- I’m going to do another list because the dot reminds me to change topics.
- What I have learned about emotionally unavailable people is that so much gets left unsaid, because they won’t address the issue and talk about it so that there is resolution of the conflict and/or dissolution of the relationship. Relationships rarely end peacefully, which is why I try so hard to be vulnerable. It’s not so that my pain matters more than someone else’s. It’s that if I explain fully how I feel, conflict won’t pop up. You understand intimately where I’m coming from, but you might not agree. The hard part is how to handle disagreement. It’s like learning to bench press. That’s because negative emotions feel like weight. You cannot be a wimp to carry it. The analogy would be that it’s not easy to carry an infant, either. You may not be a jock, but it helps if you can consistently lift 50 pounds.
- Develop emotional strength to avoid anger, because what happens with cortisol is that it rushes in so fast you think you can’t breathe. Anger is powerful. There is no need for it, but conflict is also avoidable and people are fallible. Think long and hard about starting a conflict, because you never know what’s in anyone’s past and when you feel about them deeply, both your love and your anger are enormous.
- Anger 100% leads to regret. Always. If you want to spend your life regretting what you said, go for it, but if you’re going to be that way, don’t expect people to stay no matter how bad it gets. Think to yourself “who am I to tell someone how they feel?” If you love them, you say “I gave you the right to have an opinion because I love you.” Your job is to believe whatever comes next. Actions tell a different story than words a lot of the time and exactly none of it depends on what you understand. You can’t have empathy for a story that’s never been told.
- You will always come across as a selfish jackass to someone who can’t listen to your needs and respond. Notice when that happens early in a relationship no matter what kind it is. Even when you are a child, you are entitled to certain boundaries. It drives me up the wall when parents ask their kids to hug people, because sure as shit if they’re being abused they won’t want to and too many parents are way too fucking blind.
- If you are going to have a child, before you do it you need to ask a very important question. How capable am I of being emotionally available to a child? Maybe if you’re an addict or have trouble expressing how you feel, use more birth control. When you know that about yourself and acknowledge it, you can make the decision to heal yourself before you start trying………. or not. But you won’t hold your injury over your child’s head, either way. Your child is not equipped to hear all your shit, and they will if it’s all about you.
- Here’s a tip for working with teenagers (source? volunteer youth pastor): treat them as if they’re all grumpy old men- especially the popular kids, because that’s a mask they’re using to cover their anxiety. They are not the role models, they’re struggling like everyone else and they don’t know it, because they won’t talk about it to anyone, much less each other. They are not trying to fight with you, they are isolating to protect their energy. Recognize that it is the most emotionally vulnerable they’re ever going to be in their lives because too much comes at them way too fast. Treat them as such. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it. Know when to be a helicopter and when to leave them the fuck alone.
- “The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.” -Wayne Borum
- We are all but broken children who need each other, trying to pretend that we don’t. This doesn’t show itself in just one way. We don’t allow ourselves to believe that others’ thoughts and feelings are as valid as they are. Like not thinking a monster level of neighborhood improvement came out of pain and anguish.
- I think I just wrote another line I’m going to ponder for a while.
- Maybe lists don’t remind me to change topics. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it.
Tag: mental health
There Cannot Be Just One
Describe one of your favorite moments.
Again, I do not tend to write short essays, so you’ll get more than you bargained for. NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?
This writing prompt is coming at a very good time. Today is Lindsay’s birthday. Lindsay is my younger sister. She works as a lobbyist for a federally funded clinic that does trans medicine. She lives with her husband, Matt, and her dogs, Charlie and Teddy. I would post a picture of her, but I don’t want to bother her. If I posted a picture she had not pre-approved to make sure she was looking the most fly, she would lose her shit. Pretty sure that’s a direct quote.
My favorite moment of all time that nothing can ever beat is going to see Lindsay in the hospital when she was born. It’s the most important day of my life so far. My favorite words are “it’s a girl.” We’re everything the other is and isn’t. I can say things to her that I can’t say to anyone else, and not for lack of trying. It’s just that those who weren’t there don’t have the comprehension. I’m not talking about a particular situation, just the natural ebb and flow of growing up together. Like all siblings and couples, we have our own emotional shorthand.
Lindsay is emotional about music in the way I am excited by the math. I can’t do it, but I like to listen to the outcome. Lindsay is looking for catharsis. I’m looking to set my brain on fire and blow my hair back. There’s a reason my favorite choral composer is Bach. The man was brilliant. I believe he was the first person to do mashups, because in some of the pieces, they’re in eight part harmony, then divided into two groups of SATB. They basically have individual oratorios that fit together like a long zipper..
I listen to music while memorizing rhythms and drumming my fingers on the desk trying to figure out the key and how to play the parts on the trumpet, which I don’t play now, but I reflex is a reflex for all the practicing I did in junior and senior high. I pulse my toes so that people don’t think I’m a freak show for tapping my foot. I learned that trick from my dad, another trumpet player, because conductors don’t generally want to see your foot going up and down during a performance.
Contrast that to my sister.
When Lindsay listens to music, she is deaf to the rest of the world. You’ll startle her the same way a bookworm will jump out of their skin if you touch them while they can’t see you. She wants to find comfort, and finds comfort in tracks while I prefer entries. I’ve tried to write songs before , and I’m crap at it because I’m aggressively verbal. Trying to find words that fit in a particular rhythm and also makes sense would take me hours and hours, while an entry generally only lasts one at most. The majority of the time, I type so fast it’s 20 minutes, because I’m not preplanning anything except looking at the writing prompt and seeing if it’s any good. I can do all that silently, while Lindsay does not want to be interrupted and neither do I. It’s her introvert space, because she’s more extroverted than I am, and also has to be “on” a hell of a lot more than I do. Being “on” is a reflex for us, one that was hard to beat out of me, but I would say that I have done it. It’s not that I don’t want to be polite. It’s that I don’t want to have to think of the appropriate response. I want to respond. I know I’m often wrong, but at the same time, you’re seeing the real me and not one I designed to make you happy.
I think that Lindsay is also experiencing extraordinary change in her life and trying to decide what she wants it to look like. She wants to do great things, not just talk about them. The only pie in the sky idea we’ve ever had is that we want to be filthy stinking rich. Just multimillionaires. Then, we’re gonna fix all the things Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs can’t- one because he’s dead, but never gave money to charity while he was alive…. Maybe a few times. I can’t remember. But Walter Isaacson made sure to indicate sharing was rare. The other is just egocentric. Homelessness? Not on my watch. Hunger? Here’s groceries for a week. Just everything we can possibly do to die broke.
It’s not money for us to spend, it’s money for us to give. She makes good money, I have a killer idea. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities, and not likely, either. But it was a fun conversation. It’s like that scene in The Three Amigos where they’re all lying in bed thinking about how to spend their profits from the movie and we’re both Ned Nederlander.
I don’t NOT want a big shiny car, either. 😛
I say I want a car, but I don’t. My favorite moment recently has been road tripping with Lindsay. She drove all eight hours, and I realized that though I love cars, I’d rather ride than drive. During our trip, I wrote and she listened to music, which is what I do when I travel in any way. I don’t need a desk. I’ve got a keyboard that’s pretty heavy that has a slot to hold my tablet. My lap is perfect.
I feel like it’s fancy enough that I can completely dissociate and not notice anything, because knowing my stop is rote. My attention is laser focused, and because of it, writing while riding fits my personality perfectly. It doesn’t invite people to talk to me, because I look like I’m doing VERY IMPORTANT WORK because I’m typin.’ I remind myself of Richard DeLongpre at work on the TV show “Allen Gregory.” “This is Richard DeLongpre. I’m on the phone.” This is said with no small amount of pride.
It is important work. My emotional vomit has impressed tens of you across the world.
My favorite activity is writing this blog. That’s because it’s just stream of consciousness, a literal translation of what’s in my head. The path winds everywhere because I’m interested in everything.
Today I’m sad that my favorite woodworker on YouTube lives in Portland and I didn’t know of him then. It “wood” have been cool to meet. That’s where my mind goes when I think “I’m interested in everything,” because of all the things I thought I’d be addicted to, watching people refinish or make new furniture isn’t even in the top 50. And yet, woodworking videos are my Great British Bake-off. “Did you really just do a box joint when miters are at least three times stronger?” “She’s gonna paint it…. gonna paint it….. Jesus God. I bet her next project’s a river table.” ” “You’re putting wood…. near water….. not even a coat of Total Boat. Playing fast and loose, bud.” I have nearly given up on TV. I haven’t seen anything recent. I’m just going to YouTube Youniversity. I’m telling you, though, it’s a rabbet hole. I find it so similar to cooking, because in woodworking, you also start with “the mis.” (mis en place)
Although if I have to hear another advertisement for Rubio Monaco I’m the one that’s going to lose my shit.
I’d like to make a friend who’s a woodworker, because I don’t think I’d be a very good carpenter with my vision issues I’m not the person that has the funds or the desire to get a CNC, where I could do all of it on a computer and then fit it together. However, I can stand there and hold stuff. I can do little things rather than big things to see if I’m even capable of graduating to big things. There’s lots of carpentry that can be done without measuring or math. Sanding, painting, routing finished pieces, etc. Plus, I’m knowledgeable about wood, epoxy, and metal.
Jesus, is there anything the two of us *don’t* have in common? Unclear.
The Bible is one of my favorite things, because it’s the lens through which I see everything else. Don’t freak- I’m not an Evangelical. All I mean is that I see Biblical people as human and not exalted (The Bible is an ancient blog at best. The authors of the Bible were the me of their generation. I just have less “begats.”). I see the God in all of us. Heaven and hell are created by the environments to which we belong, because God lives in the thread of energy that runs through the human race. If we count on our rewards being in heaven, we have no motivation to make heaven right now. Evangelicals are just a bunch of welfare moms in their own shitty vernacular. What makes their behavior extra hard to take is their sanctimonious bigotry masked as thoughts and prayers.
They’re the modern Pharisees and Sadduceees. You know, the religious zealots Jesus hated? The ones we’re encouraged to call out because Jesus’ law is not letters. It’s love.
My favorite thing this morning was waking up and going to drink some water and coffee. I was halfway through both before I thought about Supergrover. Progress. Generally she’s my first thought, and it’s nice to know that I’m not always going to be this sad. I’m not done with her. I’m done quietly begging for just a little bit more. If I had my way, we’d do lots of cool stuff together, but I am all about compromise. I don’t have things I need. I have things I wish for. The difference between “this is what I need” and “this is what I want, but don’t want to be selfish.” I only needed her to open up a little more, because she said she trusted me and clearly didn’t. Feeling like she was giving lip service to it destroyed me. If I’m honest, that’s the moment I was out. This is because I have an example that’s really cut and dry. I needed to go, and I didn’t want to leave.
I wrecked both of us in the process, but I do not take credit for a hundred percent of it. At ten years (really ten years now), that would be impossible. I did a lot wrong. So did she. I hurt her more, and that’s clear. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be so gunshy about talking to me about anything important to me about us. Yes, she’s married and has kids and friends and siblings and the whole nine. I do not expect her to change anything for me in terms of spending time together except for maybe a few longer e-mails, because I know she doesn’t have time for anything else. In retrospect, I should have come to the conclusion that nothing would ever change years ago. For all the joy I’ve had over the last few years, it didn’t last because I would write about anything and everything and for months I’d get three word responses. When I finally asked her to think about some things- take it away so she wasn’t responding off the cuff, she replied in about 20 minutes and said she really didn’t have time for anything but three word e-mails. She’s diplomatic, and I’m not stupid. It’s not rejection dysphoria. It’s life.
When I’d ask for the smallest things, if she couldn’t do them, she’d say something like “of course, not good enough for you.” It made me feel like a dictator I am most certainly not. I’m Type B, and and unimpressed with passive-aggressive martyrdom.
Not good enough? I think it’s crazy she believes anything isn’t good enough for me because I have told her how amazing she is, how much she’s loved, and how much her intellect feeds mine. What about my opinion says she’s not good enough for me? Or that any task she couldn’t fulfill was a disappointment? It’s not. It’s just life. She’s not responsible for me. I don’t need her to save me. She’s not the only friend I could ask for something in a pinch. She’s the one I want, not the one I need in a way that feels codependent or romantic. Just that while I’m single, she’s been my first thought. First priority. I didn’t want romance. I needed friendship on a fundamental level, and I thought we had enough history to really forgive each other and move on. I have been disabused of this notion, and it feels internally histrionic (not that intense, but I am struggling to word and the best I could do outside of that diagnosis is “extra intense.”
That’s because I didn’t give up until a few months ago, and I feel stupid. Instead of calling her out, I should have just ghosted her because calling her out has gone so spectacularly badly in the past. The imbalance was frightening because there was no direction, like being in space. I got tired of being the half of the relationship that was talking to a brick wall. You can’t wall off an INFJ. I mean, you can, but that’s not the friendship they want. I had the friendship I wanted, and I ruined it out of desperation. When she stopped confiding in me, I felt like her personal content creator….. a sideshow…. and most of all, unwanted. She reinforced that idea too much of the time, probably the same way she thought she wasn’t good enough for me and I still haven’t wrapped my brain around that thought process. We so obviously need to talk, I just don’t want to anymore. I was on hold for eight years…. and I think that’s because she thought I’d act like a man. That her worth was tied up in whether she’d sleep with me or not, because I didn’t ever think that and yet I can see how she’d get there. If she saw herself through my eyes, she’d faint. When I think of her, I blank out into complete bliss, and so does everyone who knows her. This is a stone cold fact.
I’m also not stamping my feet and asking why I’m not her favorite. What’s done is done. I am certain she thinks I’m being childish because I didn’t get what I wanted and threw a tantrum, because that’s what having feelings means to her, apparently. Feeling rejected is okay. It wasn’t her responsibility to feel guilty, just to hear me say I felt rejected and decide if she wanted to do anything about it or not. She didn’t. It’s okay, but I’m not wired for shallow. It hurt too much. Because there were no clear boundaries, all of the things we could have worked out are nebulous. It is not on her to decide when I get up from the table if love is no longer being served.
This is not to say she doesn’t love me. I don’t think that. I never could. But I think we both like our memories more, because I love the sweet things she did for me, but those also felt surface-level because I don’t trade gifts for emotions. So, I felt lonely even when we were talking. That I was sharing too much with someone who didn’t really want to open up to me, and how the amount of information I have on her pales in comparison to what she knows about me.
But now I want to talk about another favorite moment so we end on an “up.”
My beautiful girl dropped me a note out of the blue… “Argo is on HBO. Made me think of you.”
Put on blast
Popular
If you know me at all right now, you know Kristen Chenoweth is playing in my head. I remember going to see Wicked in Portland, and I think Bryn was with me. I’ll have to check with her when we talk later, because it’s early AM in Oregon. If she saw the notification, she’d get back to me and go back to sleep. I know enough to know that she’s barely moving right now, so maybe text her later. 😛
I’m writing about “Popular” because I noticed that “No Fish on Mondays” is rocketing up to the top of my leaderboard in terms of hits, an ego boost because I never thought I’d write anything more popular than my marriage article, and now there are two entries beating it…. although I would like to think that “The Art of War” is educational. Don’t say anything even remotely threatening in a Facebook post, because they will can your ass even if you make “kicking your ass” part of a statement on a COOKING CONTEST.
I’m reflecting on all that has happened between the marriage article and “No Fish on Mondays.” Holy Jebus. It’s a lot. I’m divorced from Dana, which was a mistake, but one that should have been taken care of years before it happened. There is nothing I could have done short term that would have turned us back around, because we weren’t smart enough to go to a therapist, jointly or severally. Nothing that happened from summer of 2013 on was a symptom, not a disease. We never talked about the underlying issues between us, so we floundered. It happens all the time.
I learned during that time what it was like to make a mistake that couldn’t be forgiven, and so did Dana. I do not mean this to say that I have not forgiven her on my own. We’re all good. She could call me at any time for anything. But what I won’t do is go out of my way to see her again. I don’t want to intrude on her life, either, and I’m doing it enough already. My only saving grace is that I was like this when she met me. I tanked my last blog because her sister chewed me up and spit me out, then it took four years to start this one because I had such a thin skin.
It took four years to rebuild any confidence at all. Four years of sitting silently where I could have been building something. Four years of possible recognition from better writers than me. Four years of not having a safe space to go where I could say anything I wanted, because upsetting the apple cart was not my bag. It was only then that I realized that very few people saw this space as valuable for me. That yes, I’m angry and irate, but also loving and giving to the point where I don’t take care of myself. Both of those things are true of everyone on earth. They just don’t let anyone know their process for going from angry to loving.
Because of course, part of anger is shock. We’re frightened of the things we don’t know, taking off into the unknown. So part of coming down from anger is taking a step back and looking at the circumstances and identifying where that anger is coming from. What’s the root issue, because it’s popping up everywhere? You need time to mellow out, and I’m the first one to tell you that because when I don’t chill, I make mistakes. I work too fast without thinking long term.
But in terms of what happened between the marriage article and now, I don’t think I have in all cases. I think that ending this Internet relationship will be better over time, because I was giving it so much time and energy that I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. That’s why I was so angry that she read a volume on what I was going through without acknowledging any of it except to say that it was 100% clear I wasn’t getting what I needed and to go find other friends.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t thinking of anyone else’s problems except for hers. She needed silence, and I was happy to give it. Fuck all the noise, I’m looking for a signal. Why I lived in all that noise for so incredibly long is beyond me except that I thought I could make it right. I didn’t. I was an asshole because she treated me that way. I’m sure she could say the same thing about me. Neither one of us turned off our defenses and kept them firmly in place, and trying to cross that divide was unwelcome. So, I just won’t. I would have been a nicer person had I just let it lie instead of being irate, and yet I couldn’t shake my anger. Part of my anger was “I really am worth it.” I know she sure was, and I was trying to prove it to her. But you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go, and I stopped myself from seeing it because I wanted to.
I’m not going to stop her from showing up, or asking for things. But I am going to stop pointing my attention in her direction as fast as I humanly can, and “humanly” is very important here. Ten years is not nothing. I am a completely different person than I was when we met…. in the extreme, actually, because back then I was married and my mother was alive.
My mother’s death put everything on hold for me except this one relationship, because I couldn’t emote in front of people. I could only emote in front of her. She was with me from airport to airport. She listened to my cries of “Jesus Christ, just come pick me up.” Load up the kids, get it moving. 😛
She listened to my cries of “I’m empty, and I don’t know how to fill it.” I asked her if I could ask her mom stuff (she’s a few years older than me, and she’s a mom, so it made sense then). Her reply is one of the funniest things I’ve read in my life. She said something about sure, as long as I didn’t expect what she said to be what my mother would have said. The incongruous image of them having anything in common made me literally roll on the floor. I said, “I think of you and my mother being alike the same way Tom Brady and I are both 43.” Exactly none of that takes away grief now, but it stands alone as a truly bright spot.
She did everything right, I swear. I’m just not strong enough. I’m not strong enough to look at the difference between 2013 and now and not feel an inch tall. I’m not strong enough to carry all of it. I need her. She needs me. She doesn’t think so, and I can’t prove it. So here we are…. adrift until something happens in her brain that she remembers who I am. I just don’t think she will, because she would be totally happy with my own breadcrumbs for all eternity while I sat in a loss I couldn’t fix and watched her be totally fine. She could just say go and find other friends. Not sure I’ve ever felt so much humiliation.
I am sure I am not very popular with her at the moment, but I cannot care about that. I will never get over it if I don’t write about it, and I want to get over it more than anything else in the world. You’d just have to know what my insides have looked like over the last 10 years to see why I needed to step back to stop torturing myself…. to feel this desperation that she’s the only one who would understand, but only if I was talking about someone else. That my words would roll off perfectly if they weren’t about her, and she could see anger for what it was- fear.
But it would turn into “ragging her about bad feelings from the past” when I had just written something I thought was really sweet, or I meant it to be. Those kinds of misunderstandings happened all the time, and it was tiresome. I never thought that the real issue was the one at hand, because surely I wasn’t always wrong, judgmental, and a dickhead. No one is always anything. And then to sit in all that anger and to say there’s nothing wrong while you’re seething? So that when I even make dumb jokes I’m wondering if you’re going to go beastmode and destroy me? Wanting me to write accurately about their vibe and won’t meet up in person? I’m an intelligent, impressive, asshole. One of those things is not like the other.
I felt so afraid, and didn’t want to live like that anymore. Nothing I said was getting through, I just kept hanging onto a void. Holding something that slipped through my fingers. And yes, of course I’m still furious in some ways, but not at her. At me. I’m the one who decided to make myself unopular in the first place.
Put on blast
Heather
Trigger Warning: Suicide
I am sitting in shock at my computer, too numb to do or say anything. Too far down to emote, I just need the time stamp on this entry.
Heather “Dooce” Armstrong just died by suicide.
I wouldn’t be who I am now if she hadn’t been her…. And yet, I am still her. I have to monitor my mood and behavior like a hawk. She took her eye off the ball, and her disease managed her. On a different day, it could have been any one of us who suffer under the weight of the mental health alphabet.
So I’m going to sit here and think about it. How mental health manages you in so many ways you can’t see. How tiny interactions add up.
How devastated Pete and the kids (and their dad) must be.
In time, I’ll have more to say. All I want now is to go back and remember Dooce the way she was when I found her. I’ve been reading since before she got Dooced. I even know that Dooce is the typo she’d make when she originally started typing “dude.” I was there before Asian Database Administrator, before meeting Jon Armstrong…. “dry humping and Sprite” vs. mommy blogging.
I’m thinking about what I want to borrow from her to honor her memory…. And not in a way that people would know. I’d be able to look at my own work and say, “I borrowed style from Dooce here.”
I know that because I’ve said it to myself since 2003 when I started Clever Title. In fact, I don’t think I need to honor Dooce any more than I already have, because a tiny thread of her runs through every entry. I pour out everything here because she did it first.
There’s so much I would have liked to have told her, asked her, wish we could reminisce about- the good old days of blogging when it was me and Wil and Ernie and Mrs. Kennedy, with a smattering of Anil Dash and Jason Kottke for good taste.
She was the first one of us to make it. I don’t count Wil because he already had a huge platform from Star Trek. She started that blog from literally friends of friends and built an empire.
Though it was definitely the start of huge social media influence for moms with the introduction of “mommy blogging,” it wasn’t what made her site great.
What made her site great was being willing to talk about the fact that she had a disease that might kill her, and being honest about how hardcore that is. Your friends aren’t prepared to hear that’s a reality, and it makes them retreat. You just have to keep reminding yourself not to take it personally and to keep talking. Someone will listen. It just may not be the one you thought you needed. We can’t help each other when we’re in downward spirals, so we need to reach out before we start circling….. and in the end, it’s still just a numbers game. That’s not mental health. That’s medicine. You can run the numbers on any disease. We just treat diseases of the brain as foreign. Neurotypical people understand things like multiple sclerosis and diabetes to the extent that they understand that their friend needs help on a practical level.
Part of the reason being sick mentally vs. physically is so difficult is trying to translate why you look all right, but you are definitely, definitely not. You isolate because of the exhaustion of trying to explain something you’re not real clear on, either. I’m sure I’ll have more to say over the coming days, but right now I just need to sleep to save strength for tomorrow, where we will again face the blank page together.
If there is a heaven and St. Peter is indeed at the pearly gates, all I want him to say is “the former Congressman will see you now.”
Put on blast
Empathy
Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
I wish I’d had more empathy for all of my friends when they were angry and escalating. I shut down at mean words and will match you because I am no longer taking in information. I am too overstimulated and get brain race. If your words are angry in tone, mine will match it. I finally learned to say “peace out. I need time.” But if you choose to throw a match in response, I will go nuclear. You chose not to give me time so I didn’t explode for what, the thrill of it? Some words you can’t take back without significant work, and I’ve only just now recognized to stop trying when people aren’t interested. I ask them to stop doing what is hurting me, and then it ceases to matter what you think of me. I want to stop those emotional swings from happening altogether, because it might feel powerful in the moment, but it will hurt me forever. If I’d been given time to think about it, my response would have been different. I’d have had time to come down from physical rage.
I know life gets so overwhelming, and to pay attention to my emotional needs is exhausting because I talk a lot. On the flip side, I will cater to your every emotional need if you let me know what they are. If you don’t want to, I want to move on. There is nothing more painful than realizing that the season of a relationship is always set to Death Valley heat. It’s especially painful when you realize it at the same time, because both parties know that they’re hurting and there’s going to be so much left unsaid, because each one is emotionally injured in different ways. One from showing their emotions, one from keeping it all in.
Over time, the one that’s putting it all out there resents that the other one isn’t. This is because they get blamed for emotionally needing things or cajoled into thinking they’re crazier than they are, if at all.
The one that keeps all their pain bottled up either feels guilty or angry. So the cycle continues until the one who’s putting it all out there realizes that the person is always going to be locked up. That they’ll give the appearance of change and growth but their natural personalities win out. To an extent it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you can hear change happening, you can anticipate good things. If you’re shut down, you know it’s going to be a train wreck because you’re not open to hearing what the other person has to say, and yet still trying to maintain a picture. It’s the difference between only knowing someone to the extent that you meet people in public and not behind closed doors. This happens even in marriages, because it’s a familiar dance of intimacy to many, many people.
I wish I had known how bad it was for me long ago to engage with people who weren’t emotionally available, capable of receiving and giving large emotions. So many times over my life I haven’t walked away fast enough. In particular, it was a big mistake to be with Kat at all. She was so abused, so young, that even though I was, too, our trauma was not on the same level. She was a wire monkey, blaming me for anything and everything that went wrong while just being affectionate enough to think we had a future. Then, while I was at my mother’s wedding, she slept with two of her male coworkers, left me, and married another man entirely like three months later. I wish that I could have avoided that happening altogether, but my heart went out to her quickly. I have been the Lanagan Search & Rescue and the Build a Butch store all in one.
It just reinforced the tape that I was worth nothing, that I’d been so horrible to her that’s why she left. It took years for me to figure out that I could have avoided that pain by recognizing the pattern faster and not letting her get away with shutting down as much. It wasn’t serving either of us to stay together, because she didn’t know how to handle my large emotions and she didn’t know how to handle hers, either.
Dana did, but only up and to a point. Her trauma was on a different playing field than mine, but she thought she was over it… yet still had the same trauma reflexes as me. We abandoned each other and we meant it. When we both calmed down, we regretted it. I just regretted it a lot more, and allowed her to have access to me even though she’d already made the decision to leave and just hadn’t told me about it.
I thought we had a chance at so much more if we worked on ourselves and at the same time, knew I couldn’t look back. I’d been forgiven to the point that she kissed me on the sidewalk where anyone could have seen, and it was a ruse. I know this because she made sure to tell everyone else what a project I was while I assume, trying to keep me calm. She didn’t have to do that, because it was an even worse gut punch. I was in a bad place, and feeling coddled made it worse. I did everything I could to convince her that she was capable of more than she was giving the world, that she needed to be a storyteller and get back to theater or teaching. We both numbed out too much and made each other laugh without talking about our real issues. She became a wire monkey and in some sense, she had to be. She didn’t want to take in any more information. She was done.
I am taking responsibility for my half and saying that yes, I am a complete train wreck of a human being, but it was never your job to fix me and I wouldn’t put that on anyone else. I would rather someone stop interacting with me than keep that vicious cycle going.
My entire world hung on two words when I put it out to my beautiful girl that we should hang out, and if you’ve been reading, you know what they are. “Someday, perhaps.” She became a wire monkey, and in some sense, I made her that way. She wasn’t ready, and it was okay. I said the ball was in her court, and nothing changed for years. She felt like I was picking on her, and picked me apart in return. I felt like I was handling both sides of the relationship at all times, responsible for provoking her and responsible for fixing it and responsible for making sure it never happened again. Trying to figure out what was making me come off like the irritating jerk she thought I was, because nothing was ever going to normalize without rethinking meeting in person. It’s a different pace, talking. I never could have said anything I told her that was personal if I thought she didn’t want to hear it; I would have been able to see her eyes when we talked and judge whether she was really open. I grieve for all the lost opportunities to give her a love of cooking.
The worst part for her is regret. She’s made every opportunity to tell me that she regrets ever meeting me because she’s told me personal things about her- while still being curious about my life. Treating me like her secrets weren’t important to me made me feel worthless. She picked the right person to tell, and I wanted to prove it to her. Then, I broke trust, and I earned everything I got afterwards and wouldn’t have blamed her for anything that happened after that. I didn’t expect this relationship to last almost ten years, but I was exhausted at feeling like I was the wrong person to open up to because sure as shit I wouldn’t change. Except I did. She doesn’t even realize how much work it took for me to forget the pain of loving someone I couldn’t have in order for me to make a joke like that. How much I sat in it until it didn’t hurt anymore so that when she dropped in a propos of nothing, I wouldn’t react. I wouldn’t hope for more. But the longer it went on, the bigger I hoped.
It felt like she was a priority, and I was an option. It made our relationship go up and down so fast it was like a new brand of roller coaster…. mostly because I thought the best way forward was straight through, and her route was around the city. Sometimes you’re just stuck in front of the Pentagon for a while, and then you move past it and the monuments just get more stunning. But if you don’t realize that I’m going to the Lincoln Memorial, and I don’t realize you’re halfway to McClean, we both miss the beauty of each other’s experiences.
Just like I’ve been stuck in many, many other cities.
Put on blast
Acquiring Letters
Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?
Let me start off by saying that I do not believe there is a unique person in the world. We are all startlingly alike, for as much as we’d like to divide ourselves. What makes us unique are not our personality traits, but the billions of permutations in human behavior and your reactions to them. No one is a special little snowflake, yet no one knows how to be you, either.
Taking a Meyers-Briggs exam helped to give me a framework, but it doesn’t tap into how my personality changes with trauma reflexes. The letters, INFJ, stand alone. It doesn’t change how my trauma reflexes kick in when someone hurts someone I love, though, which is objectively worse for me. If someone tried to come after the kid or the dragon, I would bite ankles until it was handled. I would be more likely to help the kid, because dragon, hello…….. Watch out, she sneezes, and the allergies are KICKING HER ASS THIS YEAR, capiche?
I would suit up to play, but I can’t think of a more unnecessary character in any fight unless the answer is a REALLY MEAN LETTER.
Speaking of which, if you have been a victim of assault by grammar, you are entitled to compensation in the form of a letter. It is freely given, and freely received. Choose your own adventure, just know what you want ahead of time. I’m too old to guess and too intense a relationship for anyone who doesn’t want it. I already have people that will go the distance, I don’t have to fight to be heard. I have only the things that make me unique, which is an incredible ability to give and not so good with the taking, apparently, because I need you to spell it out.
Actually, I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. I think I’m unique at how fast I’ll decide to step away from bullshit after running into it face first for years, just lost, confused, but full of hope for the future.
It’s the hope that’ll kill you, especially if there are dreams involved without a plan. I will take that hint posthaste, because it means two things. The first is that you’re not a dreamer, or you can’t commit to even a dream because you can’t see that far. The second is that if you’re not a dreamer, you’ll be irritated with the amount of dreaming I do.
So, better to find people that will engage in my dreams and not talk around them.
I see the things that make me unique, so I also see the things that make others different, like trauma. If you have trauma reflexes, period, that’s one set of reactions you didn’t have at birth. The magnitude doesn’t just add on, it compounds. For instance, it’s not sexual trauma plus combat trauma, it’s one multiplied by the other, or divided out because you chose combat to feel and not feel all at once. Sometimes it’s playing trauma to your strengths, sometimes it’s descending into madness because that’s another path your brain can take to protect you.
Once you get to my age, we’ve all got trauma reflexes from something or another. It’s just degrees. Some people stick to others with their level of trauma, not realizing that most trauma presents the same. It’s navigating the world with third degree burns and not letting anyone know you’re currently on fire.
Those are the things that make you unique. The rest is just a construct. There’s no such thing as gender or race. We made them and the two acceptable heteronormative expressions of them, and have adapted with varying levels of ease. The truth is a whole spectrum of thoughts and feelings that can’t be duplicated from one person to another.
I know I’m not trans. I know it for sure. I also know that I don’t present as female unless you’re a person that needs to stare and figure out my complex construct. By now, most people have a complex construct or a switch that flips from their public armor to the place that’s just the lowest case version of them.
I have never wanted anything but to find the lowest case version of people, to make them feel safe enough to be that with me because I am with them. I will prod people and ask questions unashamedly, but not for my own benefit. I am relentlessly driven to HELP THE SHIT OUT OF YOU.
But if you say you don’t want or need my help, it transfers to the next available representative. I don’t vibe with everyone, and I don’t need to. The only people that have said “no more” are generally threatened by someone being direct with them because they’re the ones that get to be direct. My uniqueness is bringing out things in people they didn’t know were there, staying with them until they believe it.
I am so direct because I don’t bullshit with feelings. I will tell it like it is, and I can feel the energy coming back at me and decide whether it’s worth it to continue. This is because it took me a long time to recognize that boundaries are there for a reason and not having any is a disaster.
I am not going to wait around for disaster to happen, especially if it’s happened so many times before I’ve forgotten half to cope. I have to “forget” a lot of shit because people don’t like having things thrown back in their faces, and they also ignore patterns so you can’t tell them anything.
But that’s just me being frustrated with my own personality type and wishing that I was the heteronormative, flighty airhead my gender stereotype seems to think I am. Good God, I could use a fifteen minute break into my nothing box.
Visions of my friends and family and how I could help dance across my mind, and sometimes I can execute them. Sometimes I’m not capable. My trauma reflexes make me angry or silent or both. Couple that with having chronic disorders with mental health, and it’s a scary ship to right. So of course I have dreams of fixing other people. It’s my unique coping mechanism to deal with the horror of being me.
But it’s only horror in my worst moments, because I have friends whose problems are objectively worse than mine. As a liberal Christian, my faith tells me there is no such thing as competitive suffering. Just because people like Daniel and Zac need your love and compassion doesn’t mean I am not also deserving on a different playing field.
Those playing fields are the uniqueness to being human, not being human itself.
We made all that up. It’s unique to being human.
We just keep acquiring letters and no one should be there to tell us we shouldn’t. Own them. Here are mine: INFJ, ADHD, PTSD. They make me more unique and funny than I’ll ever be on my own. Focusing on what my letters gave me rather than what they took away bleeds over into my real life… Someone wanting to throw them all away….. when they’re the one thing that made me unique.
Put on blast
We’re in This Together
Listen to We’re in This Together by Leslie D. Lanagan
The last entry was about catharsis, but I didn’t put it up for that reason. I put it up because it shows a very specific pattern, common when both people have trauma reflexes. Here’s why. Some people react by feeling. Some people react by thinking. One or the other is attracted because of something I learned from my friend Donna Schuurman. Google her. She’s fantastic. Basically, the connection to each other is that one person is doing all the thinking and one person is doing all the feeling. We have compatible wounds. I know it to be true because every woman I’ve ever been with save Dana was the thinker. Dana was just as much a tenderheart bear as me, and we didn’t divide up emotional labor.
Relationships like that are amazing, but only for a short while. Then someone does something emotional or logical that makes the other one mad, because either one person didn’t think about it and one person didn’t feel.
I have a feeling that the reason I’m attracted to women like that is because they’re the other side of me. I have something they lack and vice versa. Everything goes great until one of them does something stupid and/or hurtful and the thinker can’t get over it because the feeler has no frame of reference for what that’s like, especially if you have ADHD and therefore no executive function or impulse control. It has to be managed.
But I’m not saying my friend participated. Maybe it’s something I did to myself based on past history, but I don’t think so. If it wasn’t my sexuality, it would have been something else, and I’d be stuck in a fixer/pleaser relationship where neither of us were happy. When you can’t share emotional labor, it gets old fast…. for a normal person. For an INFJ fixer/pleaser, that feeler goes to eleven.
Because my friend’s huge time commitment, I noticed that sometimes, she was the complete version of the thinkers I’ve either been friends with or married. Sometimes, she was tracking with me like white on rice. So I don’t really know if my analysis of the problem is correct. I only know my perceptions of what happened. My truth and and NOT Truth Almighty Amen, Spectacales, testicles, wallet, watch.
I can only speak to what I’ve been told, and it’s not like there’s magic tricks to find out what happened. I have to find my own closure, because I have definitely done enough to push her away, because I couldn’t stand being constantly in the dark for no reason except time. Thus, waiting it out unless either one of us were triggered by something that the other said, and we would inevitably fight about it, because I have never been invited to talk about anything. If there’s a problem, don’t even think about saying it. Once trust is broken, it’s always broken because both of us (the feeler and the thinker) turn on each other. Two things about that. If someone is determined to misunderstand you, they will. If someone is determined to be unwilling to accept love when it is offered, they will.
I said “I would bet dollars to donuts that you’re never going to like me, because I like you so much more than you do.” It’s true for some people, it’s not true for others, but when someone is hiding something from you, just run. Get your own closure. Leave room for grace or don’t. Hold them to your standards, and let them hold you to theirs. If they’re different, the pattern will never change because according to my Facebook wall, “don’t spend a lifetime translating your soul.” Therefore, I was constantly confused and left out, because I never knew whether she was trying to push me away or protect me. It was always up for grabs. If nothing else, it was unfair; a game of dirty pool I didn’t want to play.
Even if she didn’t see it, I felt it. I can believe it was all about time, or it might have been covering up a deeper issue. I have no idea. But what I do know is that it’s over for now. That’s solid, and I needed a break. We’re both too much for each other, and nothing will change until she does. It’s not because I blame her for what happened. I was telling her my perception of what was currently happening.
It bothered her that I gardened. It bothered me that I would get two or three words responding to a paragragh, and I didn’t know if something applied to one question or the whole thing. Automatically assuming often went sideways. But I had to guess. I didn’t have any information.
To me, that said more than anything else. I don’t like being treated unfairly, and I don’t like being confused. It didn’t bother me that my friend was straight and married a man. That’s a non-issue. It was that I got left out of everything, and I didn’t know if it was because I’d done something wrong or not. Again, when trust is broken, it’s almost impossible to win it back.
I tried so hard, but in the end it doesn’t even matter. Finding my own closure was better than being quixotic about everything. I don’t feel like I’m fighting a brick wall anymore, because it would have done as much good.
This is because I couldn’t get her to stop sugar coating and be out with it. Do you choose me as being your friend or not? What are the limits, what are the rules of engagement, anything that would have been helpful to know. Again, I will wait forever if she’s willing to lay it out, but I don’t think she’s capable, and not because she’s a thinker. I really think she doesn’t have time, and maybe she’ll come back and say what she meant and maybe she won’t.
Based on past history, though, I can guess that it’s over. That’s because traditionally it is either a PowerPoint presentation on what a judgmental dickhead I am, or three words I can’t understand if I speak in her love language. I don’t know if it’s an emotional or logical problem, or whether my gardening was such a problem that she ran. Traditionally, because of her determination to think that I am being an asshole to her when I write, she ignores me. I also know that she doesn’t have time to play games and wouldn’t, it just feels like it when the responses reading me the riot act are so long and the ones that love her up are so short.
What I know for sure is that I can’t make sense of it, and I’m done trying because I’ve offered all sorts of solutions to the problem, like creating a Google Docs folder instead of writing letters so that she could see what I was up to on her own time.
I also don’t think she knew that she was getting the first draft of something, and that I would pick and choose lines to publish from it later, but only from my work, never hers. If you agree to be a friend, you agree to be a lockbox, and that’s why I felt left out.
I never knew whether my words were being shared with other people or not, and she did until Dana and I broke up. I can only hope that I’m so uninteresting that it’s not worth it to her to talk about it.
Here’s the last two things. First of all, the answer we were looking for is “I’ve had your food” in terms of trading dick for a live-in chef. Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. Secondly, if her husband is reading, the only thing I want from him is “man, does she ever have you pegged.” According to Facebook wisdom, we’re in this together, boo. I do…. whether she ever chooses me or not.
I’m just not hoping. I am just ready to say “welcome home” if she’s willing to do the work. I need her to go from A minor to C major, but it’s ok if the chord is suspended or diminished. The resolution is the best part.
Put on blast
Audio for Untitled Entry
Listen to Audio for Untitled Entry by Leslie D. Lanagan on #SoundCloud https://on.soundcloud.com/dPurY
It’s not any wonder why I’m a blogger. I prefer a world of two. I am one. You are the other. I run to you, my clubhouse. I feel safe here in this sandbox, because I built it. It is the finest construction, and will last eons because it’s digital. You can’t wear it out by rereading, and for better or for worse, it defines me.
I know so many people who love my blog and don’t want to talk to me for love or money, but it’s okay. How I feel? That’s none of their business, and their need to read is none of mine. I know I’m at least interesting enough to have made a highly respected doctor cry on the toilet. This level of fame is overwhelming, and I mean it. Words are powerful, and I can hit things in people both out of idiocy and purpose. Sometimes, I’m trying to elicit a reaction because I want you to feel what I was feeling while I was writing, or remembering.
Other times, my experiences are blending with yours and you’re bleeding out emotionally over something that has nothing to do with me.
For every bit as terrible as my emotional abuse as a child was, that disturbance brought me to a great place now, especially processing those experiences so that I could create new, healthy relationships later.
I have a relationship with a woman that resembles the one I would have had with my mother and my abuser had that love been pure and clean, the “rainbow mom.” Having the role of mother returned to just one person has been magnificent. It’s the first time in my life it’s ever happened. While my mother was alive, we did our best and she died. We lost our future. I have a lot of life left in which a mother’s love would be helpful, and she just shows up like a wolverine when I’m feeling the most vulnerable. It has provided a lens through which I see Cora.
I have a daughter adopted through the rainbow flag that’s giving me the ability to have clean, white, pure mother love flow through me, to give my child the love I should have gotten. And thankfully, I never have to worry about recreating that feeling of ickiness in her, that I was going to be telling her things too big for her age, because we met when she was 24 and I was 45. I didn’t have to work through what it would be like to actually relate to a child under 18 as “daughter.” I didn’t have to worry that I was setting up a bad pattern, that I was loving someone exactly the way they needed to be loved at the moment they needed it.
Mama Wolverine turned me into one, too, and not that I wouldn’t have gotten there on my own. It is that we are of the same mind regarding children, including us. Burn the world down to protect them. My relationship strengthened what was already in me, tempered it and made it shine.
Between having and being a Mama Wolverine, I don’t make a lot of time for other people. I like being a diarist, expressing myself the way I talk in my head, and not the voice I’ve curated over decades. I’m changing that now by recording my entries, but that’s because I realized that it was not really a bigger platform, just a convenience, especially for the seeing impaired, but not especially for them, because my friend Bryn said that she wished she could listen to me like a podcast.
It’s important that it’s not an actual podcast, unless Bryn (or another creator, hit me up) wants to do one. It’s important that I am writing my entries all the way out to the end, hearing them the way I’m supposed to hear before I put it out in the world. Because once it’s in my voice, it’s filtered through something. It’s vulnerability on a different scale, because on the one hand, my voice is a mask.
On the other, my voice gives emotions you might not have thought were there to words I didn’t want you to know contain them. Wondering if you can tell when Mama Wolverine and Cora and I haven’t talked in a while, or that Daniel is troubling me and not because we’re interacting, it’s just a hard situation to love a kid so much and to love her dad twice over.
I wonder if you can tell all that from one free .mp3.
My fates are not entwined with father and child unless we want them that way. Cora wants to be my kid whether Daniel is my husband or not, and it is a gift I never knew I needed. I needed someone in my life to love with such a fierce permanence it couldn’t be duplicated and to have it be an age gap where I was definitely “the parent.” I think I’ve learned enough to be trusted as a listener, and to know when I’m above my pay grade. My teenage years don’t feel like one large wound anymore. I get to take what I wished had happened in that relationship, everything that was good and right and helpful, and only pass on that much of it.
Everything else can be forgotten. Everything that made me feel too young, too helpless, too fragile, too shellshocked and broken…. all of it forgotten in favor of just remembering what it was like to have a person outside my family I could talk to that would act as a sounding board. Period. End of story.
It’s a little bit complicated when Daniel and I are together because I don’t want to tell Cora things that make her feel like anything she and I talked about has the power to end my relationship with him. It doesn’t matter to me that she’s an adult. The power dynamic is the same.
Being there for each other while someone we both love is in rehab is a very good thing, and I have so much love to give that exactly none of it has to do with Daniel. Cora can talk to me about whatever she wants, and it’s all right and good. Everything she says has so much value.
I wish I could do more financially and physically, but it has to be the thought that counts. You want to give things to your kids you didn’t have, right? So of course I want to do whatever it takes to make her feel safe as a 24 year old trans woman, pre-hormones and surgery. That kind of safety is expensive. It would at the very least require getting her into a more liberal part of Texas, when the best thing is to go to a blue state until Texas has better laws for her…. and I’m not holding my breath on that particular topic.
Too many Texans are hung up on having to change, especially the white men who’ve never had to change this much at once and it’s so hard, especially because you’ll be lucky if they give you credit for the fact that sure, their lives are hard, but they’d still rather be them than you.
If I have white hot anger at Daniel left, it’s over this very thing… not understanding that his pain and confusion at his daughter being trans was nothing compared to actually being trans. That his anger and hostility toward me for pointing out his homophobic and transphobic speech patterns is nothing compared to the pain I’ve felt over actually being queer since I was born.
My concern for “how hard all this is” for Daniel is approaching petty level 3000. It is an almost automatic reaction at this point for me to roll my eyes at cis straight white male pain. The fact that I’m even willing to try says more than I’ll ever write down.
Daniel gets to me in particular because he’s so masterful at using his writer personality to say that he doesn’t give a fuck how it feels to be me, I should have kept my mouth shut because he was in pain… and to have it make sense, so that I constantly berate myself into thinking that I could have been a better partner by saying a lot less… and not knowing how to explain that in this case, both things are important. If you can’t love me while I love you, no deal.
He couldn’t, and I’m glad to be rid of that temperature in my life. If I’m going to be with a man, it’s not going to be one that can’t admit when he’s being an entitled dickhead. Felt so beat up by a few days of me saying that things were not okay that he broke up with me permanently. So, here is what I know. Daniel can be mad all he wants that I called him on his shit, AND he’ll never be strong enough in a million years to actually be me.
He wanted to be able to act like a complete asshole with complete immunity from consequences, because he was sick and we weren’t. No, Daniel, love of my life. You do not get a pass because the things you say affect our mental health. In effect, the things you say are making us sicker because you’re hitting the same nerve that a thousand other homophobes have hit before you.
We are allowed to care about that. We should not have to wait until you get out of rehab to say that you have triggered either one of us in this manner.
And at this point, I’m starting to wonder whether this was Daniel’s master plan all along. That he could make up this wife and child fantasy with me and Cora, and then when it became inconvenient, he’d just get rid of it… or the part he could, anyway. For him, I was easily disposable, and I believe that even if it was hard. He couldn’t throw away Cora, couldn’t take out any of his anger on her, couldn’t emote in front of her without feeling fear.
So if my only role was to make Daniel mad enough to be a good father, then my work here is done. I don’t know what I want in terms of a partner, but I do know that Daniel isn’t capable. He’s out of the running, possibly permanently. He has a fight on his hands in terms of getting back to himself, because the man he is to me right now is weak-minded. Instead of being an adult and using his words, he pulled out Fox News language. That I was trying to “reprogram” him. That I was part of the “woke mob.” If that’s how he needs to think of me to get himself well, then by all means, bud. Go for it. I still get to be angry that you aren’t smarter than that.
And here is another reason I’m a blogger. I want to tell people what I think of them, often long after they’ve left my life for good. I don’t broadcast what I think. It’s just here if they’re ever curious.
I absolutely want him to know what I was thinking during this time, and that yes, I really was this angry and irate. You turned from Daniel, the thinker/writer boy into Daniel, former military from NE Texas and every stereotype that entails. Our story was worth more than that, and you made it on the cheap. Turned an arthouse flick into a segment on Fox news…. because there’s not enough content for a movie.
Never forget Aaron Sorkin’s warning about soundbites. “What are the next ten words?”
When I find them, I’ll blog them.
Put on blast
Strength and Helsinki
Put on blast
Homophonia
When I look at myself on camera, I get flashbacks. They aren’t panicky. They induce rage at the woman I’ve become. I love my personality and my humor. I hate how I present it. If there is any lingering trauma from this whole experience, it is my voice and mannerisms; even my micro aggressions look the same or similar. I have every facial expression that she does in addition to mine because I’ve been doing it for over 32 years. I’ve talked this way since I was 13. I sound just like her, because I’ve spent more time with her than my own mother over the years. My presentation also says (to me, not others) that especially when we were young, I wanted to sound just like her. I craved it because she couldn’t be near me as much as I wanted, so I basically studied her every word so that she’d always sound like herself in my head.
The way that it helped was that I discovered I was a singer, and not a trumpet player who could fake it. She unlocked a piece of me that I didn’t know was there. She forced me to kill my imposter syndrome. I am a soprano. I am very good. I know it, so I don’t talk about it. My soprano attitude comes out in other areas of my life and oh my God… I’m just like her.
She and Dana are my two uploaded consciences, the one where my thinking divides into mine and theirs. We’re happy because we never disagree about anything and I am making up our relationship as I go along. Or at least, that was the case until I got angry. Dana and I are still over the moon about each other, but only in a best friend kind of way. Hearing her responses to everything for so many years helps me to predict what she would say about something else. The last time I really cried was picturing her meeting Daniel for the first time and what that would have been like for her… just how much I wanted to share him with her and to be buddies again. I am not worried that there would be any violence between us ever again.
There’s a reason for that. I wasn’t looking for the biggest motherfucker in skater shoes who is also trained to shoot the nuts off a gnat. He just showed up. I wanted him to be my companion, and then I wanted him to be my husband, because I couldn’t let him protect me without feeling the pull toward him in every single way you can possibly imagine. It’s a new experience, pining for a man and not a woman. I like it. It feels like every “straight” girl has ever felt when she realized “uh oh. These feelings are scary and I don’t know what to do with them.”
I’ve been with men before. It’s not a big deal. I think I’ve said it before, that I didn’t identify as a lesbian because of my sexual behavior in individual instances. It was thinking about who I connected with more emotionally and whether I could picture a relationship that lasted more than a few years. I couldn’t until I realized that I’d thought about Daniel off and on over the years and it was a reconnection, not meeting a stranger. I don’t think I would have been so quick to label myself as a lesbian if it hadn’t been the ‘90s. Lesbians aren’t particularly friendly towards bisexual women at the best of times even now, because there is some kind of dick measuring contest that I don’t understand or want to enter.
Lesbians who have never been with men tend to think they’re better than the rest of us. For every man we’ve been with, points are deducted. My street cred will go down immediately if I marry Daniel because my experiences with women will be put on the back burner, as if marrying him caused amnesia. Women who don’t know me will assume that I am closeted and don’t have a clue that I’m gay, because we’ve heard that story a million times. If this marriage does end up being a thing, I cannot wait for this because it will happen. Someone will try to tell me I’m gay and offer to help me leave because I’m just not being fair to that poor man. He should have someone that is capable of loving him the way he needs to be loved and don’t I understand what I’m doing to him?
I understand exactly what I’m doing to him and what I want to do to him later, okkkkkkkk.
I don’t know if you guys will remember this. Some of you might. When Kathleen and I were partners (common law yet not legally married at that point), we went to a conference on bisexuality. Dr. Fritz Klein and Dr. Carol Queen were the hosts, and they were so fabulous. I learned more about the science of sex than I could from any documentary, and especially not having to draw my own conclusions about large scientific works.
Dr. Klein was especially brilliant. He designed the Klein Grid of Sexual Orientation, which expanded the scale originally posited by Alfred Kinsey. The grid also has you rate how often you socialize and fantasize about each gender as well. Through it, I have come to the conclusion that homosexuality and heterosexuality are subsets of bisexuality. That the spectrum is very wide. For instance, I can think of one friend in particular that our relationship is all white hot fire.
We turn each other on intellectually and deep dive into all kinds of things. What we don’t do is fawn over each other. That package doesn’t come with a combo meal, but I’d rather have it than literally anything else. You can’t buy what’s in it, and if you break it, there’s no replacement.
She is a one on the Kinsey scale, perhaps a two in the Klein grid sense of not being bisexual but understanding how it is a thing that happens for reasons. She loves pictures of beautiful women, but they don’t turn her on. That’s fine. More for me. She is perfectly happy for that to be my department… and yet, if something happens to me that’s negative, she will release the fire of a thousand suns and point it right at the offender. I am her lamb, the one she will always search for if I am lost. It feels good to finally be going so hard for the right person when I’ve given so much to the wrong ones. I am perfectly happy to love her up like Oprah loves Gayle… especially now that we both have found our Stedmans.
What becomes problematic sometimes is my flowery expression vs. her strident, no bullshit personality. I am a gardener, and she is an architect. She’d rather have bullet points. I’d rather spend six pages on a rose bush (that was a joke about Nathaniel Hawthorne). I know she routinely rolls her eyes at the length of my letters while I struggle to understand the bread crumbs I’ve been given. It’s not a bad relationship because of it. She’s just like my sister, 50 times busier than me. It takes her time to read and absorb. What’s worth it are the letters after she’s done so. I recently figured out that she is crazy about me. Just loves me more than I do, and I’m hoping to catch up. It’s a tall order. Because you see, I didn’t understand how straight women love each other when we met. Now, I do.
I just had a flashback to a sweet memory of Dana and me. We used to get married every morning. One of us would lean over and say, “hey baby? I do.” And the other would say, “I do, too.”
So. Now I’m apparently Jay because Silent Bob over there just laid down the truth last week. She’s my hetero lifemate. She loves me. She just couldn’t tell me. Not that she didn’t want to. Words aren’t her love language. There’s no wrong way to be in a relationship, but if you expect someone to respond the way you would have, you’re setting yourself up for failure. I tell her I love her in words, or I did until I realized that her love language was action. So I stopped only telling her and started doing things for her.
Picking up her afternoon coffee on a whim is more important than telling her it broke me open to hear that she took piano lessons as a child. For me, love is hearing her think/emote. For her, love is supported by evidence. I get brownie points this way: when I tell her I love her, she can bank on it. The check will always cash because my words and behavior match. When she tells me she feels something, I listen and respond immediately. What she says goes, because what I say goes, too. It’s a balancing act as to which one of us is more right this time, because both of us are so damn smart that neither one of us are going to be wrong at any time. In fact, we might get to the exact same conclusion and argue over semantics.
It’s tricky, those semantics. Sometimes words get in the way of communication, especially when they’re painful.
Oh my God. My God. I just had a thought that hit me like a ton of bricks and I need to breathe through it. I have serious Internet relationships because when I communicate by typing, I don’t hear myself in my abuser’s voice. I hear myself the way I want to sound. I hear myself without her version of how things sound, because that’s what it is. I cultivated that sound. Now it’s a monster I avoid because it’s not an homage. It’s torture.
I speak by writing to avoid talking altogether. Bryn has no idea what she’s done in a good way. I’ve published vlogs without thinking about hating my voice several times now, and it’s because of her. Forcing me to use FaceTime helped me to Think Different (oh, wow… that was unintentionally clever. I mentioned an Apple product and then tied in Chiat/Day. I’m not impressed with my own writing. I am impressed that I recalled the connection.). This is important because as I’ve been talking to Bryn, more of my expressions and mannerisms that aren’t really mine have shown up and begged to be friends. I will go there with her only, because she was there. She knows that it hurts and why it should. She should know but doesn’t yet that another friend gave me a jump scare by sounding just like her- they’re from the same area of the world. Completely unintentional, and I still panicked. She’s never met any of my friends from Portland, so I can safely say that this friend would never in a million years figure out it’s her. Another person that I love their writing, could do without seeing them in person because it’s painful in a way that cannot be treated quickly or easily. It’s my trigger, it’s my deal. I just have to work through it so I can love her sound because it’s hers. I can love her voice as much as I love the rest of her.
It’s more complicated than it needs to be because I am way more complicated than I need to be. I was born as a visionary, in a traumatic birth experience and recovery, and then emotionally abused so badly that I didn’t have opinions for many years. I am rediscovering what it is like to date people while having them. Having emotions has also been problematic.
There’s no right or wrong answer in a relationship. For me, it seems to work to make one or two friends my primary partners so that if my romantic partner leaves, my entire world doesn’t go with them. It doesn’t make sense to make something that needs to be so permanent a pressure on dating. I have made the executive decision to divide my soul and let a few people have a part. To let more than one person all the way in so that more than one person has that level of understanding of me.
Some marriages aren’t built on romance. Some are built on wanting permanence during a tumultuous time in people’s lives. Some are built on confidentiality so that both people have the freedom to say whatever they want without judgment and get feedback. Some people are asexual but still need to have a person.
I’m still working on that “both people aren’t judgmental” thing.
People being concerned about the gender I marry is ridiculous, and yet the sentiment continues. My deal is that if you care whether it’s real or silicon, that’s fine. I don’t. What matters to me is our shared upbringing and our shared thought processes. They’re virtually identical except for the way we take in information. He’s all brain, I’m all heart…. Or I was, until my heart walked out of my body and back to Texas. I hope Cora and Daniel each get pieces. All they have to do is reach into the chords that run between us and grab them.
Geometry and music combine to make new sounds all the time. Different layers, different directions at which the intersection breaks your emotions out of their military grade prison. Military prison is accurate, because I feel like I have been Lord John Grey my entire life, starting a few months before I turned 13 and ending when I was 36. The unrequited love is over, but I have wondered many times how often John lingered over Jamie’s speech patterns, craving it because he couldn’t be near him as much as he wanted, studying his every word so that he’d always sound like himself in his head.
I wonder how long he cried when he realized that he and Jamie could never be close enough for him, that he was jumping into something the relationship couldn’t sustain……………. And yet, he still sounded just like him.
Put on blast
Sunday Morning, Rain is Falling
Put on blast
How Edu Saved My Ass -or- Yogurt
Last night, Edu made curry. I made a point of talking to her while she cooked, because I knew she would feed me if I stood there long enough. It’s not that I’m lazy and can’t cook for myself. It’s twofold. The first is that I would rather eat a Pop-Tart or whatever (crackers and cheese, etc.) and call it a day. Edu makes me excited about food.
She knows that when I show up, it’s because it smells good. This was shrimp, dal, rice, onions, chilis, and masala. Masala is any spice blend in India- garam masala is hot spices, but Edu had already added fresh peppers- gods the fruit was beautiful. Heat tastes so much better, fresher off the vine. The difference is stunning.
That being said, I am the type person that does like the thrill ride, but I need enough fat and sugar lining my stomach before I take it on. It also helps if the dish is very, very hot to cool it down a little. In India, that means plain yogurt or raita. I like both, but I could eat plain straight out of the container.
By this point, I don’t even know who I am. Like, what the hell even are these? Carolina Reapers. F ME RUNNING WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
I don’t think I’ve ever been so high in my life, and I’ve taken caffeine and Ambien TOGETHER. My bathrobe and my SpongeBob doll talked to me all night when I was 19. The story behind it is really innocent. I didn’t know that Ambien wasn’t really sleeping medication. It doesn’t knock you out in that way. It’s an amnesiac, and you basically go into a fugue state if you’re amped up on something like caffeine. There is one Canadian in particular that will know what I’m talking about quite intimately, because we once had a hilarious conversation in the middle of the night where he stood on his head because of the same combo….. and didn’t even remember picking up the phone in the morning.
I thought of myself as still dating Meagan platonically. I would say that she didn’t know that, but she did. She knew it was a big deal when she came to visit her parents, and she pulled out all the stops. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked her for this…. She even came home from college either in the second semester or the fall of her sophomore year. She took me to Starbucks and we had our classic high school date. It was so romantic, but only in an Anne Shirley and Diana Barry sort of way. I was extraordinarily observant of the fact that Meagan was never coming back to the United States under any circumstances. High school was it.
If there’s anything about my relationship with Meagan that still burns me up after all these years, it’s that my parents are still in Houston and hers aren’t. No more dates, even platonically. All hope is not lost, though. Here’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever done for Meagan in my life.
Meagan used to be married to a woman named Deah. Deah and I had our differences, but she was fully aware of how much I loved Meagan because I told her that all the time. I am sure she still looks back and laughs over how pathetically in love I was with my memories. Because you see, when I looked at Meagan, I didn’t see the capable & successful massage therapist, wife, and mother. I saw my little girl on a high school soccer field, the whistle blown and the game stopped……. and the forward who didn’t hear the whistle and kicked Meag so hard she went down. If you want to find my smallest place, the one where I feel the most emotion, just talk about that game. I dare you. It won’t be pretty. I ran down to the field and would have been able to get to her if I hadn’t been stopped. I looked around at the crowd. Oh, shit. Now I’ve confirmed her mother’s worst fears…………………
Deah, knowing absolutely everything there is to know about this, decided to surprise Meagan for her birthday one year (I forget which). Meagan was equally enamored with me in a first love kind of way. We’ll never go back, but we can still cry about how obsessed we were in 1996. So, back to Deah.
I was very, very surprised to hear from her. She said that I should come up and spend the weekend, because she wanted to do something big for Meag. Oh, hell yes I was in. That’s my girl right there.
Because here’s what those dates our first year of college did for us. The first one was AWFUL. I was still so upset about our breakup that I couldn’t really enjoy myself. I was jealous of the women she was actually romantically interested in because I had basically picked them for her by telling her about a college group that was queer on her campus, because I was thinking about transferring up to University of New Brunswick after I was done with junior college.
But that was just the first one. After I accepted that I was TX and she was NB, we were able to build on a friendship instead of thermonuclear war. As a result, she was my first girlfriend, and she’ll be with me until I take my last breath, because my memories are pure and beautiful where she is concerned.
Off I go to give my girl and I an emotional roller coaster for the weekend where Deah just got to sit and gloat at her awesomeness, which was entirely deserved. I really only remember two lines from that trip, one funny and one that hacked me in half.
I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but sometimes when people are awful to you, you get an apology you never asked for and yet mightily deserve. She apologized for breaking up with me. That wasn’t new. It was the context. She didn’t apologize for being a bad kid. She apologized for not sticking around long enough to see what would have happened had we become partners as adults, because, and here’s the kicker. It made me cry……….. she thought it was something that we would have been very good at and she was sorry she never got the chance.
In what universe would that not take your heart and beat it within an inch of your life? Everything I had ever felt about Meag (and it was Niagra Falls) just rushed to the surface of my skin. Outwardly, I didn’t say anything. Inside, I was 18 years old, crying for myself and for all the missed dinners with our own kids.
I also had to get angry to get over it. My inner monologue ran thusly.
“HOW DARE YOU TAKE AWAY MY CHOICE! HOW DARE YOU NOT ALLOW ME TO FORGIVE YOU! HOW DARE YOU NOT TELL ME ABOUT SOMETHING LIKE THIS UNTIL IT WAS SO ENTIRELY POINTLESS?”
But that’s why she told me. It was pointless to her, so she didn’t attach any emotion to it. I am all emotion all the time, so it wasn’t tantamount to admitting to myself that I was still in love with her and I should drop everything and become Canadian right this very minute forever and ever amen, though the idea still doesn’t suck.
It was acknowledgement of death, grief, and loss. Our relationship has died. Our relationship has risen. (We haven’t talked in years.) Our relationship will come again. (See what I did there, Dana and Counselor?) Our relationship was just too hot to handle for a spectrum of reasons.
But I will never in my lifetime forget when Meagan and I were two peppers, and instead of being a third, Deah was the plain yogurt that cooled everything to the right temperature.
So, for a few paragraphs, I want to write directly to Meagan. Please be quiet and respectful. Take off your shoes in the house, my girl is Canadian.
Dear Meagan,
I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t introduce and close by saying “I love you.” The difference between you and all the other people I tell I love is time. It’s been 27 years since we’ve even kissed and held hands, but I love you more now because of those 27 years than I ever did as a mere child.
27 years of loving each other so much we couldn’t breathe. First because of attraction, then because of confidentiality, honesty, compassion. All the things that we really need in our friends, you presented them to me on a silver platter. 27 years where I would have literally died rather than watch you go through pain.
I am always yours, whether you need me or not. I will always love you, whether you need me or not. it’s been 28 years. There is nothing on earth I wouldn’t do for you. No boundary that would ever stand in my way. If something was going on with you, I wouldn’t even wait until we hung up to make my way to the airport.
Tony and I will be waiting in front of YOW with snacks and Starbucks. Get in, loser. We’re going home to Texas for some R&R with the boys. You can picture it, can’t you? You and me, John and Tony, O, J, T, L? It doesn’t matter that we’re not together. We’re good enough friends that we’ll fake it and make everyone crack up with laughter, because we aren’t a married couple, but we can sure as hell act like it. Surely I have enough practice at annoying the fuck out of you by now.
I love you,
Leslie
p.s. When I am chilis, you are plain yogurt. When it’s your turn, you be the Vindaloo. I’m yogurt. I’m cool.
I am editing this entry to tell you the funny story that happened on my trip to Ottawa. Meagan and I were setting up her living room like a coffee house so we could get that intimate vibe of talking with friends, and I made the tea. I was particular about the tea, because I’m particular about all beverages.
That reminds me of something I need to tell Sam…. hold please.
The way I make my coffee so good is to use the scoop that comes with the machine and take the time to level off every tablespoon. Use 1 LEVEL T of dry coffee for every cup of water. It will mellow out and be absolutely delicious if you use the same ratio with cold brew. Just set it up in the fridge at night and it’ll be better than anything Starbucks could ever dream of making. Give me Cafe Bustelo or give me death.
It’s not like Sam makes coffee wrong, y’all. It’s that I was in charge of it one morning and she asked me specifically what I did different than she did and I didn’t answer her. I mean, what are the odds that I walk into a relative stranger’s house and her coffee is the one I’ve obsessed over since I worked at Tapalaya, in Cajun fine dining.
We had our own delicious coffee, Cafe Du Monde, of course. I drank A LOT of it because it was coffee and and yet it was only half-caf because of the chicory. But there was a Cuban restaurant within walking distance of Tapalaya, so I don’t remember if Chef and I ever went together, but we definitely took turns getting Cafe Bustelo cups of coffee and lattes.
Speaking of half-caf and chicory, Cuban coffee doesn’t play. Two Bustelo lattes and you can smell numbers.
Back to Meagan and Deah and the living room and the tea.
Meagan asked me how I made my tea so goddamn good. I said, “I steep it for 11 minutes.”
Meag said something like, “what’s so special about eleven minutes? That seems oddly specific.”
Without even a hint of irony and not trying to be funny, I brought both Meag and Deah to tears.
I said, “I steeped it for 10 minutes and it wasn’t long enough.”
And scene.
Put on blast
Blogging Isn’t Writing
Especially because of the pandemic we’re experiencing, I thought it would be fun to watch movies that deal with them. The first one I watched made me laugh so hard I almost choked and died (no lie). Jude Law plays a blogger/journalist [Alan Krumwiede] who wants to break the story, and Laurence
Fishburne as Dr. Ellis Cheever provided me with this gem: blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation. One of the best movie quotes about blogging of all time and space. #fightme
I tend to think of it as emotionally vomiting all over the Internet, but what do I know? 😉
The movie has an amazing cast, and held my attention. When I watch movies, they generally run in the background as I do a hundred other things, but I actually sat down for this one. I am a huge fan of both Jude Law and Matt Damon, and love it when they work together. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a masterpiece. I also love Laurence Fishburne’s voice, and I could listen to him read the phone book and be extraordinarily happy with it. The movie itself is great, but what really pushes it over the top is the actors chosen.
I am sure I will keep watching disaster movies, because they are timely and generally have great soundtracks. I am a sucker for a well-composed score….. and isn’t it interesting how life imitates art?
Speaking of which, no show in recent memory does this better than Homeland. For instance, two or three weeks ago it was about negotiating a cease fire with the Taliban. Truly, with the exception of a Bipolar I case officer, this show is the most realistic I’ve ever seen.
Why would a Bipolar I case officer be ridiculous? The CIA would never let it happen. I think it’s probably a little unfair to discriminate against mentally ill workers that don’t leave Langley- with the exception that they have to be in treatment at all times- but field work would end in disaster, and not for the reasons you think.
If a Bipolar spy was captured in a third world country, they may not even have access to your medication. If they do, how likely would it be that they would actually give it to you? It didn’t even occur to me until Carrie herself got made, and descended into madness from lack of medication after getting captured by the GRU.
That being said, a Bipolar analyst might be a good thing. Mental illness isn’t fun, but you gain a tremendous amount of ability at being able to see things others don’t, because you’re always thinking outside the box. Carrie’s murder boards are absolutely insane in terms of always being spot on. She can make connections that no one else can or does. That part is amazing in terms of mental illness visibility, because she highlights all the bad and the good. The problem comes in when analysts are required to be forward-deployed. I have no idea how that would work, but it’s a balance of pros vs. cons. I don’t have an answer, I just think it’s something that might come in handy, especially when Think different. becomes a thing….. because trust me when I say no one is better at it.
There have been a lot of people saying that Homeland has gotten predicable and boring, because Carrie is brilliant and then has a breakdown every season. The producers’ response was amazingly kind (at least to those who have it). Carrie doesn’t get a break from it. Why should you?
In terms of my own mental health, Carrie and I are very different. Bipolar II does not cause such extreme variance between depression and mania. The depression is full strength, but the mania is basically the Bipolar I Diet Coke™ counterpart. There’s only one time in my life that it’s gotten out of hand, and it was so memorable that if it ever happens again, I’m locking myself in my room and air gapping my computer. I will leave you to your own devices as to what happened, but it cost me more than I’ve ever spent… in fact, it reached into my five dollar life and made change… the scary part was that I was on my medication when it happened, and I thought I was going to have to start a whole new protocol.
The reason that’s always scary is that changing your medication is often trial and error, so I could have been through the wringer several times before getting right again. But as it turned out, my doctor added Neurontin™ & Klonopin™ for anxiety and left the rest alone. It thankfully, blessedly worked miracles. That was four years ago, and I haven’t had a recurrence, mostly because I’m so afraid of it that I will go to the doctor at the drop of a hat.
Nothing has really changed in terms of always feeling better, but nothing has felt worse, either. I think my ups and downs are just life, not my brain causing them. For instance, my disorder didn’t get worse when my mother died. I just experienced grief like a normal person (or as normal as I get, anyway). I walked around dazed and confused for months, not getting out of bed unless I had to. I’m guessing that particular reaction is common for people who have lost a parent or a spouse, and not an indication of something worse. Although I knew that the grief would be bad, I truly didn’t expect a fog to settle over my brain that would make me constantly feel as if I was on a heavy sedative, forgetting what and who was around me…. such as putting ice cream in the refrigerator. I leaned heavily (and still do) on the friends who have also lost parents, because they can tell with one look how I’m doing that day.
The thing is, though, now that it’s been three years I am still grieving, but over different things… like losing the sound of my mother’s voice in my head, or forgetting things I should probably remember, like childhood memories. As I get older, my first decade fades. Grief is an interesting balance between being grateful for the years you got and being cheated out of the ones you were supposed to have. It is a totally different thing when your parents don’t die in their eighties.
And, to be frank, you get irrationally angry at people who say the wrong thing, because they don’t mean any harm. They’re trying to be supportive, they just don’t know what to say. The people that do know what to do become precious- the ones that just say “I’m sorry,” because they know there are no words in the English language that will make things better. Bonus points for hugs or an arm around your shoulder. I don’t think I got enough affection at that time, because I just didn’t have as big a support system then.
The one exception was Prianka, because it was so amazing to have my best buddy pick me up at the airport when I landed at DCA from that particular trip. It was nice to relax on the way home rather than having to struggle with my bags on the Metro as I got lost trying to find my way home because I couldn’t think properly. If I had been driving, I would have realized I was going the wrong way at about Richmond.
All that being said, it was really nice to know that I was having an objective experience rather than subjective, because my feelings were so universal. Deep grief is not a club you want to join, but there is an amazing community to receive you……..
Especially other people who also graffiti the Internet.
Put on blast
Tiny Details
As I start this entry, it is 0917. I am sitting at my desk with a cup of Lord Bergamot Stash Tea, complete with French Vanilla creamer. If you don’t have either on hand, Starbucks makes something similar called the “London Fog Latte.” I highly recommend them- they’re a bit addictive. Less caffeine to irritate your stomach, and/or the ability to drink far more of them. Both are equally important in my world (does flavored tea count as being “for young people?”). The added bonus is that the mug is keeping my hands warm, as it is 30 degrees Fahrenheit. In DC, the cold is no joke. Apparently, it’s supposed to be the coldest Thanksgiving in 20 years, which sucks, because it’s bright and clear outside. Just freezing with no payoff of beautiful snow.
It’s been perhaps 10 years since the best snow of my life. Dana and I were sitting next to the Christmas tree, and as Luciano Pavarotti started the Schubert Ave Maria, large, fluffy flakes began to fall. My memory may be failing me, but I think it’s the only White Christmas I’ve ever had. It was glistening, pure magic. I wish I could remember the exact date, but I am not so good with that information. I tend to remember tiny details, and not the big picture. For instance, I remember Dana opening one of her presents from me- a t-shirt that said “I’m right 97% of the time, but who cares about the other 4%?” She took the bows off the box and stuck them to her head.
Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about writing a Modern Love column for years called “Seven Christmases,” all the ones Dana and I shared… but what has stopped me is that for some of them, my memory is excellent, and others, not so much. Different memories come to me at different times, so perhaps I will start it and keep plugging away until they’re all there. We shall see… because I tend to remember tiny details, and not the big picture. It would be easier if I had access to the magnificent “Danabase,” but at this point, that is neither here nor there.
It doesn’t feel natural to not be at work today, but I’ll get over it. The Nassers are cooking everything, and as I always say, after cooking for literally hundreds of people over a week at work, the last thing I want to do when I get home is cook for myself. I tend to run on quick energy, like sandwiches and fast baking Quorn “chicken.” And, of course, today’s meal will be entirely omnivorous, but I am never vegan unless I am making my own thing. I’ve used this quote before, but it rings true every day:
Cooking is hospitality, and if you reject people’s food, you reject them.
-Anthony Bourdain
Besides, I am not going to turn down fried turkey. I’ve never tasted it before.
When I make my own turkey, I massage the hell out of it with butter and olive oil, finishing with Cajun spice. I have some Tony Chachere’s on hand, so I might put it on the table, because it is literally good with everything, especially dressing and mashed potatoes.
I also play against type and do a “Yankee Dressing,” even though I’m from Texas- generally all cornbread, all the time. What can I say? I like white bread and sausage more. It’s harder to dry it out, and I can’t tell you how many years I’ve eaten cornbread dressing with good flavor and the texture of, well, there’s no describing it unless you’ve had it… sand, maybe? The only way you can kind of fix it is adding moisture with gravy. But notice I said “kind of.” If I’m going to eat cornbread dressing, my aunt’s is the only one acceptable. Her son, my cousin Nathan, lives with his wife and kids in Alexandria, so perhaps I can get her to make some for me again at some point, even if it’s July. I don’t care. I will stuff it in my face like it’s going out of style at any time.
Dan has been on a work trip for the last couple weeks, so I’m looking forward to seeing her again. I need a big bear hug, as well as the excitement of “what did you bring me?” My inner eight-year-old shows whenever she comes back from traveling, because it’s always to interesting places. She’s also having a holiday party soon, which reminds me that I need to get a white elephant gift. Not sure how I can top last year- a Funko Pop Bob Ross. I’m on a mission (from God). I am sure I will see her before then, but a party sounds nice. They don’t always, because I’m not a big fan of crowds, but these are all “my people.”
My shoulder continues to hurt like hell, even though I accidentally got really high. You’re going to think I’m lying to you, but I promise I am just that dumb. I took all my psych meds, which includes Klonopin, and then because of my shoulder, I took a Vicodin. I know for sure I am not supposed to mix the two, and I don’t… normally, except that taking my psych meds is second nature every single morning, and taking pain medication is not. I will just chalk it up to a dumbass attack and wait for it to wear off. However, I am not as high as I could be, because the shoulder pain is still cutting through enough to make me swear like a sailor. I’ve also had a lot of caffeine as a counter measure. The only upside is that even though I feel like dogshit, I care less…. so at least I got that goin’ for me.
The flip side is that I hate this feeling, which is loss of control. Brain fuzziness of any kind drives me up the wall. I am literally counting the minutes until I don’t feel this way anymore, as I do after one cocktail as well. I rarely have them, but sometimes I will partake just because I enjoy the taste and smell. One of these days, I really am going to order Kraken rum cologne. I swear that when I have a shot of it, I will literally smell the empty glass until the waitstaff comes to take it away. I’m not even much of a rum fan, but Kraken is extraordinary, what with its chocolate and vanilla notes and crazy viscous legs. Pro tip: do not fuck it up with mixer. Please and thank you. As an aside, I think the company that makes Kraken has one of the best marketing and design teams on the planet. Everything they make just looks as cool as the other side of the pillow, especially the lampshade and the shower curtain.
Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.
About the only brain fuzziness I can tolerate is real Sudafed, which is its own special hell. It suppresses my appetite, so I have to choose between losing weight I don’t have the luxury to lose and not being able to breathe. Even though I take an antihistamine, it can’t keep up… and I’ve tried Sudafed PE, and all I have to say about that is that the box should say “Warning: Does Not Work.” It leaves me with a still stuffed up and miserable sinus mask with the same appetite suppression as the original. Good times.
Before I close this entry, I want to give thanks for all of you. Having people in my life who think my words matter is invaluable to my self-esteem and therefore, mental health. You are my Thanksgiving, along with my friends and family that support me in real life as well as being “Fanagans.” I learned yesterday that I’ve gained an important one, but you don’t get to know who they are. It’s enough that I do.
Ok, ok. I give. It’s Jesus. I’ve followed Him my whole life, and he finally returned the favor. 😉
Put on blast
Send Help
I saw a picture on Facebook that resonated with me. Something like, my diet ranges between supermodel and unsupervised child in a convenience store. I haven’t eaten very much this week, overwhelmed with writing to the point I couldn’t even finish a rough draft, like I said I would. This is not because I didn’t work hard on it. It just, in my opinion, wasn’t good enough. I needed more time to think before I put it in front of an extraordinary mind who would see through paragraphs of bullshit in a New York minute. This is because the book I’m reviewing is terrible. The story is solid, but there are so many grammatical errors and therefore, punctuation missteps that the entire novel was just a slog. All of the mistakes took me away from the story and I had to reread pages just to figure out what the sentences actually said. It’s never a good thing when I stop concentrating on what I’m reading and get lost in my own head, trying to figure out how I would have phrased something instead (as if I’m the authority on such matters….. geesh).
And then my anxiety went to 11 because I had to e-mail my editor and say, it’s not ready. When is the next best day I could send it? It’s the first time I’ve ever had to do it, which is probably the only reason I was anxious, because I wasn’t sure of her reaction. I told her that the book didn’t even have to be marked as “read” until Monday, and the review didn’t need to be turned in until the next one. I gave myself padding in case something like this happened, because I knew when I started reading it that it was going to be an uphill climb. I was afraid of turning my lack of preparedness into a kink in her day.
So, my appetite went haywire. Most of the week I ate a large bowl of oatmeal for one meal a day. Last night I made up for it by eating (almost an entire) pizza, wings, and a very large chocolate chip cookie. According to bumper sticker wisdom, every pizza is a personal pizza if you believe in yourself. I also drank a two liter of Diet Pepsi, something for which my mother would have chastised me greatly- not because of the amount, but because I was drinking that Pepsi mess, as she called it. I didn’t feel bad about it because most people drink that much wine on a Friday night… and besides, diet soda is my favorite form of caffeine because it’s not extreme highs and lows, it just keeps the bus from going under 50 (wow, that reference ages me).
The shame of it is that it wasn’t even Monterey’s or Red Rocks, just plain delivery…. but it was free. Free covers up a lot of pizza sins.
Now the only question remains is how do I not do this? I can’t decide whether it’s okay or not. Some nutrition experts would say it’s fine as long as I’m getting the calories I need over the course of the week instead of every day. Some nutritionists would beat me like a red-headed stepchild. It’s not about weight control. I am extremely healthy in that department. It’s more the binge and crash of it all, as opposed to an even keel.
Being so small is sometimes as equally body-shaming as being overweight. I know this because I have been both at different points in my life. The worst story in recent memory is that I bought six different kinds of chips at 7-Eleven, joking with the cashier that they weren’t all for that night. He said, well, your skinny ass sure needs ’em. I was definitely thinking about responding with physical violence, but, alas, I am too much of a peacenik for that sort of thing.
Setting body issues aside, the reason I took off so much weight is that I’m short. When I am heavy, I bear a strong resemblance to a teapot…. which reminds me of a great story. I met one of my readers a few years ago, and one of the first things she said to me was, I thought you’d be taller. My then-wife and I got mileage out of that one for months (years?). One of the reasons I thought it was funny is that I wanted to impress her so bad…. which reminds me of another funny story. Dana and I both love eye candy, so we both fell on the floor laughing after a few moments of talking with her when I ran into a door and clocked my nose, I thought she was so cute.
The fact that both of these things happened within a few minutes of each other is something that could only happen to me…. as well as overdoing it in the flirting department to the point where she didn’t want to talk to me anymore…. a moment when I truly wanted the earth to swallow me up, I was so embarrassed. Since we were both old and married, it didn’t occur to me that I was over the line, Smokey….. a dumbass attack of gigantic proportions. I’m sure I am not alone in having moments I’d give a limb to take back, and the entire reason I rarely (if ever) have a second cocktail as to avoid my lips being too loose, creating more of them. On the positive side, I make a cheap date. 😛
However, I am absolutely 100% certain I am not the first or last woman to lament what a shame it was she didn’t bat for our team…. just one in a long line of broken hearts all over the world. I so want to tell you what it was that flipped my shit, but I would be even more embarrassed if I somehow outed her real name by a description. Enough people know that story already, including those who didn’t think it was as funny as Dana and I did. By the grace of God, the one person I didn’t manage to offend was my real-life wife, who just laughed through my stupidity. Note to self– wear sunglasses.
I think that’s about enough reminiscence for today. I need to get back to work…. just know that I really, really don’t want to.
Send help.
Stories That Are All True 