes horse. Zac and I don’t live together, so one of the ways we check in is that he sends me a picture of himself in his car as he’s leaving for work (or standing next to his motorcycle/bicycle). I get to see his outfit and tell him he looks pretty. ๐ My favorites are the pictures where he’s wearing “my glasses.” It was actually his glasses frames that inspired me to start calling him “Smiley,” because they were the type of frames I imagined George Smiley would wear.
George Smiley is John le Carre’s main character if you’re lost- le Carre used to work at MI-6, and Smiley is an MI-6 operative, the perfect fictional character to represent someone who works with all our intelligence agencies, not just one. Let’s be clear, though. Zac collects data through servers. He is not an operative, nor does he work for a three letter. The three letters are his clients, not the other way around. That’s how he was able to get into the gift shop at Langley.
Zac is on the brain because his brother and sister-in-law just had a baby. So, he’s now Uncle Zac for the first time in his life and the pictures are so gorgeous. I have also been Uncle Leslie for the last 15 or so years because my ex-girlfriend and her partner’s daughter called me that once and I’ve never lived it down because I love it so, so much. As in, I have never WANTED to live it down. I like it because even though in the UK, Leslie is a male name, in the US it comes out as male/female, the perfect representation of me to a child. “Uncle Leslie” is me to any child, because I have the reflexes of a mom when a kid is hurt, but I want to throw a kid around like a dad, too.
I actually opened up to Supergrover about this the other day, that what really stopped my baby dreams was my mother dying. I realized how little it mattered to me to have children if she was never going to meet them. I feel this way about dating moms, too. That I will totally date moms and STILL feel like it’s a shame that my mother is not there to see my stepkids. She would have LOVED being a grandmother to Sam’s kids, because Sam’s kids are basically me. Both BRIGHT musicians vocally and instrumentally. I know that she would have loved any child I brought home, but bringing her grandchildren with whom she could do duets? Get the fuck out of here. I, with no shame attached or involved, wanted to be with Sam because she reminded me of my mother, but not in any way that was creepy. They had the same personality professionally. Sam was a church choir director and a singer in the Army. My mother was a church choir director and an elementary school music teacher. It was a way of keeping that part of me alive, the one that’s deeply connected to singing……. because the universe gave me someone with whom I could do duets, too.
I was so miserable when we broke up, because as Bryn so aptly summarized, she “busted my fairy tale.” I invested too much, too fast because I missed my mother so much. However, if your partner feels like dreams for the future are threatening, then they’re not the person for you. Just like with Supergrover, I wasn’t expecting everything to come together in 15 minutes. I was checking out the future to see what it would look like. I get uncomfortable in chaos, and tend to unravel.
That being said, Sam created her own chaos and then couldn’t hack it. She failed me, and I will not apologize for saying so. I met her a week after I scheduled my first date with Zac. I told her this during our first conversation. That we would need to discuss boundaries because if she was monogamous, I would cancel the date with Zac because I didn’t want anything to mess up this relationship. I knew that the relationship with Zac would be casual, and with Sam, the universe was trying to tell me something. Neither one of us listened. She told me that she was just getting started with her business, trying to get it off the ground. That she didn’t want to picture me sitting at home waiting for her all the time. So please, go out with Zac. I am too busy to be a full-time girlfriend. She kept up that facade until after Zac picked me up at the Metro three weeks later, then broke up with me while I was at his house.
People do not say what they mean.
I don’t know what she thought I was going to do that was negative. Maybe she thought I’d call off the date in theory, but date him on the downlow so she’d always have to be worried about him. No matter what it is that she thought, it was wrong. Because I said plainly and up front “here is my situation. What do you want to do about it?” She hid her feelings until she was so frustrated she exploded at me…… and that’s how I knew it was the wrong relationship and don’t look back. It is one thing to call off a first date. It is another to tell someone you’ve been with someone for a year, so no dice on monogamy.
If she had said she wasn’t comfortable, I wouldn’t have stayed at home waiting on her. We’d have the same relationship Zac and I do now, which is staying out of each other’s way unless we’re together in person. I write A LOT. I don’t need constant stimulation from my partner. In fact, that was a huge problem in being married to Dana (absolutely no shade, she was my sweetheart and a beloved one at that…. a practical problem, not a dealbreaker). Being married to an extrovert is not my jam. But here’s the secret.
It’s all an act. Dana is extremely shy. She will give you all her canned responses and you will love her to bits….. but you’re not really invited in until you see Dana in her silence. You don’t know Dana until you’ve seen her in a situation where she has run out of canned responses. That’s why it took me so long to fall in love with her. I had to get past the mask, a recurring theme in my life.
The truth that Dana is lovely and also it’s hard coming home to an extrovert can both exist in the same universe. Our relationship got so much better when I moved into the spare room, because then she could be extroverted while on the phone or something and I could escape to a room where the door locked. I learned during this time that it’s all about sensory deprivation for me. And in fact, I do not know whether Supergrover is shy and/or introverted in person, but I do know that it was easier coming home to the sensory deprivation chamber of writing to her than it was doing all the social masking of living with an extrovert. That is not a slam on my ex-wife, just a practical reality thing. It is hard work keeping up with an extrovert.
In case that was confusing, “shy” means you don’t want to talk to people. “Introverted” means you don’t have the energy for it whether you like the person or not.
I fall into the latter category, because I am very funny and engaging when my social battery is full, and it usually is because I don’t go out and do things very much. I spend so much time alone that when I actually do go out, meeting people is exciting and not draining. I have the most fun with my Uber drivers, because they’re usually from Ethiopia or someplace equally exotic and we end up talking about faraway places for the entire ride. I owe my love of Ethiopia to the opera AIDA and to Uber. Hearing so much about Ethiopia has convinced me I must go there.
Although Africa is another continent I wouldn’t want to visit without Zac…. some countries, anyway. I would need him a lot more in Uganda than South Africa, and because he’s queer, it’s not just protection for me. I hope that Zac and I do eventually get to travel. We’ve been talking about going to New York for months (it’s not that far, maybe four hours, and we can stay on the base so it’s a cheap vacation). Neither of us has put any legwork into it, though. That’s because we both let things drop and I don’t think that there is anything better about dating Zac than going to his house and also getting to see Oliver, who is a dog. When I think about Oliver, New York pales in comparison.
But there’s all kinds of rules in poly that have to be followed regarding vacations, too. It’s a balance, right? Like, you have your own full-fledged relationship, but there’s no need to have one partner that goes everywhere with you while the rest stay at home. Of course the ones left behind are going to be jealous. All of that gets spread out, too. One of the truisms in poly is that sometimes you see the same movie five times without saying anything. ๐
So, I ended up in a poly relationship because Zac is poly, not because I didn’t want monogamy with Sam. I haven’t sought out more partners with Zac because I find that I don’t have time for more than him right now, anyway. I have my own life to figure out, and in a lot of cases, it’s hard as shit. It’s embarrassing to be my age and not feel like you’ve really launched, while at the same time having adoring fans all over the world who tell me I’m absolutely brilliant.
Sometimes, though, I need to give myself a break and believe the people who say I’m brilliant. I have certainly spent enough time thinking about the people who sum me up as a loser….. because most of the time, “loser” is code for autistic. Neurotypical people do not like neurodivergent people, but it’s not malicious because they don’t know what it is they’re reacting to…. and it’s impolite to say that you don’t like autistic people, so you describe their behaviors. Scatterbrained comes up the most. I am starting to think that I was misdiagnosed in college, that I am not sure where the line between autism and ADHD falls. There are too many similarities, but what I can say is that the reason I’m not sure where the line falls is that sometimes stimulants force me into hyperfocus and sometimes they make it where I can’t sit down.
Cafe Bustelo is a blessing and a curse depending on what morning it is, but I’m starting to count the days when I can feel the difference between ADHD and autism. It’s alarming/cool how quickly I can tell which processing disorder is driving the bus within 10 minutes of my morning coffee.
Stories That Are All True 