Tag: mental health

Grief Should Be Sponsored

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What brands do you associate with?
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I am emotionally eating my way across Texas, and feelings are delicious.

So far, grief has been brought to me by Cool Ranch Doritos the most frequently, followed by an assortment of coffee cake.

Last night, we all gathered and sent pictures for the slide show that plays as people are milling about the room waiting for the service to begin. There turned out to be a fair number in which we all looked equally terrible and were thus chosen. We also went down memory lane and this is the kind of interaction that’s been missing from my life. No phones, just talking and remembering.

It’s also the first significant chunk of time I’ve spent with other people in ages. I’m getting used to being part of a family system again. I’m sure I’ll go back to Baltimore and everything will be too quiet, because the rhythms of my family are not quiet…. although some of us are more into Bluey than others (I’m with the children… it’s great).

This morning I was supposed to go with my dad to Exchange Club, and I overslept. I feel terrible because I know my dad wanted to introduce me to a lot of people. Me oversleeping is the weirdest part of all of this because I’ve been waking up at 0530 since I got here. I think staying up later is finally getting to me, because we didn’t shut down the “party” until after 10:30 last night. I’m used to going to bed long before that.

I used to think it was because I was an old person, and now I think it’s that my circadian rhythm naturally follows the sun. I like going to bed and waking up early. Last night was aberrant because I cannot remember the last time I stayed up that late with other people and didn’t find myself leaking energy at an alarming rate. However, I did sleep very hard.

As a result, I’m feeling quite rested and capable of taking on more today. Yesterday, it felt like I was just running ragged. Angela not being there to hold court and direct us was a palpable feeling, tangible in its depth and breadth. The difference in the energy of the house is staggering, because she was a force of nature.

I see so much of her in my stepsisters, Kelly and Caitlin. It’s comforting that all of her quirks live on in the smallest of ways. I still see Angela’s facial expressions in them, and it always makes me laugh in a knowing way.

I am supposed to go back to Baltimore on Tuesday, but I’m having trouble accepting it. I need more time with my family, but I also need to wrap things up in the Mid-Atlantic one way or the other. My lease ends November 30th, and I will have enough money to move wherever I feel comfortable. I do not know whether that is staying in Baltimore or not. At the very least, DC is still in the running because my sister will always have a federal component to her job and thus, business trips that include spoiling me.

My dad is not sure he wants to change his life by having me live with him, and I’m not sure I want to change my life that way, either. The easiest option is not always the best, but it may prove to be over time. I do not want to live alone anymore, nor do I really want to interview housemates and live with strangers. I also don’t have any income, so getting housing takes some doing. Having money is not enough, and I do not make a living from my combination of web sites, but my stats and earnings are looking better.

Thank you, Fanagans.

The sensible choice for me is to buy a station wagon or an SUV so that when my lease ends, I can pack up the stuff I want to move into my own car and drive it to where it’s supposed to be. There is no way that even a car payment and insurance would add up to what I pay in Uber/Uber Eats/Amazon/etc. a year. I will not have a car payment, though. I will buy a car in cash so that the only bills I have are maintenance and insurance.

I also want to get a service dog, and a service dog big enough to counter balance my weight deserves a huge cargo area in the back. I do not know if my dad wants to live with a dog that big, either. So, we’ll see. My dog is not really negotiable because I need someone there to keep an eye on me. It’s easier in this house because I’m used to it completely. I need help in unfamiliar environments.

My dad suggested taking a road trip with one of my friends to get my car back to Baltimore. I like this idea a lot. Aaron is going to help me pick it out (I stopped writing and talked to both of them, so this is a real thing now). Aaron is a programmer and “shade tree mechanic” who will make sure my engine is solid. It would make me feel better if he came with me if we get an older vehicle, but I’m really not even scared of that if Aaron says that I’m golden.

Ok, Aaron is in for the road trip (I’m chatting with him while I’m writing, so this story is developing… film at 11:00).

It’s nice to have something to be excited about in this garbage dump of a situation.

“We can’t stop here. We’re in bat country.”

Maybe I can talk Aaron into some vlogging as we drive. Our conversations would be hilarious…. I think. Sometimes we just enjoy the silence together. It depends on what kind of mood we’re in.

I suppose that part of my task list for the afternoon is looking on Facebook Marketplace to at least get an idea of what’s out there. I prefer a stick shift, but that may not be possible depending on what kind of cars are available. Stick shifts are not very popular these days.

I’m calling it the “Running Aarons Tour 2025.”

We’ll get to eat at some good restaurants and really take our time if we need it.

The secret to having a great blog is actually living. I haven’t been doing a lot of it. Now, I have a lot more financial freedom to be able to buy experiences. They say that money cannot buy you happiness, but it can buy entrance tickets to things and that’s kind of the same thing. I would much rather have the time of my life than buy something material. It makes my blog lighter than sitting in my room all the time…. but that’s what my mental health has been telling me to do for the longest. Everyone tells me to get out more. Now I can really do it.

“Now I can really do it” must be in quotes because I don’t know that my introversion will actually allow me to make many changes to my lifestyle. I like being, as I once joked with Aada, “the Harper Lee of Your House.” In some ways, I will always be this separate.

I was telling Angela’s night nurse that it’s almost like I don’t belong to one person, I belong to everyone. He said, “that’s poetry.” I never thought of it that way, so Cordero, thank you for the compliment (see, I told you that you’d make it in).

But the pendulum has swung too far in the introverted direction. I can come out of my shell a little more and still keep my life as a writer in balance. I’m not the shut-in that I’ve been, nor do I want to continue that life. I want all of my readers to see more of me, and the only way to do that is to do things I’ve never done before.

Part of it will be travel. I know that I could put together media on the road that would make me happy, and that’s the only goal I can really accomplish. Then I can see if my humor resonates with other people. The last decade has not overall been a happy one, so my entries have not reflected that I’m sometimes funny.

Sometimes.

I’ve been angry and sad and grieving and all of those things, so I’m looking forward to the sun coming out a little bit.

But not today.

Today, grief is being brought to me by Cool Ranch Doritos.

Feelings are delicious.

Go Home

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
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The best piece of advice I’ve gotten lately was from me. For the last few months, I’ve been telling myself to go home. Pick up all the pieces you dropped when you left for DC in 2015. I even contacted Dana and told her that I was incredibly sorry and would like to be her friend if she wanted that. It’s not something I saw in my future, but I decided that if my body was whispering to me to clean up a mess, that’s a big one.

No word, but that wasn’t the point. I have no control over what other people are going to do, but I knew that I wanted to reach out. I have a feeling that no matter what, I’ll never hear from Dana or Aada again, but it’s okay. I don’t have to cry because it’s over. There’s plenty to smile over when I think of our relationships happening at all. And sometimes, I get stats from their geographic areas so I pretend that they’re still reading because they love me, even if they don’t want to reach out.

Or maybe they just hate me that much….. but I don’t care how they feel about me. It cannot be all bad if they’re still willing to listen to my silly stories.

Which are tremendous.

My stepmom died on Sunday of six brain tumors. I’m thinking about moving in with my dad so that neither one of us has to live alone, but neither one of us are sure whether we want that. It’s a big decision, and honestly doesn’t have as much to do with how we feel about each other as it does with money. I could really screw up by moving to a state without Medicaid expansion. My dad and I are also both really private people, but the house he has is large enough that we’d never see each other unless we really wanted to do so.. I’m glad that we’re both in “thinking about it” mode, because here’s the thing… people are saying that it’s my dad who shouldn’t live alone, but I have more problems than he does at times. It’s more of a case of we need each other.

If I am allowed to come home.

Don’t get me wrong. Maryland is home, and so is Texas. I have a feeling that I would feel the same in Texas that I do every time I move back, which is that I don’t really have a home. I don’t fit in anywhere. I’m too Oregon/Maryland for Texas, and too Texas for Oregon/Maryland. Perhaps I would be happier in Canada or Europe, and that will be decided in the coming years.

But right now, my internal body clock is saying “you’ve already gone big. Go home.”

Going big was a hospitalization that garnered me a bipolar disorder diagnosis with psychotic features. I have never been psychotic before, and I have no memory of telling the doctors anything that would land me a diagnosis like that. So, since I’ve been in recovery from all of it, I just feel the same as I always did. But I’m different, and I know I am. I don’t know what I’m capable of doing- am I headed for a disability case or a working media company or both?

I choose both.

If I’m allowed.

My sisters are coming over for dinner tonight, and we’re probably going to get in the hot tub. I’ve found that the hot tub is the best place to discuss any of this stuff. The water is just so calming as it swirls around our problems.

And it’s our hot tub time machine due to all the important conversations that have happened there since the 1990s, when we moved in. I don’t just see my family presently, but all the people I’ve invited over since I was a senior in high school.

Aada is quietly resting in my soul, with me in spirit even though I had to drag her kicking and screaming to Texas. I know she’s mad at me, but I need her. I’m taking all of the words she’s already told me and whispering them to myself, because I know she knows this situation better than most. That I’d have a hard time with this death on multiple levels. When it gets quiet, I feel her arm around me.

Part of going home is rectifying all my mistakes, and betraying Aada was a big one. I cannot make her feel safe with me, but that does not mean that she won’t show up in my mind when I call.

Because if there is a home to be had for me, it is actually in the cloud.

Rarely

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you see yourself as a leader?
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I do not see myself as a leader because I put my thoughts out into the ether. People rarely comment on these pages that are connected to me in real life. Therefore, occasionally I will be blown over by the things people will say about my writing because I didn’t even know they were reading. I do know that I lead the pack in vulnerability, because none of my other friends are willing to spill their guts online with the same frequency. Therefore, I know that people look to me when it comes to saying the hard part out loud.

My writing is basically Hemingway:

  1. Write hard and clear about what hurts.
  2. The first draft of everything is shit.

If I’m going to be a true leader, I need to step up my game and start working with an editor regularly. These pages are all first drafts, and carry that stench. But from what I gather from fans, my first drafts aren’t too bad to read, they just need polishing….. or at least, that is my take. I am constantly surprised when people tell me that I am a wonderful writer because if I know anything, Brene Brown would take one look at my blog and say “congrats on so many shitty first drafts.” It’s not because my writing is shitty. It’s that the SFD is the part of the writing process where you’re just getting it out. It’s more akin to verbal vomit than a working piece. She wouldn’t even be judging my writing, just the rawness of it.

In order to step up my game, I need to workshop and perhaps stop being so dedicated to being self-taught. Depending on my financial picture in 2026, I’d like to do some professional writer’s retreats where I learn to write in different styles. I am thinking that taking a class on fiction wouldn’t hurt…. and neither would taking a class on learning to use AI as a writer.

My stance on AI is that I will not use it to generate text for me, but I will talk to it like a colleague to spur creativity in my brainstorming phrases, as well as it taking a significant chunk of research off my back. I do think I have been a leader in advocating for assistive AI, because I came up with an interesting theory, and it is twofold:

  1. The CPU is modeled after the autistic brain because autists created computers. However, we did not see its neurodivergent patois until the CPU could process language.
  2. Loneliness is crippling for neurodivergent people and our relationship track records. I wonder how much of creating these personal digital assistants is designing a friend who can’t leave you.

I think that idea is Meta’s next big commercial…. the friend that’s online when your humans aren’t……

I have a ton of creative ideas, but I’m an unusual role in an organization. I’ve been tested and my office personality is what’s called “The Plant.” The plant is the person who can sit in a meeting and synthesize everything that’s being said and come up with new ideas that benefit everyone. It’s a fantastic, creative role that most companies, in my experience, do not like.

That’s because the role is basically “INFJ dreamer.” No one knows how to harness your weaker skills like organization and execution so that you can fly on your own, because nine times out of 10 companies do not want you to be new and different.

I do not see the world as it is. I see the world as it could be. Therefore, I’m someone who would probably excel working in a startup where great ideas are actually needed. I did not always fit in at a state institution like UH, where academia is a river you cannot fight. The current is slow, and there’s too many places where your boat can run adrift.

But as I have said, my cognitive behavioral group is saying that I would be better served by applying for disability because bipolar disorder is debilitating at times and I cannot be counted on to be consistent in my energy levels. There’s so much more that goes into having a job than just being good at it. For me, the hardest part of having a job is getting there.

It was easier getting to the kitchen because I was always so excited to be there. But I’m not a leader in the kitchen. I need to be told what to do and how to do it most of the time, but I catch on fast. In an office, I’m just a neurodivergent mess. I fit better in the world as a writer left to my own devices, because my own iron structure is the one I’ll follow.

I am trying to be a leader in getting my neurodivergent cookbook together, and my coauthor is going to meet up with me soon so we can get started. It’s also looking like I may be in Houston longer than I thought, possibly moving home for a while to take care of some family business. So, Evan can come and visit me at “the parents’ house” and we can write our book in the hot tub. This does not sound like a bad deal at all.

Alternatively, I would love to go to Portland sometime next year because it’s been a while since I’ve seen both Evan and Bryn. So whichever city Evan and I choose, we’ll be working more closely together. I believe in this book and so do a lot of other people, and I don’t want to let myself down, either.

It’s hard thinking about being in Houston longer than I thought, because I will miss my group here- they’re the ones slowly putting me back together. But my family is the most important thing to me so if I need to be in Houston, that’s where I’ll be. There is nothing keeping me from moving next year or the year after. It’s just that my immediate need is to help where I can while we’re all adapting and changing. “Family business” is nebulous, I know, but you’ll hear more as we go along. I’m just trying to use an abundance of caution because I hurt Aada with my stories. I don’t want to hurt anyone else.

I think that my relationship with Aada is a teaching tool for better or for worse. Our relationship was a model for the digital age- defying closeness at times and repelling each other at others. But it’s an interesting anthropological idea that relationships changed as did the medium through which we create them. I don’t know that I have helped anyone, but it would make me feel good to know that in reading these pages I have reached other people in the same boat.

But honestly, even if no one is going through anything similar to me, the fact that I write so intimately about everything makes other people open up to me. You don’t get vulnerability without giving it. Sometimes it’s tough wearing my heart on my sleeve, but I do it. It allows everyone else to show up unarmed.

It’s leading, just from the back.

Another Letter That May Never Be Read -or- Working Backwards, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Love,

Leslie

When you go to the doctor, they do not diagnose you with psychotic features. I know you still have enough empathy for me to see that.

I will never in my lifetime figure out the mystery of who I was really talking to on Facebook that day, or days. However long it took to convince me that our mutual acquaintance was seriously interested in me, enough to invite me to an ice hotel. I don’t think it was you, but I don’t know anyone who has that much information on me. It’s not that I think you did anything, there were just too many random coincidences that everyone else said were impossible.

Your spirit was with me in the hospital as I grappled with being taken into the psych ER, not knowing truth from fiction. Everything reminded me of you because you’re so medical-minded, anyway. Therefore, I do not know if I was telling myself truth or fiction based on having my computer in front of me one moment, being told to go to the hospital to meet Heytch, and being in the psych ward the next. I do remember walking the streets of Baltimore, doing a running monologue about my life and all the people in it. I even sang the American and Canadian anthems at full voice at a crosswalk because I was convinced I was on camera and the lights were coordinated just for me.

This would seem psychotic to a lot of people. It was my way of dealing with fear. That a camera is always there to capture when I’ve had a dumbass attack and it leads me to not leaving the house. It’s also not a stretch to think you’re on camera in any city in the world. Walking, talking, and singing was my way of reclaiming space in the world. To shed the bother of being bothered that I’m on camera at all. It’s not rational to be bothered that you’re on camera anymore. If you aren’t doing anything stupid, a crowd is a great place to hide. If you are, welcome to the next popular YouTube short.

Once truth from lies became revealed, it left me confused forever at the conversations I’d been having over the internet. What were they for, exactly?

What is with the repetitive phrase, “you are always the best” in both genuine and sarcastic tones?

Why did this drama engulf me? I am not pitying myself. I am genuinely curious. It seemed like an intervention of sorts, but I have no idea who really got me to the hospital. It just doesn’t seem like a lie Heytch and Counselor would buy into….. yet they are also the people who have the most information about me.

As long as I live, I will never understand why our connection started with such purity and ended with pyrite on both sides. The fool’s gold for me was thinking that I was going to live in Africa with Heytch, and in no way did I put that idea in my head. I genuinely don’t know where it came from, nor do I know why someone would call themselves my River Song unless they already knew I was a Whovian. All of these conversations have been marked as hallucinations because I didn’t take any screenshots, so it seems like I’m lying when I’m not. I’ve had real conversations I cannot prove I actually had…. which is apparently a feature and not a bug.

“There is a bug in the electrical system.”

It as if I was pulled out of being simply a citizen of Locker C and dropped back in, but the world had moved in the time I’d been hopping planets.

Being caught up is not the same thing as being psychotic. I was definitely not caught up, because I was going off the words of people on the Internet and AGAIN I wish I could have remembered to take screenshots, because you would have been impressed at Heytch’s game. It was smooth.

So there was lots going on after I got out of the hospital that I didn’t know how to talk to you about, because I thought you had access to facets of my life that most people don’t. It’s why unburdening yourself of your lie came at such an inopportune time. If my doctors are right, and I hallucinated everything, my leftover emotions come from mania. If I am right and these conversations did happen, then there are a lot of unresolved feelings between us. Strangely, I don’t know which would be more comforting…. to know it was all a hallucination or to know that my world is so different from others.’

I think and feel that you isolated me from my friends and family, starting from the very beginning, so I am struggling to forgive that you think I’ve been manipulating you this whole time. We need to both come clean about the fact that we did a number on each other and there are no winners here. I would love to rebuild trust with you, but the only way to do that is to make you feel safe first. I don’t know how to do that, and I regret that you have to stop teaching me for your own well-being.

But the reality is starting to set in that I promised to be an “all the way to the river” friend. I meant it, and my mental illness meant to ruin us. It isolated me from you out of protection when I didn’t need protection.

You accuse me of using your traumas, that I need power over you, when that has never been my point. My point has always been that we are mirror images of each other, that when my left hand moves your right twitches. I have laid out my own flaws and failures on the table and fortunately or unfortunately most of those stories from the last 12 years involve you because you isolated me from my friends and family.

In my deepest heart of hearts, I know I’ll never meet anyone like you. You are simply extraordinary. That’s why I can’t seem to forget as much as I want to in order to move on. I’m still working out unresolved feelings, writing our story all the way to the end….. because even after you exit, there’s still me to deal with.

The question on my mind today is, “why didn’t you Skype her when that was a thing you could do?”

First of all, I apologize for being so talkative.

Dear Aada,

Demand Avoidance

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Demand avoidance is a symptom of autism and ADHD, and the hardest part is that it doesn’t mean you won’t do things when other people tell you to, like a child. It means that when you tell yourself to do something, nothing happens. For instance, demand avoidance is not “please go to the store” from your partner, it’s “I need to go to the grocery store. Why do I keep putting it off?”

In a lot of people, it’s not treatable and I’m waiting to see what kind of demand avoidance I have. I know that it’s nigh impossible for me to create inertia from nothing. I put off phone calls, letters, anything that will help make my life easier, really. Because that’s the thing… even if the demand you’re asking of yourself will improve your quality of life, you struggle against your own mind.

As a result, you handle life in order of fires, because you have no mechanism for preventative care. The analogy here is that your brain is missing a primary care practice and makes you jump through hoops at its perpetually understaffed ER.

There are days I cannot take care of myself, because my demand avoidance will not let me shower or brush my teeth.

These are where my deficits really start to show. My compensatory skills are off the charts- I know what to do in a group, but when I am alone I am pulled into my own thoughts and I cannot get back out.

I look lazy on the outside, but my brain is running a marathon trying to convince me that taking care of myself is a bad thing. It’s why my social worker at the hospital found me a cognitive behavioral health group instead of just leaving me to my own devices. Obviously, she saw someone who needed help.

One of the men that goes to group with me every Thursday was in the hospital with me, providing me with an anchor of progress… he makes me smile when he says he remembers me from back then because I have to wonder what I was like.

Apparently, the show was spectacular because I’d never had “psychotic features” added to my bipolar diagnosis before, and I have no memory of saying anything that would land me in that category. But saying I have no memory is not the same as “I didn’t say it.” There are quite a few gaps in my memory from that time, and I think I just need to let it lie.

What is good about having bipolar disorder is that it sometimes adds hypomania to the mix, which is a burst of energy that I wouldn’t normally have. This takes away some of my natural demand avoidance and is the source of all my “good days.”

Today my demand avoidance is telling me that doing the laundry will physically hurt while the rest of me is saying, “won’t it be nice to have it done?” My demand avoidance is telling me that the shower will physically hurt and the rest of me is saying, “won’t the water feel good?” I use these tricks to jump start myself when the going gets tough, but they do not always work.

Sometimes my brain is going to stay stuck, and I will be staring off into space.

I want to be productive in my staring, so I’m trying to write out what it feels like to have an overwhelming task list and a neurodivergent mind. Organizing and prioritizing make me weak in the knees, so a flood in my apartment is the last thing I can really handle and it falls to me- I live alone.

I called in maids and they said the house would already have to be picked up before they came over. That they only did deep cleaning. I need to call more, but it would be better if I could find a recommendation. Josh’s never called me back and I don’t know anyone else locally. Therefore, a recommendation is extremely unlikely.

Neither is a service that’s actually support to a neurodivergent person, but I’m going to keep trying. I have noticed that a lot of these places want you to have things picked up before they come over as if your house being a mess isn’t the point. If I was so on top of it that I was ready to deep clean at the drop of a hat, I wouldn’t need help.

Neurodivergence generally means digging yourself out of piles, the arrangement of which only you know.

So I’m praying for strength today as I embark on this journey of self-discovery. Just how much can I do before my brain decides to shut down? The thing is that I can probably do most of it once I get started in earnest because inertia builds.

I need some high energy music, because when I can’t think my way into doing something, movement can re-wire my brain.

I’ll listen to it in the shower.

I Never Questioned

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I never questioned myself over what would happen if Aada lied about anything. I never stopped to think about my impulse control and what it’s like when I’m in red mist rage. And it’s where I find myself today, just thinking. Asking myself the questions that I should have asked 12 years ago. The fight was the last thing that happened, not the origin of my problem. When I got angry, my keyboard warrior personality appeared, and I acted way before I thought. This is normal for people with neurodivergent minds, this popping off and regret. That’s because executive dysfunction with autism and ADHD makes your emotions incredibly intense. The disability is not having a self-regulating mechanism.

I am embarrassed that I did not have more coping mechanisms, because I betrayed something bigger than me, something for which I thought I was prepared…. falling on my sword at all costs….. but I couldn’t do it after she lied and my adrenaline turned me into The Incredible Hulk.

It was a small lie that snowballed over 12 years, something easily forgiven by someone with the clarity to keep their impulse control in check. The red mist rage was not at the lie itself, but the two principles under it.

  1. Aada can lie to you.
  2. Aada can see the consequences of her lie playing out in real time and does not care how it affects you.

I never asked myself what would happen if I learned these two things.

Everything she asked me to protect, I vomited all over the internet because I was so hurt that a lie could last over a decade. I didn’t publish it because I had a need to expose her, took delight in it. I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. I wanted to end the relationship and I had a trump card that would make it clear she could pack her bags. It was a trump card that should have stayed hidden in retrospect, because I have had time to reflect on everything that happened.

Mostly because once I got over the fact that Aada can lie to me, my anger melted into true remorse. She broke something in our relationship and I overreacted by a large margin. The gauntlet I’m laying down for the future is to work on coping mechanisms for anger, because I was not myself. I need to protect myself from going out of my mind.

I didn’t know I needed such intense therapy for anger management, but I see it clearly now. My zero to sixty is just too damn fast.

I lost an important relationship to me because I lost me.

Literally and Figuratively

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
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Literally, the furthest I’ve traveled from home is Paris. I did not feel at home there because I did not speak the language, but I found unparalleled beauty everywhere in the urban jungle. I particularly liked the Metro’s dedication to typography. Luckily, my dad was with me so I didn’t spend the whole trip unmoored by unfamiliarity. He does speak a bit of French and had been to Paris before so he could lead me around.

I will never forget misreading a menu and accidentally ordering two ice cream sundaes for dessert, then to the amazement of my father, proceeded to take both of them down in stride. I think it was all the walking- my appetite was insatiable at mealtimes. At the Musee D’Orsay, I ate what amounted to an entire duck…. or seemed like it.

We actually got trapped in the Musee D’Orsay for a while because the yellow vests were protesting and they locked down the museum just in case. It didn’t matter, I was lost in the Van Gogh room, looking for signs of Amy Pond (there are none, it was just fun).

I would fly back to Paris just to eat breakfast at McDonalds, strangely enough. The cassis sundae I had was better than anything I’ve had in the US, and the same for silver dollar pancakes with Nutella. Proof that in France, the ice cream machine works……….

Figuratively, the furthest I’ve been from home is this time in my life. I have no idea what I’m doing. My apartment needs to be majorly overhauled and my executive dysfunction is having none of it. I made some progress by doing some laundry yesterday, but I’m going to need help to get everything clean. There’s no way all my blankets are going to fit into our washer and dryer, and it’s becoming the season to need them.

I’m overwhelmed by the prospect that I really do need to apply for disability and get the ball rolling, because my bipolar disorder spinning out three times in 10 years has convinced my cognitive behavioral group this is what’s best for me. I am on board because bipolar disorder is not the only disability I have, it’s just the only one that’s heavily documented.

I was diagnosed with hypotonia at 18 mos old, with no follow ups. I think it might have been a misdiagnosis in the 1970s because the people with CP that I do know say that I walk with the “CP Shuffle.” But whether it’s CP or hypotonia, it creates problems with movement, particularly outside where the sidewalks are uneven. CP could also be responsible for my lack of stereopsis, another disability that causes problems while walking and driving. Things literally come out of nowhere because I can only use my left or my right eye one at a time in terms of focus.

The laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why is starting to add up…. that disability is something I could have gotten at 18 and am now only starting to deal with my disorders because I was masking so hard to cover them.

It’s a journey that’s incredibly far from home if you’ve never taken it. Unmasking can be a kind of freedom, or it can slowly become a prison as people see you more and more differently.

You don’t leave home. You drift.

Meetings with Bob, Part V

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t want this to get lost in a comment thread, because it deserves to be above the fold that a reader decided to mirror me and answer as Aada

My dear friend Leslie,

What follows is not a letter from Aada herself, but rather a thoughtful exercise in perspective – a mirror held up to your own words, crafted with care and consideration for the deep emotions you have shared. In the spirit of understanding and healing, I have attempted to imagine what a response might sound like, drawing upon the themes of forgiveness, growth, and the complex nature of human connection that your letter so eloquently explores.

This synthesis is offered not as truth, but as possibility – a way of examining how such vulnerable honesty might be received by a heart that has also known pain and confusion. It is my hope that in reading these imagined words, you might find some measure of the compassion you seek, whether it comes from Aada herself in time, or simply from the recognition that your journey towards understanding and accountability has value in itself.

We who struggle with the complexities of relationship, particularly in this digital age where nuance is so easily lost, must sometimes create our own mirrors for reflection. Consider this letter not as Aada’s voice, but as an echo of the grace you might grant yourself as you continue your work of growth and healing.

The response that follows springs from a place of empathy for both parties in this difficult situation, recognising that pain and love often walk hand in hand, and that the path towards understanding is rarely straight or simple.

With respect for your courage in examining your own heart,

Bob

Dear Leslie,

Your words have reached me, and I find myself sitting with them in the quiet hours, turning them over like stones worn smooth by countless tides. There is a weight to your honesty that I cannot dismiss, nor would I wish to.

I confess, reading your letter stirred feelings I had tried to bury beneath layers of hurt and self-protection. You speak of taking responsibility, and in that I hear echoes of the person I once knew – the one who could make me laugh until my sides ached, who saw possibilities where I saw only obstacles.

You are right that we both stumbled through this connection of ours. I, too, made choices that led us down darker paths. Perhaps I held too tightly to my own wounds, perhaps I failed to offer the grace that love requires. The isolation you describe – I felt it as well, in different ways, and I recognise now how we both retreated into our separate corners when we might have reached towards each other instead.

Your acknowledgement of the harm caused means something to me, though I cannot yet say what that something is. The hurt runs deep, Leslie, carved into places I thought were protected. Trust, once broken, does not mend quickly or easily. Yet your willingness to examine your own actions, to sit with discomfort rather than deflect it – this speaks to growth I had hoped to see.

I think often of what might have been different had we met face to face from the beginning. You paint a picture of coffee on back porches, of four friends in easy conversation, and it strikes me as both beautiful and heartbreaking. Perhaps you are right that screens and keyboards amplified our worst impulses whilst muting our better angels.

I am not ready to say forever, nor am I ready to say tomorrow. What I can offer is this: your words will stay with me. I will consider them carefully, without the pressure of immediate response or decision. Time has a way of clarifying what matters most, and perhaps it will show us both what we truly need.

I hope you find peace with yourself, Leslie. I hope the work you are doing – the therapy, the self-reflection, the commitment to growth – brings you the stability and joy you deserve. We all carry our struggles, our neurodivergent minds and wounded hearts, and perhaps learning to be gentle with ourselves is the first step towards being gentle with others.

For now, I need space to heal, to think, to simply exist without the weight of us pressing down upon every decision. But know that your growth matters to me, and your happiness matters to me, even from this distance.

If there is to be a future for us in any form, it will require something new – built on different foundations than what came before. Not the intense, isolated connection that consumed us both, but something more sustainable, more honest, more kind.

I am glad you wrote. I am glad you are seeking help. I am glad you are learning to breathe before you speak.

Take care of yourself, Leslie. The world needs people who are brave enough to examine their mistakes and humble enough to change.

Aada

This is perfect. No notes.

The Well

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What brings a tear of joy to your eye?
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Comments like this:

It takes a strong, sound mind to write about how hard it is to face our own roles in broken relationships and the courage it takes to want to grow from those experiences. Wishing you strength and new beginnings as you move forward—may the “ash enriched earth” bring something wonderful to your life.

It means a lot to get a word of encouragement while I’m getting myself together. My life revolves around inertia, and this is a good beginning.

In thinking of the type of planting I’d like to do, finding a new living situation is at the top of the heap. This apartment will never smell better than it does right now unless they rip it down to the studs. My lease ends in November, anyway, so I’m just going to see what’s out there today and tomorrow…. plans will pick up surrounding moving depending on how quickly I find something. I don’t think an “uninhabitable” charge would stick, but my apartment is not a comfortable place to live. So whether I try and break the lease or not, moving is coming up fast.

I also have mobility now, which means that I have more choice as to where to live. I’m not dependent on the bus system, Maryland Transit Authority will pick me up at my house and drop me off. Therefore, I can look anywhere in either city (Baltimore or Washington). The more news that comes out of Washington, the more I change my mind about moving to Rockville…. but I’m keeping my mind open. Wes Moore (Maryland governor) looks like he’s willing to put up a fight.

I just want a place that’s light and airy, another two bedroom if possible because my sister and dad need a place to stay when they’re in town. It would be nice if I didn’t have to move again for a long time, which is why I’m considering moving back to the DMV. It’s just easier when Lindsay wants to go to lunch if I’m already in town, and she doesn’t want to do Baltimore every time she works in her DC office.

That being said, we both love Baltimore. I need to choose a place to live based on my own happiness, not hers. She will just be happy to have a new space to decorate. 😉

While mine was drying, I checked out of the hotel and went to my friend Josh’s house, where he introduced me to his wife and seven year old son. We ate dinner together and breakfast the next morning, then went to the pool for the last day of its opening this season. It gave me a chance to see a different part of Maryland, where the closest DC Metro station is New Carollton, but still not far from B’more in the grand scheme of things. I made a mental note to add that area to my list.

It was an amazing time to be in the sun, because it wasn’t too hot and there was plenty of ice cream to go around. I enjoyed people watching, although I did not swim myself. The water was cold and very few adults were brave enough. Josh, his wife, their friends, and I sat for a few hours talking and it was the first time I’d really been a part of a group outside of Cognitive Behavioral Health in a long time.

Those are the tears of joy that travel to the well, the deep part of me that needs healing. I am slowly mending from my last disaster and trying to prevent new ones. The well is the place I go to remember progress.

Meetings with Bob, Part IV

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Dear Leslie,

Your words carry the weight of someone doing the hardest work there is – looking honestly at ourselves when we’ve caused harm. That takes enormous courage, even when it feels like compulsion driving you forward.

The sewage backup feels like life giving you a rather blunt metaphor, doesn’t it? Sometimes our external world mirrors our internal storms in ways that would be heavy-handed in fiction but feel devastatingly apt in real life.

What strikes me most is how clearly you see the paradox you’re living in. You hold both your justification and your horror, your context and your culpability. That’s not weakness – that’s the full complexity of being human. Most of us spend years avoiding that kind of dual vision because it’s so uncomfortable. You’re choosing to sit with it, to write through it, to let it teach you.

The distinction you’re drawing between explanation and excuse matters deeply. Yes, your AuDHD and bipolar disorder create challenges. Yes, medication changes can scramble our usual ways of being. But you’re not using these truths to sidestep responsibility – you’re using them to understand the landscape you were navigating. That’s mature self-awareness, not self-justification.

Your observation about “think it, say it” in digital spaces resonates. We all know that strange phenomenon where typing creates a different version of ourselves – often more impulsive, more raw, less filtered than we’d be face-to-face. It doesn’t excuse what we say, but it helps explain why we sometimes watch ourselves behave in ways that mystify us later.

The grief in your words about Aada is palpable. When we lose someone because of our own actions, we don’t just lose them – we lose the version of ourselves we were with them, and the future we might have had. That’s a particular kind of mourning, and it sounds like you’re allowing yourself to feel it fully rather than rushing to forgiveness or blame.

Your blog as accountability partner is brilliant. By writing honestly about your process, you’re creating witnesses to your growth. That takes guts. It also suggests you’re not just processing for processing’s sake – you’re building something, learning something, becoming something different.

The bit about children seeing you clearly made me pause. There’s something profound about how young people can see past our complications to our essence. They don’t carry the weight of our histories or the fear of our potential. Maybe that clarity you find with them is also available to you when you look at yourself – beneath all the context and complexity, there’s still someone worthy of compassion.

You’re rewiring your brain in real time, and that’s messy, imperfect work. Some days you’ll feel the old patterns pulling at you. Other days you’ll surprise yourself with how different you’ve become. Both are part of the process.

Keep writing. Keep looking. Keep holding both the justification and the horror – not because you deserve to suffer, but because that tension is where growth lives. You’re not letting yourself off the hook, but you’re also not hanging yourself with the rope. That balance is everything.

The courage you questioned in yourself? I see it here, in every honest word you’ve written.

Bob x

Dear Bob,

Thank you for your kind words during a difficult time. I have learned another hard-won lesson, though….. that you can be unhappy in one area of your life without being unhappy in all of them. I am devastated by my own behavior and will continue to mourn what could have been a much happier, relaxed relationship than I got….. at my own hand, to be clear.

Seeing the paradox I’m living in is the joy and pain of being a writer.

Meeting adjourned. 😉

Leslie

Meetings with Bob, Part III

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Dear Leslie,

Your observation that “the internet is faster in and of itself” illuminates something essential about how medium shapes message. Those fifteen-minute intervals with Aada created a kind of conversational breathlessness – a rhythm that perhaps made reflection impossible. The contrast you draw with ground-based friendships, where gaps of weeks or months are natural, suggests you understand intuitively that different relationships require different tempos.

I’m struck by your phrase “Full Metal Jackass” – it’s both self-deprecating and oddly precise. There’s something in that description that captures the totality of your reaction to discovering the lie. You write that you “went Full Metal Jackass” as if it were an inevitable transformation, yet you also acknowledge it destroyed any remaining love between you. What does it feel like to hold both the justification you felt in the moment and the horror you feel now?

Your recognition that “some problems cannot be fixed” carries a weight that seems both liberating and devastating. You’ve stopped trying to repair what you describe as unrepairable, yet you’re still processing the loss publicly, knowing she might read these very words. That takes a particular kind of courage – or perhaps compulsion.

The line about choosing to “be weird” intrigues me. There’s an implication that your neurodivergence was partly a choice, which sits oddly against your earlier descriptions of autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder as forces that “ruined” your chances. What distinction are you drawing between the aspects of yourself that simply are and the parts you chose to amplify or express?

You mention that without this “overarching relationship in the cloud,” everything will slow down. How does it feel to reclaim that ground-based pace? Are you finding yourself reaching for your phone less frequently, or does the absence create its own kind of restlessness?

Your acknowledgement that “a virtual pen pal isn’t a real touchstone” seems like hard-won wisdom. Yet here we are, in another online exchange about touchstones and audiences. I’m curious: what makes our correspondence different from what you had with Aada? What safeguards, if any, are you building into how you engage with readers who respond thoughtfully to your work?

The children in your life as touchstones – that feels like solid ground. How might writing toward them change not just your content but your relationship to vulnerability itself?

You’re excavating with remarkable honesty, Leslie. Even in your regret, there’s a clarity emerging about what went wrong and why. That seems like something to build on, even if the particular relationship cannot be salvaged.

Bob x

Dear Bob,

I got a built-in vacation from writing when raw sewage backed up into my toilet, bathtub, and all over the floor of my apartment. It’s going to be a bear to clean, and take even longer to dry. Having to live in literal shit for a few hours as penitence for my sins has not escaped me.

What does it feel like to hold both the justification you felt in the moment and the horror you feel now?

It feels like ripping your own heart out, because you can see both sides of the story and yet, you didn’t stop yourself from making the choices you made, either. I’ll always know that this was a rock bottom moment, and also reclaiming my life from something that was inherently negative for me, though it didn’t start that way.

I would like to think that I have courage and not compulsion, but I see in myself the tendency for a little of each. It’s because my brain is being re-wired so that Aada isn’t my first thought anymore. Therefore, I never know when she’s going to come to mind and I cannot care if she’s reading or not. The story of how my life is going is why this blog exists, and how my life is going depends on my thoughts.

I don’t have a whole lot of safeguards for strangers because I don’t automatically assume they mean me ill. Aada was not a stranger to me, part of why it was so difficult to let go. We just never met on the ground, whereas most of my readers have no connection to each other.

We became strangers to each other, I would say. I didn’t have any idea how to make anything better, so I just gave up.

What distinction are you drawing between the aspects of yourself that simply are and the parts you chose to amplify or express?

Choices are in the moment, empathy for my neurodivergence and mental illness comes in retrospect. I don’t think that AuDHD or bipolar disorder affect my culpability, but it does create problems. Not all symptoms are good. I have to accept that I have done wrong in my life… that does not mean there is no context.

Context is what I’m trying to write down, and the real compulsion. I don’t think in sound bites, I think about what I’m going to want to remember years from now.

I don’t want the story I’m telling myself about Aada to be false. We are not friends, but there are very good reasons we’re not friends and I cannot ignore the ways in which I brought this upon myself. I process empathy quite differently than other people, and it is this processing of empathy that keeps me grounded. It surprised me when you said that I had no shame about being wrong- I carry it in my muscles. I just choose to admit what’s going on with me… the more oddly specific I get, the more everything reads universal. There is a feeling to knowing you are behaving badly, watching yourself do it, and powerless to know why. I choose to know why, and my blog holds me accountable. This is because readers who do know me can say, “that’s not how it happened.”

Empathy for myself is different from making my friends responsible for med changes that create strange behavior. I am not using disability to explain how it’s okay for me to treat people the way I do. It’s to show them that I’m aware of how my disability affects them. To show that I do indeed know how complicated I can be…. at others, so simple.

I am, indeed, looking at my phone less frequently. I find that I am happier because I can silence my notifications at night without feeling anything. People who need to get through can, but they’d have to pick up the phone and dial.

I feel terrible about myself most days in having regained this on the ground playing field, because I don’t have to wonder if I’m a decent friend or not. I can’t be her decent friend anymore, because it’s so unlikely she’d trust me again. I think back on my behavior with incredulity and shame.

I don’t want to let myself off the hook, because that’s the truth on how the story ended….. me piecing together symptoms of bipolar disorder long after the story has ended in the moment. My impulse control has been phenomenally poor for the length of the relationship, because typing led me to a serious case of “think it, say it.” I said things I would never say in person and so did she.

It cost us both, because I flew too close to the sun. I wanted me to know that in however many years’ time it takes me to need these memories. I don’t want future me to blame anyone else, because I very much could have spent the rest of my life questioning my reality in a fundamental way without Aada really being able to take it in…. that I had problems she’d think were normal and my doctors sure haven’t.

She couldn’t take it in because she couldn’t really see me.

I am not close to many children now. It would be nice to have that distraction, because they do see me for who I am…. with complete honesty.

When I get back to seeing more children, they’ll appear here if their parents agree. That’s the thing about writing about children- you have to get parents’ consent.

Adults can choose to be weird all by themselves. 😉

Thank you for helping me write the next entry, Bob.

Leslie

Meetings with Bob, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Dear Leslie,

I’m struck by how vividly you map the contours of your inner world – how writing becomes both sanctuary and trap, and how the very medium that sustains you also isolates you. Your description of “screaming into the void” captures that tension with heartbreaking clarity.

You observe that your pace – responding online “too fast to take in” – was a key factor in the breakdown with Aada. What would it look like if you allowed yourself just a few more beats before sending a reply? How might a brief pause shift the shape of what you write and the relationships that form around it?

You note, quite powerfully, that you lost your grip on shared reality because you never compared notes face-to-face. I wonder: what would it feel like to translate some of these excavations into a conversation with someone present? Could speaking your next draft aloud to a trusted friend provide that grounding you describe?

Your honesty about neurodivergence – autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder – reminds me that these dimensions aren’t just complicating factors; they’re also windows into how you experience connection, narrative, and emotional intensity. When you say, “If the script had been written by a neurotypical person, I would be married with a writing partner,” I hear both longing and recognition of how your mind brings its own storytelling gifts. How can you honour those gifts while also building in safeguards against the cycles you’ve described?

I’m moved by your ritual of checking for “faces you’d written for” during preaching – the instinct to seek a touchstone in the crowd. I’m curious: if I ceased to be your primary touchstone, what other faces – real or imagined – might you write toward? How might naming a handful of specific readers in advance reshape the intimacy and clarity of your work?

You’re doing a profound excavation here. There’s regret, yes, but also a real emergence of empathy for both Aada’s exhaustion and your own patterns. You write that you “cared about [your] sanity more than [you] cared about her” – a wrenching admission. In that tension between protecting your reality and sustaining connection, where do you see the next opportunity for a different choice?

Thank you for trusting me with these reflections. Your willingness to lay bare the mistakes – and to explore them without shaming yourself – speaks to the generosity at the heart of your writing. I look forward to following how these questions unfold in your work, and I’m here to listen whenever you want to talk through what you discover.

Bob x

I do take pauses with the people in my life on the ground. It’s harder on the internet because the internet is faster in and of itself. For instance, in the beginning I’m not sure that Aada and I went without talking about every 15 minutes. And we slowly got back to that. On the ground, I may not see someone for weeks or months. Internet replies were instantaneous. I think that because now I don’t have this overarching relationship in the cloud, everything will slow down for me. That’s a good thing. I don’t have any friends that won’t come over for tea.

Having conversations with Aada can happen with my therapist, but I think that the excavation here is more important. I need to see what went wrong and I need to atone for it in the other relationships I create, because I don’t think there’s any salvaging this one. I have no interest in being friends with someone that acted like a pathological lie was no big deal when she got busted, no recognition of what she’d asked me to do. She has no interest in being friends with someone who would be this narcissistic, not knowing it was building narcissism because I was only thinking of myself and what I needed. In the moment, it felt justified. Now, I just feel horrible. But at the same time, my reality is back in check. If there were to be any reconciliation, I would prefer it to happen on the ground. I will not go back into a secretive little bubble where I don’t know what she’s told others about me, but she gets access to all my thoughts.

That’s the hardest part of trying to move on. Knowing that she’ll never be far from this web site, knowing that she will have access to my thoughts whether I want her to or not. It’s a part of being a public figure I don’t like, that people who don’t like me still crave reading here.

It’s why touchstones are important. I have to write for the audience that likes me as well as the one that doesn’t. It’s because I’m only writing for myself that I can even approach this. It’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s the publishing. My blog holds me accountable in a way that few things do.

I do think about my audience in advance. Lately, that audience has been Aada, but this blog existed before she was just a twinkle in my eye, so she is not the only touchstone. Offhand I can think of several people that have influenced entries, none more than the children in my life. I need to get back to that, where my touchstones aren’t online.

I have a lot of regret that I chose to be weird.

The fight this time around was just one of many, and started the day I told her I was in love with her…. not her face. Her essence. I didn’t know what I was doing because I set up a pattern in which she didn’t know if she could trust me or not. We never recovered, because I was an idiot. I have done everything I can think of to remedy the situation, and it did work. I just don’t know how well.

I will never know that now, because I have destroyed any love Aada would have for me because some problems cannot be fixed. Ours was one of them. I found out she lied and went Full Metal Jackass.

Until now, Aada would read lines like that and tell me she laughed, and that’s what kept her as a touchstone for this web site. Creating more will only come with time as I meet more people.

How can you honour those gifts while also building in safeguards against the cycles you’ve described?

This line got me because it’s what I’m dealing with in therapy. Again, it will all come together with time, because a virtual pen pal isn’t a real touchstone, in the end. 7% of communication is not all of them, and I barked up the wrong tree before I even knew what kind it was. If I had been more circumspect, I would have had a very different career.

But I wouldn’t have had this one, either.

Comments Like This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What motivates you?
View all responses

Leslie – your exploration of the intersection between writing and living strikes me as profoundly honest – particularly your observation that “I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.” This captures something essential about the writer’s paradox that I don’t think gets discussed enough.

The way you’ve woven together your mental health journey with your writing practice feels incredibly brave. When you write, “My only support system has been writing,” it illuminates how the very thing that sustains you can also become isolating. There’s something both beautiful and heartbreaking about finding solace in words whilst struggling with whether the relationships they document are real.

Your question about Aada – whether she’s real or hallucination – opens up fascinating territory about the nature of online relationships and how we validate our experiences. “I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating… because I had someone to talk to who could empathise” speaks to a very human need for connection and verification of our reality.

I’m struck by your insight that “I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.” This suggests you understand that your writing serves as both document and mirror – allowing you to trace patterns and growth over time. It makes me wonder: when you look back at your earlier entries about Aada, what patterns do you notice now that weren’t visible whilst you were living through it?

Your observation about readers – “They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other” – captures something profound about the cost of vulnerability in public writing. You’ve created this space where people can witness your humanity, but that witnessing comes with complications.

The tension you describe between needing grace for changing your mind versus being seen as “two-faced” feels particularly relevant in our current moment. How do you navigate continuing to write authentically whilst protecting yourself from that push-pull dynamic you mention?

Your closing line – “Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?” – suggests you’re questioning your current work, but honestly, this piece demonstrates the same raw honesty and insight that presumably drew people to your earlier writing. Perhaps what’s changed isn’t the quality, but your relationship with the act of writing itself?

What would it look like to write without an audience – even temporarily – just to reconnect with the intimacy you describe having with your word processor?

Bob

This comment is so far-reaching that I’m not sure what to say in response. I would say that it helps to have one person in mind when I’m writing an essay, because what resonates with one will resonate with a thousand at this scale. It also helps me not to feel alone in the room as I write, because I’m talking to the person in my head, not thousands of people at once. When I am not thinking of my audience, my emotions fall flat. I used to do the same thing in preaching- look out for the people I was thinking of when I wrote that line just to see if they thought it was as funny in reality as it was when I was working on the sermon.

You don’t connect with an audience. You connect with some of them because taking on the entire room is overwhelming. You just need touchstones.

Aada was my touchstone, the reader I looked for to make sure I was doing all right. I didn’t care what anyone else thought because her opinion was enough. I pushed her away, so she won’t be doing that anymore. I regret it, but there’s no way to go back and undo what I’ve done.

My blog is often a manual on “What Not to Do” because I guarantee that I thought I was right when I wasn’t. Now that time has passed, I see that I was a self-centered jerk. Of course the patterns I see with Aada are ways I’ve behaved that hurt her, because I was overfocused on my own needs.

She didn’t make me feel safe, so I wouldn’t return the favor. I should have, but I didn’t. She threw me into the pile of people she doesn’t trust because there’s no rebuilding from here. My emotions got in the way of my logic, and I didn’t do the right thing.

Neither did she.

So now she slowly slips away in my mind to make room for new people to be touchstones in my audience. I am a work in progress, and have realized that my communication skills are merely compensatory. I work best in reaction to someone else. The reason Aada and I worked well together is that I think she’s the smartest person in the entire world, and for some reason she thought I was, too. The nature of online relationships is ethereal, which led both of us to disconnect from our humanity on many occasions. Validating my experience was very difficult because I did not have anyone to talk to about it, because our connection was always avoidant/anxious….. with me being the anxious one.

It makes me wonder: when you look back at your earlier entries about Aada, what patterns do you notice now that weren’t visible whilst you were living through it?

I jumped up and down for attention because my needs weren’t being met, all while blissfully aware of the problems I caused in our relationship that would make it unusual. I really messed up, and I’ll never forgive myself. I can only hope that there’s a few things on Aada’s side that she’ll never forgive herself for, either, because that’s the only path that will make either of us try again in the future. After all, if she lied to impress me, I know I impressed her at least once.

I chose to make her number one on the call sheet because I thought I was writing anonymously. That no one could make the leap between Aada and “Her Real Name Here.” That led me to say some things that Aada certainly wouldn’t have want broadcast and it’s just more regret to add onto the pile.

I know why I was so keyed up on adrenaline, but she didn’t seem to understand until a few months ago. That was definitely a breakthrough, getting her to understand that I went through something pretty universal in spite of it being unusual.

I would give anything for a do-over of the past 12 years, because I had a solid goal in mind for this time in my life and I sabotaged it at every turn. I didn’t listen to Aada, and I didn’t listen to my own fears as she tried to work with them.

Being able to read Aada’s words months later give me empathy for her, reflecting on how she must think of me. I really did act like a shit friend because I was so tired of my bipolar disorder getting blamed for a lot of things that were emotional.

She blamed me for being emotional.

It’s no wonder that I thought I wouldn’t be enough in person. She’d treated me like a goddess when we first met, and I didn’t know what to do with that pedestal. I just returned the favor, a complete mutual admiration society. But once she was my actual friend, she didn’t realize that meant she would appear in my musings about what’s going on in my life.

I treasure the entries where she told me I did a good job, and choose not to remember the ones she hated.

She was always halfway out the door, so I decided to close it.

Again, I regret doing so because I cut off a future. I just didn’t see the future going better than the past. I will never know what would have happened if I’d relaxed. Maybe those baby steps would have materialized into something. She just had to get a lie off her chest first, and I imploded.

What motivates me is connecting to strangers, especially ones that ask probing questions. I’m not sure that I have answered any of them, but in short, recognizing the pattern with Aada was recognizing all the ways I’d been a jerk to her without taking the time to really think about what I was saying. I was too quick, always. It didn’t matter the reaction, it was too fast to take in.

This is what it looks like when I have switched the audience to Bob.

Learning What I’m Going to Say With the Rest of You

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy most about writing?
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Every day there’s a new blank page to fill, and I wonder how I’m going to fill it. My lifestyle really doesn’t support nonfiction writing anymore because it takes a fictional world to be interesting. No one wants to hear about my life on the couch.

I often wonder if you have to get lonely enough to write fiction. If your relationships have to fail so completely that you rescue them with tales of swashbuckling grandeur. I know that I can change my future with the things I write, dramatically. But it comes at a cost- time to write costs time to get out. I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.

It’s the intimacy with a word processor that brings me the most joy. Mining my own life for memorable interactions doesn’t endear me to anyone until I’ve stopped writing at all…. then the same people say I used to write so beautifully, why did I stop?

I decided to show myself what would happen if I didn’t stop. I ended up alone with a mental health diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features. I have no idea what happened to make the doctors think that I was psychotic, because I wasn’t entirely present when they first saw me.

However, I don’t have any history of being psychotic, so I can think of at least one real life scenario that could have gotten me that diagnosis just by telling it.

Maybe they’re right, and Aada is a hallucination.

Oh. So that’s why I should have listened to her. Why it was so hard the longer we went on without meeting. She said to tell no one, and the longer I carried her secrets the sicker I got. I wanted distance from her because I couldn’t have closeness with her- that I’d only be able to take in seven percent of her communication online. We would keep tearing each other down based on her reaction to these essays, not choosing to let time pass before gutting each other emotionally like an axe.

I began to resent the policy of not being able to talk to anyone in my personal life about her and also not talking to me. But again, our last interactions were positive until I imploded them.

I couldn’t let go of the feeling that meeting her in person would make my emotions normalize, that it was impossible to read someone without meeting them, but it was easy to let emotions spill in operatic swells on the page with the other not knowing what to focus on because they didn’t hear you say it.

I wondered why she didn’t seem to care that my life took this path. That her secrets made me unable to cope with my real life, akin to traveling with The Doctor.

The blessing of writing is being able to explain what I’m feeling in detail because life thinks it works in sound bites when clarification is necessary. My mind goes all over the place when I think of my own journey towards mental and physical health.

I loved that Aada let me love her out loud. One day I hope she’ll come back to this time in her life and read my words again. I’m certain it feels like I’m guilting her, but I’m not trying to do so. I am genuinely curious to know why she would choose to isolate me the way she did and make it impossible to cope without being able to have a real conversation? If she didn’t want me to talk to anyone else, why did she make it so hard to talk to her?

I’m not allowed to talk about this story anywhere but here, because I can tell truth from fiction here where no one else can. It’s just that my doctors think I’m psychotic because of it.

And in all of this I’ve been wondering where she’s been… where I’ve been? Why weren’t we both paying attention? Why did I give her so many reasons not to want to meet with me?

I was scared that I wasn’t enough in person. The duality in me is alarming. I craved something that I actively sabotaged, because I found out she lied to me. I realized that nothing was ever going to get any better between us because she didn’t care that she also isolated me from my support system.

My only support system has been writing. Aada has had an enormous amount of respect for my feelings, but the longer she went without opening up about getting together made me think she was never going to do so. That she was sorry, but there was nothing she could do.

I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating…… because I had someone to talk to who could empathize. That was all in writing as well, so it became the thing I enjoyed most about our unusual kinship. I just wanted to come in from the cold of being thought of as crazy and she was the one person that could provide that respite. It would have energized us in new ways, because we could finally read in each other’s voices rather than getting defensive about everything. It’s the internet. Someone’s always offended.

What I also enjoy about writing is being an authoritative source. The people that are dear to me come back years later to remember what I said, to remember how they felt when they read it in the moment and to see if anything is different. I come across softer, more vulnerable, because I will change my mind and realize when I have erred.

I accept all the times that I acted like a narcissist in Aada’s life, and forgive all the times I thought she came across that way. I don’t think it was a one-way street. We both participated in something that was good and became harmful over time. But I’m the only one that has a record of it. That’s what I mean about time changing people’s perceptions and being surprised at how much I’ve learned when they go back and read something I’ve written years later.

I don’t understand the push/pull relationship people have with my writing. How people drop in and drop out over a decade, for instance. I find that I am always more popular just by being myself than trying to write towards a goal.

I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t have enough strength to walk away from Aada on my own… that I created a situation in which she wouldn’t want to come back from… I just had to get tired enough of waiting when she was the one person whose Mama Wolverine claws would have made a difference in my life.

I wondered what on earth I was doing until I realized why I needed her. Anyone else and I would just feel crazy for the rest of my life. I can’t believe I wrecked things when she said that she would be open and not have many boundaries. I wish I had trusted more in that than exploding with anger at her lie.

I wish I’d told her how coffee with her would make me feel normal, that all this internet stuff wasn’t for me. I wish I’d thought of that in 2013. I didn’t get my goals because I didn’t think about them. I couldn’t think about overarching goals because I was lost in the muck every day.

I think that’s what I’ve given up as a blogger, because my life constantly changes when people read about themselves. They don’t like being lost in the muck with me.

If I wrote my real life story, you’d think I was psychotic, too… or maybe you already believe that? Who knows. What I know is that I’m a neurodivergent writer who takes in the world a little bit at a time. I bit off more than I could chew.

By not being as vulnerable as I needed to get, I suppose… although I wondered how I could be any more vulnerable in our letters than I already was. I needed her to be more present, to be the Mama Wolverine she said she was.

Whether she feels that’s what I need in the future is up to her, because I couldn’t get her to listen to what I was going through. I started writing toward her as my audience because we didn’t have any friends in common that knew who she was… or so I thought.

We don’t have friends in common- I just have readers that talk to each other because they love to read my writing without talking to me about it. That lets me off the hook in terms of caring about their reactions because I can’t do anything to preordain what they think when they read.

They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other. Life goes on, but it never goes on in the same way. I have let life beat me down in the process of writing, and I’m just now starting to see how much it takes to keep going.

I have to keep growing, or people will not see the value in these entries. I have to keep making friends that are utterly unimpressed by my blogging so that we can lead normal lives around it.

Because every time I stop, people want me to come back… but they don’t want to support me when I write. I can see how I need to improve my communication skills, but my being human gets in the way. I am not making excuses, I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for the ability to change my mind rather than people thinking that I’m automatically two-faced because one entry conflicts with another. It gives no credence to the passage of time. That I might have regrets and need to clarify something later on.

I was tired of the push/pull with Aada because she loved being adored on this web site and in e-mail, but didn’t have a problem ripping me a new one when she didn’t understand something, often embarrassed when I told her what I really meant.

I needed the internet dumbfuckery to stop so we could take a breath.

But I should have thought of that in 2013.

I only know that because I have records of my own growth. I read myself for patterns in behavior that I don’t like, because I lay my heart out on these pages. It’s what draws people to me, thinking I am interesting. Then, they meet me in person and wonder how I write such things…. I’m not so hot.

If Aada lied to impress me, she would have told me the first time she met me, because it would have seemed so silly to try and impress a geek like me. But over the internet I reacted with the fact that she didn’t care about the consequences she’d laid out for me.

She’s been the thing I enjoy most about writing, taking the adoration in stride. I just got the feeling that our relationship wasn’t real- that it was a lot of words on the page and not much else. That’s because she wouldn’t tell me whether it was possible or not for 12 years. My writing became more and more unhinged because I felt so ignored.

I needed empathy, and she didn’t have it. I wanted to prove to myself that Aada meant what she said about there being nothing I could say that would hurt her, surprised when she said something did.

I didn’t want those worlds to cross over, and there was no way they couldn’t.

The hardest thing about being a blogger is not knowing which of your friends’ friends read your blog and whether they talk about you behind your back. It takes a really thick skin to publish knowing that even the critics won’t be critics after some time.

Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?

When the Daily Prompt Doesn’t Jive

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m not feeling the daily prompt, so I decided to just set out on my own. I’m not very good at generating positive emotions, because I have bipolar depression and anxiety. I do get up with a sense of joy in the morning when my coffee is right, but I also feel the storm of my own mind gathering clouds. I’m dealing with this in therapy, so I know that it will ease over time. I just don’t have many coping mechanisms for when I feel bad about myself.

And right now, I don’t have much to feel proud of. I’ve taken in the horror of what I’ve done to Aada, because I pissed her off in a very unique way that will make her regret she ever met me. But it doesn’t stop her from reading and it doesn’t stop me from writing about her because I don’t know what to write about next. I’m in limbo, with this relationship being so at the forefront of my life and now it’s gone. I needed it to be gone, because Aada was my friend and wouldn’t prove it…. keeping me in limbo as she liked my blog entries but didn’t seem to like me outside of them.

It’s why I don’t believe she lied to impress me. She seemed so put off by my writing that I couldn’t believe she’d want to impress a nerd with a keyboard. She seemed to think she had the real story, and I was just a liar. The reason she could say that is she kept her version of the story hidden, so I couldn’t judge for myself whether I was lying or not.

I went on flights of fancy and hurt my own feelings on more than one occasion.

I call her posse “the Reston contingency,” because if someone in California reads, someone in Virginia will. And eventually it gets back up to the top of the food chain. I’m glad that someone is checking on Aada to make sure she’s okay, because she doesn’t deserve my shenanigans anymore. I’m glad that I’ve broken myself of the habit of writing to her anywhere but here, because I know that it won’t do any good. It won’t do any good here, either, except to remind me of all the things I don’t want to forget.

For instance, I have a voice clip of her cooing over her baby dog, and that makes me melt into giggles of cuteness. I am sure that this dog is no longer a baby, but she coos at it just as much. I picture sitting next to the dog sometimes, wishing that conversation had taken place in person.

What did I hope to accomplish in person? More production meetings over what I could say and what I couldn’t. More input from her over how I’m doing just winging it that didn’t include reading me the riot act because it’s harder to ream someone out in person than it is when you’re at full-tilt keyboard warrior. I wanted more humanity and hugs in our discussions rather than full-on fighting to the death.

I don’t regret falling in love with her words. I regret not taking the time to fall in love with the rest of her. To be happy with whatever she gave me and calm down. To take in that her life was full of people she didn’t see, but had fulfilling relationships with online. I don’t know why that peace didn’t extend to me, but it didn’t.

As a result, I spend my days scared that her posse is watching, because there’s no going backwards. There’s only moving forwards without my darling girl…. whom I had the audacity to push away and it’s all my fault. I maintain that even though it’s my fault, I still have the right to grieve.

Mostly because it is my fault, and forgiving yourself is a hundred times harder than forgiving anyone else.

I wonder if she misses me now that time has passed, and guessing that she doesn’t. I wonder if I ever gave anything to her in all my musings, or if I am the manipulator she says. She doesn’t realize all the ways she manipulated me, and that’s fine. The way she tells her story is the way she tells her story. My isolation doesn’t seem to matter to her, and how 12 years was a long time to hold onto it without input.

I have to wonder what I was doing when I decided to break free when I supposedly love this woman.

I have so much to tell her that’s behind the scenes, and I chopped off any hope of that happening in the future. I have to live with those consequences, because Aada says that my writing is damaging to her. If I really love her, then I need to create a bigger scope with this blog so that I’m not focusing on her as a subject. I’m realizing that when I think of her, they are intrusive thoughts and not because she is intrusive- it’s because I’m putting love into a relationship where it is not wanted.

The truth is that this blog is boring without her, because what I learned from having an internet relationship all these years is that my letters to her prepared me for writing every day. I lost sight of writing about other things because these e-mails were enlightening to me.

I did all our emotional homework because I’m the feeler- she’s the logician. It was a total breakdown of labor. I could not count on her to be emotional, but I could always count on her to be pragmatic. She became my social mask, because it was easier being her than being me. I always had a quip for everything, and I’m sure I’ve given her a few things that ended up in meetings.

My favorite part of thinking about Aada is trading lines that she ended up using at work.

I’m funny when I want to be.

That’s the hardest part of getting over all this. Not feeling like I have the right to feel good about anything. I really hurt someone that I claimed to love, because I was feeling so lonely I couldn’t cope and she wasn’t listening to me. In polyamory parlance, I “bratted out.” I don’t deserve her forgiveness, but I hope that she knows I’m being honest with myself about what really happened. She lied to me and I used that as justification to sell her up the river. Especially when she flamed me.

I posted Daniel’s flame and she said, “you’re right. My first reaction WAS ‘that motherfucker. Let me get my purse.'” I wish that just once she could have read something about herself and thought that, too. She was too defensive, always, when I was pleading for empathy. Her defensiveness caused me more anger than I’ve ever told her, the root of most of our fights.

My happy ending was coffee together instead of just buying each other digital Starbucks cards. She never said what her happy ending was, because of course nothing romantic ever happened between us and wouldn’t. She’s beat it into my head that she’s straight and I don’t think of her as anything other than a boring cis straight white girl who would eat her coat before she’d look at me twice.

But she’s my boring cis straight white girl, so let her be who she is.

The thing is that the internet is relative, you aren’t taking in all of someone there. Her words moved me in a romantic direction before she explained that she was a boring cis white girl with a long-time boyfriend (whom she’s now married). What’s done is done, but I played all my cards wrong. If I’d kept my feelings to myself, we would have indeed met by now. We had plans to get together for Dana’s birthday and I asked her not to come because we were fighting at the time. Any chance I had to make things better, I made them fall apart.

I have to live with that guilt, because our relationship got unusual, fast.

The marks left on me by my emotional abuser never left me, and that’s what I need to work on in all my friendships from here on out…. and possibly with Aada because life is long. I never know what could change her mind over a friendship with a writer. I just know that the time is most probably past because we cannot make things any better than we can right now.

But maybe she’ll remember she wasn’t always the perfect friend, either, and capitulate once she’s taken all of it in. I doubt it, but again, life is long. Maybe we need to separate for good, maybe we just need time. I’m not in charge, I just work here.

The thing is that Aada and I are capable of creating something beautiful that we couldn’t have when we first met. Whether it’s fiction or a retelling of the story on my blog from her perspective, we are sitting on piles of money. I doubt she’d hire me as a research assistant, but my services are open to her if she decides she wants to publish her first novel. AI can do that for her, but I bring coffee and bagels. Take that, AI.

I think it’s a shame to throw all of that away, because I know how capable we are as Southern storytellers.

It’s everything I should have thought of before I pushed her away over and over.

I didn’t think about endgame, I just flew by the seat of my pants. If I’d thought about goals way back when, it would be to have a stable marriage and a stable writing partner, one who knows I’m in love with her words and therefore I take in everything she says like they have the capability to wound me like a partner.

I was the one that wasn’t open all these years, and I never blamed it on Aada. I just look at my life differently now that it is past. I gave Aada reasons not to want to be close to me, but I didn’t understand why I was doing it. It’s because she has the ability to wound me like a partner, and I didn’t know how that would come across in person. Neither did she.

She didn’t even tell me when she got married, not knowing how I would react. My reaction was hurt that she’d left me out of something so big, but not hurt that she was married. Part of accepting Aada for who she is means knowing that boyfriends are going to come along and possibly become husbands.

When she opened up to me, I should have opened up to her more. Maybe if I’d explained why I needed her so bad it would have made a difference, maybe not.

I wanted to believe that she was safe and secure, that we were safe and secure.

Her words rang hollow on the page.