Tag: mental health

In What Genre?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?

My oldest coffee mug says “SPY” and it features the Culpeper Ring, the men that won us the Revolutionary War because we didn’t win the war by outgunning the Empire. We won because we had better spies/scouts than they did. It’s a toss-up to me in terms of history what would have happened if we’d lost. In some ways, I think we’d be happier. In some ways, I think we’d be furious. If they hadn’t taxed our tea, we would still be importing PG Tips like it was more important than the water bill. They turned an entire population against something that would have bridged our cultures. So, go them. We drink coffee like the French.

So, if you’re wondering about a business that could have sustained you for centuries like Disney bailed out Doctor Who, you done goofed. You come to the US and complain about our tea, the height of entitlement over a problem you created. The British influence was so strong in the south during the Revolutionary War that it’s how iced tea became the house wine of the south. So, thank you for that. I think. It’s actually really interesting because to me the South is the strangest transformation in history. Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore were just as English as New England and New York. I wonder what caused those two cities to diverge in the woods, and it only takes one answer. England abolishing slavery. There were about 50-60 years between when England freed their slaves and we freed ours, because the Southern economy would have gone to shit without it.

I have heard differing stories because African American culture is not a monolith. Some people of color blame the English and the Americans for slavery. Some blame the African kings who wanted to get rich and sold their ancestors to white people. It depends on who you ask, and a wide spectrum of brilliantly defended propositions. There is no way I can walk a mile in a black person’s shoes, but as I queer person I can empathize and relate. The institutional pain between black and queer people is similar, yet not on the same playing field. We’ve always both had problems with the police, except that now that history is in the past but we’re all still touched by it. There haven’t been enough generations where queer kids come out in peace.

I do not know if black people had a special shape in the Holocaust, but I do know I did- a pink triangle. There is no such thing as competitive suffering, so even though it’s not the same, I feel some of the same scars on my skin. I have only recently become a citizen who can get married like everyone else, and I am still persecuted by Christians who aren’t right, but they’re certain.

The older I get, the less certain I am about anything. Discovering at an early age how gender and sexual orientation affect me led me to end up believing that everything is a spectrum and not a binary. There are too many permutations of human behavior not to believe there’s a wider range than we are originally led to believe…. whether people tell others about it is another matter.

If you don’t tell anyone anything, you don’t realize how lonely you are, because you’re not giving anyone a chance to feed you. Part of being fed by your emotional support is feeling heard. That no feeling is invalid. You talk about the logic behind the feelings, but you don’t discredit the feelings themselves. You discuss why the other is helping you to feel one way or the other, being willing to compromise until we meet in the middle.

It takes an enormous amount of strength to talk through a conflict, and I know that I got frustrated with Supergrover early because I was so tired of everything that had happened before. Her being half in didn’t make sense to me, and created more turmoil in me than I wanted. Like, why do I continue to pour energy into this relationship when it’s clear it’s not wanted? I have learned that it is wanted through context clues.

We don’t have to work on the fact that we’re connected for life and cannot suddenly stop knowing each other, and I don’t want a relationship where she’s half in and can’t plan for shit.

When I mentioned getting together, she said, “I don’t think it’s a good time.” That’s fine with me. I’m not thinking about the up close and personal future. I’m autistic, so I have different ways of feeling out getting together with people. It takes a very long time for me to process that information so I don’t chicken out at the last minute. Perhaps she did feel like I was nickeling and dimming her for her time, but I hope she’s known me long enough to know that I didn’t mean anything sudden. She won’t retire for a while, and any plans I have that have to do with her giving of her time is at a time in her life when she’s had more bandwidth than she’s had in years. Getting her time right now is impossible, but it’s not impossible to work towards later.

That’s the goal that keeps me going- preparing for later. I don’t presume this is the end because the end never is. We repel and attract like magnets, because I’m a silver penned devil. 😉 My friend John gave me that nickname and now I want it in 18pt font up my arm, bigger if it fits. 😛

But what I mean in terms of friendship is that by working out our problems on my own here, they are often touched by what I say. I am attracting energy to me, rather than seeking attention.

I do hope that Supergrover finds something she does want to discuss with me, because it’s the highlight of my day. She’s not the problem. We are. There’s a big difference because we are both perfect, and I mean that sincerely. We are beautiful in all our flaws. Bad communication is its own thing, not whether either one of us are good people. We’ve been friends long enough to know beyond a shadow of any doubt that she’s good people.

My biggest fear is that she only wants to be a fan, and doesn’t want to be my friend. That’s why the pattern doesn’t change. It breaks my heart, because her criticism is more important and more impacting of the direction of this blog than anything else.

But if she’s just a fan taking pot shots from the peanut gallery, I can’t take it. She’s my friend, one of the great loves of my life because I fell into her charm and I’ll never get out. She deserves every bit of that love, but we don’t communicate well enough to be able to tell each other that. We did, and she decided that being vulnerable once was enough to her, and her next interaction seemed rule based and yet not. I do not know where to go, and so I’m resting in Zac because I can. She only means more to me due to the number of years I’ve known each, not because one is closer to me than the other. I was happier taking a break from thinking about the problem, because I hit a land mine almost immediately and she told me to go to hell.

It’s on brand, so I want to figure out how we are both contributing to that problem or not interact. I am overcoming a lot of feelings all by myself that I don’t know how to navigate, because I don’t know how to talk to Supergrover and as a result, I don’t know how to talk to me about her, either. It’s confusing because we are both entitled to our feelings and privacy. I also think our relationship would look a lot different if it wasn’t moving at the speed of the Internet- that it would take longer for us to be angry if you got a letter two or three days after you sent it, not immediately. There’s no time to calm down and absorb anymore, and you seemingly can’t reframe anything because someone else knows what you mean better than you do.

It’s hard letting them go because they’re right about you. It’s just that their perceptions are their experience of you, not who you are.as a human being. What someone interpreted you as saying may or may not be correct.

Because my second oldest coffee mug is one she bought for me.

The only books that matter are either by Jonna and Tony Mendez or they were presents from her. She can pick my books at any time, because our interests overlap occasionally and we’re both suckers for amazing prose. I am so glad that she has sent me books by Kindle, because they’re presents I’ll never misplace; she’ll always be with me in one way or another. I feel like that’s enough, because it takes two to tango. I do not want to cut a rug all by myself. I do not think I was impulsive to say that I was struggling with the odds on “happily ever after,” because there was no new information to take in. I have to just keep saying it over and over- I do not judge any friend as not worthy to hear my story anymore because they are not worthy as a friend. They become unworthy to hear my story when it’s not an exchange of information. It’s just me pouring energy into you without feeling it in return. I’ve been in that relationship with lots of women, and I’m done. That’s why I thought I’d found the one for all time. It’s really, really hard to break up with someone you’ve never dated. My joke about this is that her husband may not be at her next wedding, but I will. The reason it’s a joke is that I love Michael almost more than her because he’s the one on the ground taking care of her. I don’t have to worry as much as I would if she didn’t have that kind of support. I’m the kind of friend to call if you need support in absence of a partner because I’ve been doing pastoral care a very long time. I am not going to be offended at what you tell me, who you need me to call, what you’ve taken, etc. This is because I’ve been single for a very long time, and you need your friends to step in for you that way. But that doesn’t mean that I want to be the conductor. I just want to be in the orchestra somewhere. Maybe one of these days she’ll let me play lead. I just don’t think she thinks I have the temperament for it because I am so shy and retiring in writing.

“Custody over Supergrover” is my favorite thing in life. The hardest part of having a pet monster is dropping her leash. The other hardest part is not joking that each of us are the oldest thing we own. We’re both in that nebulous age where a group of people is a “no, thanks.” I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I actually get more time with her when we’re just e-mailing than I would on the ground, because her diary/schedule is so full that I’d wait months for anything on the ground, possibly years. Just e-mailing each other allows us to be together no matter where the other is.

I have also said that the silver lining of the pandemic is that now everyone has friends they’ve known for a long time without meeting in person, so there’s no need to explain so much. Emotions run higher because you’re more brave with the wall of anonymity. You don’t say things with as much social nicety as you would in person and there’s no way for anyone to hear your tone or read your eyes for context clues. And still, emotions persist.

The way I feel about my relationship with Supergrover over 11 years is that it is very much akin to having dated and decided we didn’t work as partners, but we worked as friends. The only kink in that logic was that Supergrover is straight and in a relationship, so she wasn’t dealing with the same issues as me. I could stop wanting her, but I couldn’t stop being programmed to protect her and give her everything she wanted that was within my power. I say it just that way because we’re the same person. When we have power, we use it responsibly because we really don’t want it. She’s the type boss I respect, that she doesn’t give her team anything she wouldn’t do herself, and I believe that she’s an excellent trainer without even really having to think about it. Instructional design is a theme in both our lives. Nothing in our lives is transactional, either. When I say that there’s a lot in here about what she won’t do for me and not a lot about what she will, I am not saying that from a narcissistic perspective. I am letting you lay out your bandwidth, I lay out mine, and we meet in the middle after conversations.

At the very least, this should have been a deescalation and not the end, but ultimately that’s not my call, either. One of my readers talked about Supergrover ghosting me or being half out. I want to talk about that here, because she didn’t ghost me or say she was half in at all. She explained her reasoning perfectly, and she would have been spot on in her analysis if she’d gotten my actual intent and not what she thought I meant. She reads through my words and picks out the worst possible interpretation she possibly can. It weighs on me, because I’m not villainizing her. I’m painting her.

I was reminded that I wrote on the blog that she lives in my ink. I was reminded of that line when I was looking around Fahrney’s, an American pen/pencil shop. The back of the store was covered in bottles of ink in every color you can imagine. It’s why she pulls me in and repels me. All the things that we’ve written to each other come up in my mind when I’m doing other things. As I understand what she’s said more, I try to guess what she’s saying more. Then that goes wrong and I’m alone again.

But not truly alone, because since she lives in my ink, it is a communion only we share. I feel her presence in the room when I’m writing, so my writing leans toward her whether she’s the intended topic or not. I would like to make friends where we could also be that close, but there’s no way to duplicate this connection and I’ve stopped trying.

She doesn’t feel creepy to me. The fact that I want to know her like every friend would know her seems creepy, because I’m not pumping her for information. I am genuinely curious because she’s unique. I don’t know what she means about her not being vulnerable means deliberately hurting my feelings does not work for her. So far, not being vulnerable has always led to hurting my feelings because she’d rather put me off than face her demons and just tell me what’s up. She says she can’t say anything without immediately being tagged as avoidant. If your whole pattern is avoidance and has been since you were a child, you cannot see how avoidance hurts other people. They also don’t change when they’re not aware of something. I feel like calling her on avoidant behavior when it happens is better than keeping it all in, because it will come up less and less frequently over time. Her patterns will change to being used to being vulnerable all the time instead of going in guns blazing.

As I told her before, it’s not that she went guns blazing on me. It’s that she has CPTSD so the guns are always already out. Taking down her walls means getting vulnerable about how she feels in reaction to what I said. She said “writing to each other, supporting each other.” I get that. I really do. But I don’t feel supported when it feels like my feelings are going into a void. Like, I’ll write an essay about X topic, and no matter what topic it is between us, that’s not a topic she’ll discuss. It’s frustrating to an enormous degree, because if I bring that up, she immediately goes to “I’m not good enough for you.” It’s not a healthy environment in which to bring up problems, and relationships always have them.

Many things about friendship aren’t the good ones, and you have to go through the bad ones to get the good. I don’t want to focus on negativity. I want to focus on where we go from here. Most notably, what have I done right? I’m not fishing for compliments. I have heard all the complaints.

I think she also just. cannot.

That this friendship was doomed long ago because there are certain topics we need to resolve that she’ll never talk about, and there are multiple issues that fall under that category. I am a lot of things she is not. She is a lot of things I am not. Bridging the gap is enormous.

A river runs through it.

Boring

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m noticing that I have less of a need to write now that there’s not a constant problem turning itself over in my head. Relationship issues are hard work, and to come out on the other side healthy & happy feels like a win. I’ll take it. The flip side of the coin is that my inner monologue has settled back into boring. Boring is fantastic. I like it a lot. Emotional ups and downs take it out of me because I have such a fear of abandonment that standing my ground feels like torture on my nerves. I just have to feel that fire, knowing it’s turned up to hell by autism and a regular person wouldn’t feel like that. We don’t learn to fit into society by actually making our brains process differently. Neurotypicals, particularly parents, think that eventually the battles over homework will get easier. They’re just like other kids. Other kids don’t like homework, right? Meanwhile, it has nothing to do with us. We don’t need to change. People need to change around us. If you don’t notice that your kid is doing poorly in school because they memorized the dictionary and the encyclopedia (so he can’t be dumb), you are likely missing neurodivergence for what you *want* to see.

I know this is true of the conflict with Supergrover, because it was so easy to miscommunicate over e-mail. However, it is a constant and vigilant battle because no matter how much I say I’m autistic, it is not what people are thinking when they’re talking to me. Neurotypical superiority is relentless….. unless you’re high needs. Then, everyone who interacts with you views themselves as a fuckin’ hero because other people *tell them they are.* Basically, if you are high IQ, people don’t think “autism” because they have it confused with mental retardation. Yes, some autistic people are that affected by it, but being on the spectrum means you have a processing disorder. Information goes through your brain differently than it does for your neurotypical peers, often changing the meaning of sentences, questions, and demands.

Nor do we understand social cues. The only reason I do is that I was coached into it. I couldn’t have had more people to mask than a PK. That’s seeing hundreds and hundreds of reactions a week instead of just my immediate family. I have learned how emotions work in neurotypical people because they have explained it…. I do not do it. I do have emotions, but I process them as differently as I process logic from someone neurotypical.

In popular culture, there are two versions of autistic.

There’s the kind people win Oscars for, and the real autistic people- the actors that have taken on many roles without even knowing they’re autistic.

There are a few celebrities I recognize with my neuroscopte (as opposed to “gaydar”). I don’t even want to tell you who they are, because it would stigmatize them in your minds. Suuuuure, you’re open-minded. It’s a pattern I see all the time. People are okay with neurodivergence as long as it’s ADHD. When you tell someone you’re autistic, they either don’t believe you or treat you like you have cancer. That’s because their whole lives, they’ve been taught that autistic people are to be pitied.

I am so driven to write that I don’t need much stimulation from other people. I get it, and then remember why I don’t like it. There are positives, though. With autism, there’s a specific way you walk that plays heavily into the “neuroscope” aspect. It’s so prevalent there’s a diagnosis for it- the autistic gait. I was not convinced I was autistic until another autistic person pointed it out to me.

I am not officially diagnosed, I am in the process. However, I have been peer reviewed by people who are both autistic and work in a day center for autistic adults. One of them even has the same combo I do, autism and cerebral palsy. Because autistic people can identify other autistic people a majority of the time (some studies say up to 80%), I do not feel worried about my official diagnosis. I know I’m on the spectrum, and that I fluctuate between low and high needs all the time. People just don’t recognize when I’m high needs because I’m smart and I hide it. This past year has been about uncovering who I really am, as opposed to what everyone told me I am and should be.

High needs is needing help around the house, like a carer in a nursing home. You want your individuality, but you also don’t want the details of your life to fall through the cracks. Neurodivergence is very good at letting you ruin your life if you let it. You do things like forget when it’s time to pay bills. I am not saying that’s what a neurodivergent person is like all the time. There are resources, like Google Calender, Tasks, etc. What I am saying is that nothing is too important to slip the mind of a neurodivergent person. I forget to eat, sleep, bathe, you name it. I live and die by my adaptations, not who I am as a person. Who I am as a person is to hyperfocus on one thing for years and years, boring people to sleep.

(My dad’s favorite joke is that one time he woke up and he was preaching.)

I am lucky that my interest is writing, because even though I tend to talk about very few topics, I manage to weave a lot of media, current events, etc. into the narrative. However, because those topics are emotional relationships and how I handle them, it’s an area few people are willing to explore……. But they love reading about others. Lots of people enter my world that aren’t even convinced they have one. You’d be surprised at how much you think about everything if you get still enough to hear it.

In short, I’ve come to think of myself as your pinch hitter. That maybe my emotional work will help you along. I’ve had successes and failures, so it’s not like I’m writing the manual on how to feel and be felt. It’s that some people read my writing looking for how I do what I do. Others read my writing to find out what they *wouldn’t* do.

Either way, I hope I’m worth the price of admission.

Even when it’s boring.

GET TO KNOW ME! -or- My Best Jon Lovitz Impression

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here is the string I chose for Carol to get me started today:

Read https://theantileslie.com and ask me 20 questions that would make good blog prompts in my personal style.

It turned out to be the best interview I’ll ever have until Ari Shapiro takes his shot.

Based on the tone and content of your blog “The Anti-Leslie,” here are 20 questions that could serve as thought-provoking prompts for your personal blog:

  1. Reflecting on the past year, what moments have truly defined your journey towards self-care and setting boundaries?
    • Oh, so many. Some of them I can share, some of them I can’t. Here’s the most I can share without telling someone else’s story for them except for how I felt in reaction to small words that represent large ones.:
      • All of the crying- the deep animal sounds that came out of me when I realized Dana was right. Supergrover did not take our connection seriously, choosing to believe that I was out to get her somehow, and a documented bipolar patient at that. She had every right to be angry, and so did I. As I told her, “I have not been saying on my blog that you are a bad person. I have been charting the journey as we get closer and closer from the goal and further and further away, the goal being what we talked about in the first few weeks of our relationship…… “What do you want our relationship to look like in 20 years?” “Impossible to say. Hopefully strong and comfortable.” She said, “I can’t, for the life of me, understand how it got so shitty.” Instead of exploding at me, she heard me. She even listened when she said I thought it was neither right or fair to either of us to just think that 7% of communication is enough. What got us into this mess won’t get us out. She rightfully pointed out “baby steps,” and that writing had worked thus far in terms of getting us back up to a healthy level of interaction before we meet. It would be my last wish for it to be awkward. Again, my immediate response was “now that I understand your thought process more fully, I can get behind it.” That’s because I wasn’t saying we should go to Starbucks tomorrow. It’s that getting together in person brings up a lot of fear for both of us that can best be summed up by Kumar of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” “Just talk to her once and it won’t be weird anymore.” We are at step one, planning out steps two through 10. That was a Van Helsing Abridged reference. It’s sick and twisted. I love it. I think Supergrover also forgets that I am the queen of overthinking, the present of Overthinkers Anonymous. She could be talking about getting together tomorrow or five years from now, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.
  2. How has your understanding of personal boundaries evolved, and what have been the most challenging aspects to enforce?
    • Oh, wow. I think they started in 2012 with my marriage article, because it was published on my blog a year after I wrote it as a Facebook note. I had the concepts down for a good marriage, I just stopped taking my own advice and it cost me dearly. Now, I am on my way to understanding that I need to attract light, not beg for love. I am allowed to take up space in the world. Yet, my love for people is not based on what they can do for me. It’s based on how I feel in their presence. My love for Supergrover has changed me the most, because there are so many aspects to our relationship that defy odds and boundaries. It has been a journey to realize that I can’t go back to monogamy, even if I am polysaturated at one person. Just because Supergrover and I are not romantic does not mean she is not worthy of my love and protection to the extent that I’m able to understand what irritates those privacy issues in the first place. I also developed hard boundaries with my blog as I started getting more popular. I count on my red and yellow strings to keep me grounded. Everyone else can go to hell. I don’t have enough bandwidth to trust everyone with all my information, and if you’ve behaved egregiously in the past, I have absolutely no desire to keep feeding the connection. I can love you from waaaaaaaay over here.
  3. Can you share a story where enforcing a boundary significantly changed the dynamics of a relationship or situation?
    • Yes. Both Supergrover and I realized our relationship was fixable at the exact moment I got boundaries. Either work on yourself or go away, because I’m happier without the roller coaster our love for each other has represented. She had to get over the fact that I’m not out to get her, without asking me for help. I had to try and protect her without her answering my questions. Accepting each other was our only choice. It’s our destiny, and I know that, because I will never, ever in my five dollar life not be a blogger.
  4. In what ways has your approach to conflict and confrontation in person differed from your written expressions?
    • I am terrible at conflict in person, because I just don’t have the emotional strength yet to be able to talk about my feelings without constantly interrupting myself with tears and feeling bad about something to an enormous degree when the other person was actually trampling all over a boundary and throwing a fit over it. I would rather text/e-mail someone so that I have more dexterity in conflict. I do not process reading the same way I process conversation. I’m also much less verbal and much more reliant on my body language in person, as well as seeing that of others. People don’t want me to wax rhapsodic the way I do here. I pay good money to bitch on the Internet. I don’t let that cross over into the way I treat people in person, because they didn’t ask to resolve our conflicts here, but I don’t feel them in person the way I do through my fingers, and all of my friends are overwhelmed at the amount I write because neurodivergence. If they come here, it kills two birds with one stone. Here’s the stuff I want you to know before we get together so that you have a random idea of what’s going on in my life so that when we’re together, we’re always creating new stories instead of rehashing old ones.
  5. How do you navigate the balance between seeking input and correction versus coming across as judgmental in your writing?
    • Holy shit. Carol just kneed me in the balls. However, it is very easy to answer. I will get angry and walk away from anyone who comes across as judgmental with me unless they’re also neurodivergent. That’s because I’m not actually judgmental like a narcissist where I think I’m better than anyone else. I’m judgmental like I’ve been appointed to the Supreme Court and I’m hearing arguments in my head. No one is a good or a bad person. They win and lose based on fact, but those are all transitive feelings. If we do better, my writing about you will, too. I seek information regarding my thought process, not sniping ad hominem attacks. She’s the only neurotypical in my life that has said she needs to accept that my brain works differently and sometimes better than hers. That’s why I feel like I’m in a writer’s room with her. She may not publish anything, but she’s sure as shit whipping my ass into shape.
  6. What strategies have you found effective in managing the symptoms of your autistic brain, especially in communication?
    • Disengage. I know when I’m going into meltdown, and I want to be alone because I cannot regulate rage. You think that I have different problems from high needs autistic people, but my silence is social masking while my brain yells “I’M A SURGEON! I AM A SURGEON.” Me getting that angry is a recurring theme in my life, and though it’s helpful when it’s manageable in terms of expressing my emotional needs, it’s time to learn to walk away when my symptoms overtake my compassion. You can only apologize for autistic rage so many times….. and that’s people’s right. If they didn’t sign on to be your caretaker, why should you make them?
  7. Describe a time when humor helped you defuse a tense or challenging interaction. What did you learn from that experience?
    • I had really good boundaries with women until I met Supergrover, and I do not mean to imply that she is responsible for any of this. Now that she knows my reasoning for why I write what I write, my adrenaline at my life speeding up made me feel invincible- forcing me into mania. I said unforgivable things to a lot of women because I was “flirting,” and it was “cute.” The blessing of my life is that Supergrover, I don’t think, has forgiven me for the things I’ve said to her, but she’s willing to try for our sake. This is because she sees that writing the way I do serves a purpose. That I can be more of who I really am in person when I can talk about things on my web site without talking about it…… in effect, turning a positive into a negative. I know this because when she said, “I thought the flags would give it away,” I said, “I need bifocals….. LIKE YOU ALREADY HAVE.” Behind the storm is always the rainbow (that’s the best line I’ve ever written about us).
  8. How do you process and write about pain in a way that feels authentic and cathartic for you?
    • I have on noise canceling headphones so that all I’m hearing is the beating of my own heart. I write down what I am currently thinking, and why. It’s organic and cathartic because I’m having my emotions out while no one is there. It’s intensely private because I don’t write for shits and giggles. I am the type writer that “wants the entire world to read their stories without letting me know that you’ve read them.” If my donations and my Facebook page are any indication, I am getting my wish. 😉 I have told people to screw off and don’t tell me what you think about my writing. That’s because the ratio at which people tell me the things they like to the things they don’t is one in a thousand. My self esteem would be in the garbage if I didn’t desperately believe that all I need in life is a computer with an internet connection, because “you may not recognize my Thu’um, but you will hear it.” The reason blowback is incredibly personal is that I am writing from my inner monologue. Every piece of blowback comes across as “this is not about the writing. This is about how your thoughts are crazy.” This is because I had the audacity not to include their interpretations of what they’re reading when I’m thinking about the future and how I want to shape it. I cannot care if I run over people in the process when they’re just sitting at home, butt hurt anyway. I solve conflicts with people who show me I’m worth it, not people who try to take away my agency in telling my own story the way I want to hear it. This book isn’t on a shelf. It’s a living document.
  9. What have been the most surprising revelations about your own narrative when comparing it with someone else’s perspective on the same events?
    • That always comes from my sister and dad, because we have completely different memories of the same event and they’re willing to tell me that. Right now, Lindsay and I are in the process of getting some rest and relaxation in the perspective that has come from my mother’s death in October of 2016. Instead of me feeling like the older sister who has to take over as a parent, we are reparenting ourselves.
  10. Can you delve into the complexities of a relationship that has both harmed and healed over time?
    • Many, and I have written about all of them extensively. Here’s the short list:
      • I can’t think of any extreme I’ve ever been to with anyone that has been the ride I’ve had with Supergrover, because we had to find a way to resolve things for both of us to be happy, because it was never going to work without us being in contact at all. Too much anger, too much resentment, too much not talking about the real issues. Too much PTSD on both sides. Too much mental illness on mine. We have both done a complete number on each other, and I hope that she’ll get as much out of healing as I hope to over the next few years. The reason this time it’s different is that our relationship is not based on one of us getting angry, sending the other one into rage. Now that we’re on the same page, we can both rest and relax. Every time we’ve tried reconnecting in the past, the emotional swings have gotten bigger. I don’t want that anymore, and I can say with honesty that I could not walk away until I’d had enough. She couldn’t reconnect until she saw why I would walk away at all. I am friends with a mystical being, who does not see herself that way. I want to help, because it provided so much kindling for our fires.
  11. How do you find peace and resolution after a conflict when the other person may not communicate their hurt as openly?
    • This blog. It is exclusively responsible for getting to the place I am today, which is that closure rarely comes from other people because they’re just not brave enough. There’s a ghosting epidemic because connection is so scary….. a direct result of the Internet because it didn’t used to take up our whole days. If you walk off angry and/or text message breakup and/or say you don’t want contact, I’m not going to stick around looking for your version of the story. You have already told me you do not want to tell it.
  12. What does the phrase “The Holy and the Moly” signify in the context of your relationships and interactions?
  13. Share an instance where you felt like “the bomb and the detonator” in a situation. How did you handle the aftermath?
    • It is a reference back to Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett. I realized that we are all Good Omens. We both have the capability to be Az and Crowley depending on the situation. None of us are all good or all bad, just sinful angels and thoughtful demons……… in love. I kidded Supergrover about us being “The Holy and the Moly,” but after watching so many demon shows like “Lucifer” and “Good Omens,” I realized that Gaiman and Pratchett were expressing two sides of the same coin.
  14. How do you reconcile the desire to bring issues into the light with the reality of only owning one half of a relationship?
    • This is very important to me, actually. The most important thing in my life given what I’ve chosen to do. What I think is none of other’s people’s business. Therefore, I am trying to guess what is going on in their heads so I can decide how I feel about a situation. The fact that my friends have access to my rolling thought process is intimidating, but not as intimidating as tearing down any success I’ve had as a writer by reaching strangers through my trials and tribulations as well. How you own your own story is to try and explain to yourself what is happening to you without rooting around in the other person’s head.
  15. What lessons have you learned from the dramatic and toxic cycles that can occur in close relationships?
    • It takes a mountain of work to break a toxic cycle, because it presents as one person being emotional and one person being avoidant. If there’s a trauma bond, the spikes in lovebombing and valleys in discarding are more and more extreme, because the lack of dopamine affects your mental health. It brings a lack of happiness in other relationships by focusing on one. Since I’m the emotional one, I deal with it by not bending to anyone’s comfort and standing my ground. You accept me as I am, or you don’t. I will accept you for everything you are, I just may not want to interact anymore, and a lot of that is your call. I don’t have to tolerate bad behavior. I can just welcome people home when they really listen to me and the conflict subsides.
  16. How has your role as a first child influenced your approach to conflict and the need to ‘win’?
    • Not well.
    • I am a first child. No one can be wrong. Part of this is because I’m autistic, and I overexplain so the person thinks I can never be wrong. In reality, I think the other person thinks I’m a dumbass and keep explaining because I think there’s something wrong with me. The first child generally buys in to what their parents do…. except that in my case, being neurodivergent made me terrible at it. I cannot even dream of a need to win as a pastor when I can barely take care of myself. I feel that I have the best shot of success as a writer because my voice is unique. I don’t need to win, I’ll just be glad if I do. It’s better for it to happen organically and to feel like you really worked for it rather than paying for your blog to be seen. However, I might resort to that eventually, because my sample size is large enough to prove to me that the ad dollars would be worth it. That if I’m talented to this many people, I could fool other people, too. 😉 In short, my desperate need for competition relies on how much of you see in yourself in my story. When I help someone, I get a win.
  17. Reflect on a memory with Supergrover that brings you comfort during tough times. What makes that memory special?
    • She sent me a quick e-mail when we were absolutely in the thick of it, to the point that I was actually freaked out that she was reading. It said, “thank you for this……. ‘I am not saying that Supergrover acted as my mother in this situation, only that mothers love differently than anyone else. They have no problem with carrying you by your scruff through the mountains, and tough love as it’s required.'” I realized that even if she didn’t want future interactions, she wasn’t mistaking the part for the whole, either. It reminds me to keep going. Someone is listening. She does.
  18. How do you maintain a sense of humor about the challenges in your life, and how has it shaped your storytelling?
    • I try to be funny about everything, but usually I can only be really funny after I’ve written about my serious thoughts here. I do not have to work on my issues and verbally process with my friends. I have verbally processed enough. Get me out of my head. When I am back in my body, I can be the life of the party. My social battery just drains very fast. I am quicker in person with witty retorts because I have to be. You’re not here. 😛
  19. What’s the story behind your nickname, and how has it played a role in your identity and interactions?
    • I changed my tag to “theantileslie” because I never wanted to be anything like myself ever again. I needed to reject what no longer served me. The antileslie is not a bad person, like the antichrist. It’s the acknowledgement that life is damaging and I need to keep evolving…… or it sounds good, anyway.
  20. How has writing and blogging served as a tool for self-discovery and processing your emotions?
    • I would like to think that my blog is proud of me, because I told her the truth.

Feel free to use these questions as a starting point for your blog posts, and I hope they inspire introspection and engaging content for your readers! 📝

A Celebration of Sorts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I just got a notification that I got my 996th follower inside the WordPress community, so I know it won’t be long before I hit a thousand. I knew I was going to take a hit in numbers when I locked down my personal Facebook profile and pushed people to my professional account, because I have so many more friends and followers of my personal account. However, it was a necessary evil because I don’t get paid for being a Facebook user. I get paid for being a Facebook creator. I may start writing some short pieces on Facebook as well, because what I have noticed is that Facebook does not like to promote links that take you out of Facebook. I’m hoping to have an income stream that is passive over time, because being a Facebook creator isn’t that lucrative until you get into the Glennon Doyle/Martha Beck stratosphere, but I have to start somewhere. Glennon and Martha didn’t become Glennon and Martha overnight, either.

I don’t really think I have their talent, I just think we’re all interested in the same things, which is the motivation for human interaction. Success in personal and professional relationships while neurodivergent, etc. Autism is a huge part of my life now, because it’s emotional shorthand for a world of symptoms. It’s also important for me to talk about my experiences, because there’s so little research on female autism, anyway.

Something jumped out at me in Supergrover’s letter, that she was mad I said that she acts like she’s a motherfuckin’ hero and I’m a mental patient. She went to the place of literal hero, like cape and tights Supergrover! ensemble. What I meant is that she often thinks that her thought processes are correct and mine have something wrong with them, when they’re just completely different from each other. Again, Mandarin on my side, English on hers. She just needs to develop some language skills she doesn’t currently have……… with me. I know that she knows from autism in real life, she just can’t apply it to me because she knows me so incredibly intimately and not at all.

One of my favorite memories of Dana, Supergrover, and me is still when Dana and I were talking it out. That I knew I was falling for Supergrover, and it could never be. So please just be patient with me. Dana was so incredibly sweet and kind. She said, when it comes to her, I am not threatened. I think I have more than proved my worth. God, she so did. Every day. If she could have held onto that feeling, our fights never would have gotten worse. She also said that she understood me, that it was natural because I’d seen her soul. She knew how it felt. She was married when she started crushing out on me. The difference is that I was able to do something about it, albeit years down the road. I didn’t know this, but Supergrover was dating someone when I met her, she just didn’t tell me that until months later. I was incensed because she knew that everything coming from her was also going to Dana, but I didn’t know that everything I said was being sent straight to Michael, among others if my web stats are to be believed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it did the least bit of good.

Dana was angry when she said it, but she knows me better than anyone else. She said, “you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to prove that you’re a good friend, and she’s always going to see you as a mental patient.” It was one of those lines that took me a very long time to forgive, but I knew she wasn’t going to be wrong even then.

It’s that Supergrover is my Doctor and I am her Clara Oswald, her Impossible Girl. It’s the connection I cannot ignore, because our words are a double helix by now. She is also equal parts Malcolm Tucker and The Doctor. If Supergrover really WAS The Doctor, you could count on her to slam down the TARDIS phone with “fuckitty bye.” 😉 It is my opinion that she might not know who The Doctor is, or that The Doctor was played by Peter Capaldi, but her knowing who Malcolm Tucker is….. probably a sure bet she’s in the loop. I never gave up because it was a connection I couldn’t ignore. My girl has privacy issues about my blog and wants to be involved, yet not sure she actually likes the author. Or, it feels that way to me. I’m not a judgmental dickhead, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even really kick her out of my life. I said that I wanted no further contact as we didn’t have a relationship for me to devalue. Prove to me that we have one, and I’ll play ball. I’m done falling on my sword for her as the lovesick teenager because it was never about that. It was a fantasy created to cover up reality. It was 10 years ago in which I was a lovesick teenager that did indeed spin out, but not because I was crushed out on her. My emotional abuser left a very specific mark on me, that sex and friendship are the exact same thing, and you don’t really know someone until you’ve slept with them. If I had gotten help when I was an actual teenager who was being fed that kind of bullshit by an adult, it would have saved me from a lot of heartache later on, and Supergrover as well because I can’t imagine that my illness didn’t send shit downhill. But I was never sick because of her. I was sick because of my emotional abuser. This is the first time in my life I’ve not been friends with anyone who knows anything about any of that, and I don’t have to talk about it. I am finally free. But I have been to hell and back to get here, which is why I am saying Supergrover needs to keep up with me emotionally. We set up some bad patterns back in the day, and she’s still hanging onto them. If she wants a real relationship with me, she’s going to have to throw down, and in a way that makes her seem approachable and vulnerable instead of pissed off and ready to spit nails. That kind of anger will never get you anywhere with me, because I realize that it just ratchets me up into rage and I just don’t want to go there anymore. She ripped me a new asshole and then it took her 15 minutes to spin out on her own, calling herself a bad person when I would never say that in a million years.

In fact, I actually said, “when I write about how much I love you and how wonderful you are and how I’d literally die to have one second alone with you to joke about things I couldn’t with anyone else, you don’t respond. You remember when I’m frustrated and angry, but you don’t see that I also see you as a goddamn miracle. If there is a God, they smiled when they put us together.” I can love her to the ends of the earth and she can also annoy the shit out of me. It’s about balance. It’s just that her response is “take care of yourself.” She feels deeper than that, but it would kill her to let me know. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t hang on my words the way she does, because she proved it. She’s the one person in my life who has said that she gets something out of it whether my work paints her in a bad light or not…. that I always have something worthy to say whether she agrees with it. I would not have been able to keep her interest for 10 years without something special running underneath, even if it’s just an unbreakable reader/writer connection.

I also know that she used to tell me she loved me. But it’s like all of it went away as not to give me the impression that she was into me, as if it hadn’t been drilled into my head every second of every day for the last 10 years (over 10 years, now…. coming up on 11 in the summer). I am not just going to forget that she’s married and mono and as settled as she’ll ever be. You’re never in the friend zone if you value having women as friends. At least that’s what they tell me. That’s what I’ve been working towards. Not a great love story, but yes. A great love story. Oprah and Gayle….. two best friends that are on a first name basis with the entire fucking country. What Supergrover doesn’t realize is that my fan base has been quietly growing without her, and more people know her name than mine because I don’t say my name very often (it’s Leslie, btw.). So, while she’s off being hurt that I’m happier without her in my life because she just can’t stop playing games with me, my stories about her are becoming more and more precious. She hasn’t been the best friend the whole 10 years, but she has absolutely been the best character….. a Siren.

Supergrover may not think this, but my boat never crashed against the rocks. I dragged her into it. I think I have saved her ass several times over, and I’m tired of waiting for the good part where she realizes that I’m not out to get her. As she said to me, “it seems like you’ve only taken away the bad.” That is objectively not true. Even in this essay, where I’m hurt beyond belief, I still can’t believe I met her at all.

People have problems, full stop. It’s how you handle them that matters.

I took a shower.

I got dressed.

I did my laundry.

I did my shopping.

Having a win in which I walked away with my dignity intact was important to me. Demand avoidance was not so strong today. I am making progress, however slowly.

It’s not huge, but it’s a celebration of sorts.

My Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t come up with the most intriguing of things to write about this morning, because the daily prompt was “how do you feel about cold weather.” I answered it last year, so I cannot answer it again. I think I said that I loved it as long as I was dressed appropriately, and I almost always am because I’m autistic and hate the weather on my skin, anyway. So, I tend to overdress and take layers off, rather than getting cold and hoping I find a cheap tourist trap that sells sweatshirts. It’s not worth it when if I wanted an FBI/CIA/DIA shirt I can just ask Zac for one and it will be official instead of a couple of threads being in the wrong place. Autistic people don’t do that.

That’s because autism is all about pattern recognition. Let’s take Chucks, for example. I hated rip-off Chucks because the design was off. I am not one of those people that says “close” is “good enough.” Sometimes, it’s more expensive to be autistic, which sounds funny until you add up the cost of the right clothes, the right shoes, the right everything so you can make it through the day without being irritated. Bombas socks are $60/box. Worth it. American Apparel t-shirts are at least $25/apiece. Worth it. Knit caps that don’t feel like they cost three dollars and will drive your ears insane are probably $25 as well. Worth it.

Clothes for autistic people are extraordinarily specific, because you’re trying to cut down on your sensory issues to make it easier to function in public. My friends would not like hanging out with me as much if I always acted like there was a rock in my shoe. There are only so many quirks a friend can take before you’re “embarrassing them.” I will have to say that this has only started to be a thing in the past year or so, because before that I would social mask within an inch of my life to be acceptable. I have found that I am much more happy being loud. Just put it all out there. People who are embarrassed by me don’t get the right to hear my stories anymore. I know at least one woman who does the same, and she’s not a part of my life anymore. We lost touch about 15 years ago, and I wish I could just have a friend date with her all to myself and lay it out there. I think we would both cry and find someone to confide in, but it’s not a relationship in which I would feel comfortable doing so anymore. However, I can empathize from here and hope that she’s still a fan, and thinks, “wow….. Leslie and I do have a little too much in common for me to ignore this.” We are two peas in a pod, and I wish we could help each other more now than we did then. Back then, we just picked on each other because our sensory issues are over the top and we just ignored them, choosing to be that kind of aggro that’s polite.

But all of the things I noticed in her are actually things she needs to notice in her. It’s not my bag, but I think it would help her to discover herself. That’s all I want to do from here. Hope that she does pick up on it eventually, because it will unlock her personality as easily as it did mine. I don’t have to sit there in silence. I can say things like “I’m autistic and I need you to be sensitive to the fact that florescent lights are way too bright for me. Please respect my quirks and I’ll respect all yours. David makes me use coasters even if it’s an insulated mug. It’s his quirk. I’m here for it. I don’t have to like anyone’s quirks. I need to not set people off. That’s true for any neurodivergent person, including me. If it’s a small thing you have to adjust that literally no one else cares about, but it will make an autistic person more comfortable, do it. Life is hard enough without people stepping all over your sensory issues. They won’t even register if you don’t say “I’m autistic and this is a real thing. I’m not just being dramatic.” Even if you do say you’re autistic, it’s 50/50 as to whether people will respect you or tell you to get over yourself. Neurotypical people are my nemesis when it comes to this, because you’re “making a big deal out of nothing.” No, you think that my brain works exactly like yours, and to you, I’m just “silly” or “rigid” or any number of things people say when they think your autistic quirks are stupid.

That’s the thing. We know they’re stupid. If we could figure out how to turn them off, we would.

We are also not children, just for the record. We are not acting childish when we need comfort items, we are not acting childish when we want to sit in the same spot every time, we are not acting childish because one shirt feels good and the other doesn’t and you can’t figure out why we don’t want to wear it EVER. None of it makes sense unless you also have my brain disorders, and I’m done. I might not rage in front of people as not to be rude, but I’ll rage about it here because this is a survival manual for someone else. Who that might be is anyone’s guess, but it’s here.

Let’s also not pretend your life as the friend or parent of a neurodivergent adult/child is harder than actually being autistic/ADHD, okay? Cut the shit. I’ve been accidentally involved with parents’ groups trying to find peer groups on Facebook, and I’ve never seen a bigger bunch of babies at times. Oh, you think it’s hard that your kid will only eat five things? What about how hard it is when your body rejects EVERYTHING except five things, and everyone just thinks you’re “picky” and “difficult.” Do you think we like being this way? That it’s just so much fun? There are no words for how alarming unfamiliar food is to some autistic people. It is a sensory issue that will set someone’s nerves on fire. It gets worse as you get older…….. “guess who finally decided to show up for once?” It took me three days to get up enough energy to bathe last week. But I grin and bear it because demand avoidance over basic needs doesn’t make sense to neurotypical people and it never will.

I’ve finally got my computer set up the way I want it, and I swear to Christ David thought I had died in my room. I said next time you think that, you could just text me and ask. I told him that when I don’t come out of my room for more than peeing and eating, it means I am utterly obsessed with writing, not that anything is wrong. Plus, I’d just gotten home from Zac’s, and that always takes a lot out of me on the way home because I’m transitioning to writer’s mode rather than socialization mode. I also got food poisoning on Thursday night, so getting home was delayed by several hours so that I didn’t throw up on the train. I’m glad David works from home on Fridays so that I didn’t leave Jack stranded.

It was so nice to spend time with Oliver, who is a dog. I love that I have a Jack away from Jack and an Oliver away from Oliver…… and I am responsible for neither in terms of food or emergency vet bills. It’s a truly great setup, because I like pets, I just don’t want to spend money on them when I know I’d be tapped out quickly.

And that’s all I have to say about that, but I’ll be back on later. It’s going to be what I’m doing now that my hatred of Windows knows no bounds. But before I go, here’s why I love this office so much- my views into the front and back yards. They are no longer in bloom, but when they are, it’s a hundred times more beautiful.

I Had to Choose to Accept It

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your mission?

Today has been a complete shit show from beginning to end, but now it’s over…. not the day, just the negative aspects. I should be getting dramatically better as my brain chemicals rebalance.

Yesterday, I realized that I was out of Lamictal, so I contacted CVS for a refill. They came back to me and said I needed to go to the doctor for a new set of prescriptions.

No problem.

The problem came in when the doctor’s office said they didnt’t have any appointments for the rest of the day, and I had to spend all night cradling my head between my knees…. until I finally realized I could take a metric fuck tonne of sleeping medication and the whole nightmare might be over……. or so I thought. I took three melatonin and some Zyrtec, which had me out like a light prety quickly. However, the migraine-like pain of having your brain chemicals whacked let me know that today was not going to be any better than yesterday, and I had to white knuckle my way through getting my own medication. By the time I got to the doctor’s office, I was in a right state and they knew it. There were lots of whispers that maybe they should have worked me in yesterday…….

I’m just not a complainer. Just like my mother when she was having me, she heard all the other women around her screaming bloody murder and she was not going to be that patient. So, she was basically biting her pillow until the OB/GYN nurses bothered to check whether she was in pain or not…… and it took a while, because my mother wouldn’t say anything.

What I know from this experience is that they weren’t paying any attention to her because she didn’t bring any attention to herself. I struggle with this often, as I do not want to be seen as a complainer, either. This doesn’t work in my favor, necessarily, but it does. If I had gotten any sicker, I would have gone to Urgent Care. I just thought I would be okay, and I was absolutely 100% wrong.

I wasn’t having trouble with my thought processes today. Psych meds aren’t known for giving up after only 24 hours…. except for benzos and methamphetamines. Those wear off as quickly as they kick in. But for maintenance medication, it takes about six weeks to build up in your system.

The antianxiolitic I take, Klonopin, kicked in immediately, so I’m not in as much pain as I was previously…. it still doesn’t take away the sting of the clusterfuck that happened after my appointment…. and the pain won’t truly be gone until my brain chemicals are right, which may take a few days. So, absolutely none of this is what I needed today, and could have been avoided if CVS hadn’t waited unti the last moment to tell me that I needed to see a doctor. Again, today has been a goat-roping clusterfuck. I’m glad that it can’t get any worse. Tomorrow is date night with Zac, and I can’t wait to give him a hug. It seems like a long time, but we’re both slammed, so it’s no issue. It’s a huge relief that we’re both doing our own thing. That being said, it’s going to be nice to have a place to decompress after :::gestures broadly at everything:::

First of all, we are going through a huge storm system- I know it’s huge because my dad and Lindsay are stuck in the same one (they’re in Houston). Therefore, taking the bus was not really an option because it’s not just normal rain. It’s supposed to flood. The bus would have been fine. Standing in water that’s over my ankles isn’t.

So, I ask the doctor’s office where they sent my prescriptions. They said, “CVS on East-West Hwy.” So, I head there and the doctor has actually sent my prescriptions to their in-house pharmacy. I know this because the doctor’s office did resend my medication, but then it was saying that they were too early to be refilled….. because they’d already been filled at the other place. So, I go back to the other place, the in-house pharmacy that only carries three of my medications, so I have to go to CVS, anyway. I’ll have to pick up the Adderrall tomorrow at some point, because it’s not the priorotity here. I have the three things I really need.

So, I get to my pharmacy and in the time it has taken to get from CVS back to the doctor’s office, that pharmacy has canceled my order so I can pick it up at CVS. My only saving grace is that the pharmacist called upstairs and got the three medications I needed rather than make me hoof it back to CVS, saving me a lot of money in that process…. again, Uber. I also managed to get some home COVID tests, the COVID vaccine, and a flu shot. I have a feeling none of that is making me feel any better, either, but here we are.

In the meantime, here is my protocol because I feel it’s important for my people to know how I handle all this. Bipolar is hard on all of us, and sharing information means more to talk to your doctor about, because I’m not it. This is, in the words of Paul Gilmartin, “a waiting room that doesn’t suck.”

If you’re thinking about doing psych meds, here’s what works for me, but there’s a caveat. Unipolar depression medication sometimes works with a mood stabilizer, somtimes it makes bipolar worse. So tread carefully. Again, this is only what works for me….. and since I’m a doctor’s kid, you’ll get it in pharmacy notation…… 😉

  • Lamictal 200mg i qD
  • Lexapro 20mg 1qD
  • Klonopin .5mg BID
  • Adderall XR 20mg 1qD

I don’t know what I’ll do with the Adderrall because I don’t know that I need it all the time. But I’m getting it anyway just in case, because I never know when my ADHD is going to eat my lunch…. because I won’t.

These drugs do not play around, and I’m in the shit with side effects. I was so upset that I had to fill my prescriptions at the pharmacy in the doctor’s office after I opened them, because there are two different Lamictal generics. Same ingredient, lamotrigine, but whatever is in the diamond-shaped one makes me so nauseous I will absolutely throw up anywhere and everywhere. I look like such a drunk sometimes, because I’m trying to find a trash can and that’s people’s first instinct. But, you can only control what you can control, so what people think of me does not matter.

As I have said before, I have to choose between physically ill or mental, and I choose physical because my interactions with other people are more important to me than nausea and vomiting. It’s never fun, but it beats the hell out of not regulating my emotions.

The weird thing is that I’ve had ringing in my ears since I haven’t had my medication, and now I’m just waiting to see when it will go away. I basically flooded myself with brain chemicals, so it’s happened before. They just need to get into balance, and if I’ve said this twice, I apologize. I am not a well woman. But I did have a “not a well woman” exam today. They ran all my bloods and I should get the results back. I wouldn’t be surprised if anything is wrong, but I would be surprised if it was anything more than “you need to do more of this at home.” I’ve thought I was getting an autoimmune disease for the last few years, and I’ve been tested for rheumatoid arthritis, but not gotten the results. So, I’m having my clinic run the test again because what happened last time was that I was on my cycle and they couldn’t do the test….. another thing that could have been brought to my attention because we could have rescheduled…. No one has ever told me they didn’t want a urine sample when I’m menustruating before, so it didn’t occur to me to tell them.

But the bloods aren’t just for that. They have to make sure that my liver is still functioning well because mood stabilizers have a tendency to beat up on them. With some mood stabilizers, you have to have a liver function test every month, not every six months or a year. It’s serious business, and all of it started with lithium as we learned more and more about it.

All of these drugs are murder on your body after a while, except Klonopin, and with it there’s the pull of addiction. I have not fallen into that trap with either Klonopin or Adderrall, because again, I’m choosing sick over crazy. There’s nothing that makes me want to take more medication because the side effects are toxic…. mostly in that they render me in a constant bad mood like I’m Ouiser Boudreaux on a mission from God.

I’ve been 46 since I was six, so I actually have been in a very bad mood for 40 years.

But right now I’m thinking about the fact that Zac hasn’t read my fiction blog entry yet, and the only reason I want him to is that he will absolutely pick it apart. “That would never happen…. or that…. or that…. or that…. or that….” I’m joking, and yet I’m not. Zac and I are in it to win it. We may not ever get paid for writing, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it to be excellent.

I also know that I’d wait years to hear his impression, and I’m saying that out loud so that he doesn’t think, “oh shit! I have something to read right now!” It’s not a homework assignment, dear heart. It’s just fun working with him because even though he’s not a spy, he’s worked in military intelligence (not as much of an oxymoron as you might think) since he was 18. I think he signed up willing to do any job, but his test scores on the AFAB or whatever were so good they realized they could get anyone to weld ships or whatever.

So, entrusting Zac to be ruthless, kind, and accurate is a good thing. I know for sure that none of his criticism will be mean, because I’m not mean to him….. or if I am, he hasn’t mentioned it. 😉

Coming up with ideas for Zac’s fiction challenge was one of our best dates because we were both excited and happy about creativity- and he’s definitely more creative than I am on the fiction side of things. I can turn a phrase and make it funny, but he can build whole worlds. It’s the mountain I have to climb, and as I’ve said, I’m at the bottom. Yet, none of it bothers me because I know I’m becoming a stronger writer every day.

I am seeking out strong writers like Jonna Mendez, Tracy Walder, Vince Houghton, and John le Carré. I know that le Carré is dead, but “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a masterpiece and I’ve been learning from him through podcasts. His interviews on both Fresh Air and Writers & Company are among my favorite episodes of the entire show.

I don’t want to write exclusively about intelligence, which is why I’ll always be a blogger. It engages a different part of my brain. Intelligence is just what excites me about fiction, because I have read so many non-fiction books that I feel like I’ve taken a college class. Fiction is easier to write when you’ve done the research first. You’ll always have to research along the way, but knowing the broad strokes of a subject is key.

I can write about the kitchen because I know it.

I don’t know shit about spies, but it’s the same concept. I sought out Bourdain in order to develop that voice. I sought out Jonna and Tony for the same reason, because I loved the “Argo” script and wanted to do something like it eventually. I figured starting with their books was wise, but in reality the book about The Canadian Caper was written after the movie came out, because there were so many people who wanted the real story.

Reel is not real, and thank goodness the book came along. Argo is punched up for drama, but the story itself is no less great when you take away movie magic.

If they don’t make movies about “The Moscow Rules” and “In True Face,” it would be such a shame. I mean that sincerely. People need to know what happened during “The Cold War,” because it wasn’t any less devastating than our other conflicts. And honestly, they wouldn’t have to punch up “The Moscow Rules” much. It opens with a case officer having the shit beat out of him by FSB in front of the American embassy. I would like to believe we won The Cold War definitively, but the moment Trump took office, it ramped up again (in my educated guesses). That’s because the FSB beat up someone trying to get to American soil in…. wait for it…… 2016.

It startles me how the rest of the world does not see that Trump is an enemy both foreign and domestic. The Russians are in it to win it, and they have had/will have an asset planted at the top depending on whether Americans get it or not. The Founding Brothers are rolling over in their graves, because the last time high crimes and misdeameanors were on the table, both Republicans and Democrats believed it. This time, Putin has won. He has divided and conquered a nation by helping elect a president that was completely out of touch with reality and took notes from all the “benevolent dictators” out there. I’ll believe benevolence when I see it.

Most Americans are completely ignorant of the chessboard because they think we’re the best. All the time. Every day. In a way, I’m on a mission to dispel this notion, because it is simply not true. Other countries do things much better than we do, like having standardized drug prices across the country, whereas Medicare and Medicate pay different prices depending on where you are. Every drug costs a bit different depending on the pharmacy, not just the geographic location…. and that’s just one example. We could have better railroad infrastructure, both subways and cross-country. Lots of cities would benefit from it, because especially in the South, you get a car and won’t take the bus, anyway.

However, this leaves the least of us stranded because gas is expensive and people moving- not so much. I hope that more people than just me have a passion for taking care of poor people, because I feel that the United States is the country with the least viable support system because we have social services, but universal heatlh care takes so many problems off the the table. The US needs nationalized care badly, with doctors making real salaries, because since poor people can’t afford insurace, they end up in the emergency room never having had preventative care…. they can’t afford it. They also can’t afford hospital bills, and when you don’t pay, that’s keeping money out of the hospital system for salaries.

There won’t be any difference to you in terms of health care if we do it right, because the only thing that will change is who is writing the checks.

But drug companies and our current insurance policies don’t want that. They want to be able to charge whatever they want and get medicare to pay for it. It’s unsustainable. By not having universal health care, you are crippling people at jobs who don’t pay for benefits, or shackling someone to a job so that you have insurance in the first place. Nothing like the golden handcuffs.

But at the very least, I want everyone to be able to show up healthy to work because they didn’t wait to go to the ER until they were having a heart attack, or kidney failure, or any number of things. Stuff that could have been caught and wasn’t. So, instead of a $10 co-pay, the bill is $120,000 dollars….. but it’s $200,000 at a different hospital and a different part of the country. Prices vary everywhere. There is no standardization among even generic drugs.

Government-run pharmacies and clinics would allow us to buy all generics in bulk, same with medical equipment so that a cast in Oregon is the same price as a cast in Vermont. And we can get closer to home (for me). The highest Medicare costs in the nation right now are in El Paso, Texas. How does it have the ability to go up and down? Other countries don’t have this problem, and it’s a shame that we can’t have nice things when 99% of the world has figured it out.

We had a lot of hubris in the Revolutionary War, but it went overboard. We are so independent that we think saving money on health care is a bad idea. Meanwhile, if we’d lost, we’d have our own version of NHS because we’d be a Commonwealth country. So, in terms of progress, winning and losing that war are both a mixed bag.

I’m not on a mission to prove to you that we should have lost. I ultimately think it was better to win….. that doesn’t mean that we should stop taking lessons from other countries. They take lessons from us. I think we’d be a lot happier in the world without American imperialism….. or at least, so much of it.

If I have a mission on this blog, it’s saying random factoids that will stick in your brain along with all the crazy. 😉

I don’t know that it’s a Mission from God.™ But I do like jazz and blues, so it’s a start.

Yes… No… Maybe?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

Are you a good judge of character?

I am an excellent judge of character in other people, but what I don’t know is how much of my behavior is inspired by me. I tend to pick out emotionally unavailable people, anyway, so I wouldn’t know if I was doing something annoying or not because they would not volunteer that information. Therefore, I could not change.

It’s why I had so much empathy for Jon Armstrong during his divorce from Heather (Dooce). He went through absolute hell with her, and I know this because my caretakers are often overwhelmed when I get mentally ill. I go into autistic meltdown and burnout, which is code for “doesn’t play well with others.” So, when Jon said “she told me everything that was wrong and just left so I couldn’t change it” (not a direct quote, I’m paraphrasing), my mirror neurons went off and my heart went out to him. Mentally ill people can be so ungrateful, but it’s not because they are actively trying to be emotionally abusive or narcissistic. It means that they’re in so much pain they can’t see past it.

I don’t blame Heather for leaving, either. Her feelings are absolutely valid. I just know from experience that perception is not reality. Whether what Heather saw was accurate or not is missing the point. There is no wrong feeling, there are consequences for acting on them. Depression, particularly bipolar, blows everything out of proportion because sometimes you’re depressed and sometimes you’re manic. You are not seeing what things are really like, you’re seeing them in a fun house mirror.

Whether I’m a good judge of character depends on when you meet me. My perception is different depending on my mood, and that’s not a good thing, but it’s real. It’s my work to do, because mental illness is not the whole answer. It’s developing coping mechanisms and safety nets. Depressed and anxious people do not actually believe that we are loved and we are not a burden on our families or society at large.

The hardest part of a mental processing disorder and/or mental illness is that you’re either slow or crazy, take your pick. I’ve never been called “slow” mentally, but I pick up facial expressions and microaggressions easily. I know what emotions look like on people’s faces and even when my perception is wrong, my judgment on other’s motivations/moods are generally correct. This is because in order to understand a conflict, you have to understand both people’s interests and what motivates people to get closer to you vs. further away.

Most of this is through looking approachable, not being nice. Nice is not kind. Those are two completely separate things. “Nice” says “no, we’re all good” while you continue to distance yourself from me. I noticed discrepancies between words and actions quicker than others do when the words are actually coming out of their mouths, because since my intuition on what I’m going to do is rock solid. I don’t make bad leaps by judging character, but by noticing the hypocrisy and seeing what happens if you call people on it. If they’re angry you noticed a problem and want to talk about it, that’s the biggest red flag you’re ignoring if you’re a people pleaser who lives not to rock the boat.

Most abused people exhibit this, particularly those who have been emotionally abused young by people who are supposed to take care of them. For instance (this didn’t happen to me, just an example), children raised by alcoholic parents are programmed to invert the dynamic. Boys are just as susceptible to becoming a parental figure as girls, though with girls it generally comes faster because women are designed societally to be people pleasers, anyway. But I know this to be true from the number of “mama’s boys” I’ve met, both straight and gay, who weren’t babysitting their mothers because they just wanted to do so; they realized their mother or father couldn’t take care of themselves and didn’t want to watch them struggle, because watching them struggle means that they’re angry and absolutely will take it out on them.

My stepfather is a perfect example. His mother was a horrible alcoholic and actually died from it in a roundabout way. She didn’t live long enough to die of cirrhosis. She was on a drunk and passed out in the snow. She didn’t wake up….. and obviously, he married my mother. The classic image of a “mama’s boy” is not him. That being said, he had to grow up fast. Running a household was nothing to him because he’d been doing it since he was five.

Again, he ran the household as a child until she died in the snow and someone (I don’t remember if it was his family or a neighbor) just found her. I cannot imagine that kind of trauma, and I don’t want to try.

Everyone is fighting something, which is why I believe there are no red flags. I have never met anyone, particularly a woman, that wasn’t fighting massive trauma. Absolutely all of my girlfriends have been sexually assaulted, more than not raped in childhood. That’s not an anomaly where I just went out and picked women who were abused. I have experience with abuse because again, ALL women. All of ’em. Every woman you know has at least a creepy story about a man, and in this culture it’s surprising when you get off that easy if one in four women is raped at least once in their lifetime.

In fact, for most of history it wasn’t rape if you were married to them.

Some mothers are even vicious enough to tell their children that they’re a product of marital rape and make their kids walk around with that knowledge until they’re adults and start unpacking it. It gets worse before it gets better. I cannot stress this enough. You will recover, but at times it feels like you should give up.

But here’s the thing….. during the Renaissance, beautiful statues were often finished in wax to cover mistakes. This is a double-edged sword as an illustration when it comes to PTSD. The first is that the statues weren’t any less beautiful. The second is that when finished with wax, it didn’t mean that the flaw wasn’t still underneath. What you get out of healing is what you put into it. Are you using the wax to cover your wounds, or are you examining the dead spots in your emotions? Are you using the wax as filler not because you are ignoring pain signals, but because you’re rerouting them?

A statue without wax is called “sin cera.” “Without wax.” A statue sin cera was incredibly rare….. another truism because you can make a statue sin cera, but no person ever could be. It is the nature of being animate, fully human and fully divine.

The sculpture you start carving after abuse looks completely different than the one you were carving before, because you don’t have the same thought processes anymore……. however, you do not get a new piece of marble. Maybe you’ve chipped more away. Maybe you’ve taken the “clippings” and rearranged them into something new.

People who have been abused and then are driven to success sometimes drive me insane because they’re so insistent they’re fine. Meanwhile, it’s not that they’re so perfect, it’s that everyone has learned to tiptoe around them. They’re not fine in terms of their emotions, but they don’t notice because why would they? Everyone around them is FINE.

Meanwhile, families who have someone with PTSD become the planets revolving around the sun…. in effect, nurturing it and asking it to warm them when they’re not capable of it. If they’re scared of their emotions, they’re scared of yours.

A lot of the women in my life are or have been a big deal. The two most successful women I know are complete wire monkeys, both raped in childhood and driven to control their entire universes so it never happens again……. not realizing that by trying to control everything, that includes controlling the people around them.

The planets orbit the sun, completely dependent on its behavior and not daring to deviate from the pattern that’s currently working….. but it won’t forever and instead of calling bullshit, the people around “the sun” adopt new ways of trying to please to avoid emotional injury.

Are you people-pleasing because you’re naturally programmed to give all of yourself away, or are you giving all of yourself away to try and mitigate damage?

I don’t know. Sometimes I’m a good judge of character. Sometimes I’m not. It’s especially wishy-washy in trying to determine my own. I am selfless and giving to an enormous degree, but not so much that I’d be willing to do anything to get love. But that’s a relatively new development. In the past, I was so afraid to lose a connection that I just wouldn’t do it. I would cower in fear instead of saying “this is bullshit. You don’t get to control my feelings in addition to yours.”

Whether or not the person listens is the best judge of character there is, because whether you’re wrong or not, your feelings still deserve to be heard. I am the worst person in the world at giving up in relationships, because I believe that certainly there must be a combination of words that will unlock you and make you open up, but it has never worked with a woman who has been raped.

Ever.

But that’s a perception with empathy, not a judgment call. The most upsetting thing is that statistics don’t lie and culture doesn’t change.

But you can.

It’s Hard to Quantify

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?

This year I started taking care of me for the first time in my life, ever. People who learn a little bit about boundaries install them with spikes, because they don’t know balancing language yet. So many, many times have I been fed this year on a meager emotional diet, because someone would cross a boundary and alarm I’d never had went off. There has never been anything loud enough in my mind to say that my opinions are valid, because I get intimidated and fold easily………………… in person.

On paper, I am not anticipating someone else’s reactions, so I come across as judgmental when I actually want your input/correction, I’m not dictating to you what our situation might be. My work to do is to learn how to control my autistic brain symptoms, like “I have explained this six times and it hasn’t resulted in any change at all, so that means I only have to explain it ten more ways and we’re golden.” I will absolutely argue with a signpost……… in text. If a waitress served me soup with glass shards, I’d be so mad I’d only leave a 20% tip.

I talk a lot about the first blush of excitement on both ends at Supergrover and I meeting each other, and it’s those memories I focus on when I feel the kind of desperation you absolutely will not admit to anyone, I am fine……… meanwhile, your eyes are rolling out of your head because you’ve thought I was an idiot about it for months why has this taken so long dear Jesus get a life…….. and actually, that’s not true at all. It’s how it feels to write out pain. It doesn’t change all at once. It changes a little every day.

I do not have any interest in telling our story as if it is our facts. No, they are only my facts, and I am a hundred percent certain that our stories are different, but I will never know to what degree. I’ve guessed at the extremes and the middle and been wrong every single time. I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me. I cannot drag a relationship kicking and screaming into the light when I only own one half…… and if it sounds like I’m holding myself up as some kind of beacon, that’s not it at all.

We fucked each other up nine years ago. Our relationship shouldn’t be so dramatic and toxic all the time. It’s not good for either one of us as we both sound like Dorothy Sbornak and Ouiser Boudreaux in text. We are both first children. We fight until someone is bleeding, because we are not used to losing…….. and I’m laughing about it now, but believe me when I say I have seen Oppenheimer and I didn’t even know it was a movie until recently.

I am just as filled with rage as she is. We’re The Holy and the Moly because one day I’m the bomb and she’s the detonator……….. and then she’s got the big red button. We installed them in each other quickly and use them to great effect. After we fight, I will say “this is what hurt.” She won’t. She says, “I was licking my wounds.” I wish that just once this year she could have seen my face when I read it. If there are moments that make me want to reach through her phone and hug her, it’s lines like that.

Autistic people are not here to be nice, because we do not have all the social masks involved in sensitive situations. I used to be very, very practiced at it, but I’m not in front of parishioners all the time anymore. As I’ve been away from being a preacher’s kid, it has been a slow, painstaking process to unmask. Everyone does the public/private thing to a degree. There is a truly marked difference in “show mode” and “autism.” Most people are trying to hide their emotions a little bit, certainly. No one wants to ugly cry if Oprah’s not handing out Beetles. Autistic people cannot regulate their emotions like neurotypical people, and we can catalogue their behaviors by the hundreds, but what we cannot do is replicate them. This is because the reason we thought you had the reaction was different than why you actually had it.

Impasses are frequent because “I just don’t get it,” and I have empathy for how tiresome that is. I really do. That’s because if your’e exhausted, you’ve experienced a few hours of my symptoms and I live this way. Not said to shame you, just to say “I need empathy here.” There are other areas in which I’m stronger than my friends and we trade off….. no one is ever getting the short end of the stick……

And unfortunately, reminding Supergrover of that didn’t go over so well because I don’t think she was picking up what I was putting down. She told me several times some version of “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” First of all, that’s a huge red flag. If you tell someone up front that you have a disability like bipolar or whatever and that’s what they say, that’s not the healthiest response ever. The reason I ask people for help is that they’re the first person to ask me. In this one case, the tables were turned where I needed help first….. so, of course it felt like I “was the one who always needed help.” But it’s 10 years later and those words just don’t hit the same way anymore. Healthy people do not shut you down every time you want to have a dialogue. What would have been perfectly healthy is just to walk away for both of us, and yet neither of us did it. I don’t think we meant to be in a relationship this crazy for 10 years, but those tickets are non-refundable.

In some ways, I felt like it was really hard work and deservedly so. Most friendships like ours end quickly because of who we are jointly and severally. I am sure this is conjecture, but it seems to be that the key words are “friendships like ours.” What I see as trying for connection, she sees as “telling her every bad thing she’s ever done.” Sometimes when my sensory environment is turned up to hell, I do come across like I’m nitpicking. Because it’s all text, she can’t hear my tone of voice and she doesn’t ask for any clarification. So, whether I intended to provoke ire or not, I will have done it.

I have never wanted that for her, and I had to learn not to want that for me. I stepped all over her boundaries because that’s how it works in my world. If you troll someone, they’ll leave you alone. We just both met our match and wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash. I will never be as strident as she is in person. She will never be as over emotional as me in text……………… but not because she’s not capable of it.

She’s my fairy tale author girl. As in, not the author of my fairy tale but the writer friend I have who is interested in creating fairy tales for actual children. I keep telling her that “50 Shades of Gray” was so terrible I didn’t even read the whole first page, but it did prove to me that either one of us was capable of writing a book on our phones while using public transportation. I have more time in a day to dedicate to it, but I will never write something akin to the main quest of Skyrim, and she could. I don’t know what her future holds, but I do know that if she wrote a book, she’d sell a copy.

What I know is that if I keep talking, one of two things will happen. The first is that repetition gives the story less power. How do I know it has less power? When I can write essays like this and I don’t end up sobbing so hard I can’t see what I’m writing anymore. There’s so much to cry about, really, that doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s universal. You lose someone significant in your life, and you adjust- but I do not know anyone who is downright happy about it.

It would also be easier to focus on this prompt at the end of the month than it is right this moment. Finnish Independence Day is always craptastic because it’s trying to replace the parts of my heart that are black with the lights and music of Helsinki. Finlandia, yes, but also Finlandia conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The black parts of your heart will respond to music if you let them.

That’s it. That’s the thing I’ve learned this year. The black parts of my heart will respond to music when I let them. This means that I can author the destruction of someone I 100% regret having to cut out of my life because I didn’t have any other choice. I could no longer make decisions about the health of the relationship based on what only I thought, because what happened on a large scale a few months ago was happening all the time in conversation.

We hadn’t talked for a few months, so she was reading me without responding….. months of posts in which we weren’t checking the stories we were telling ourselves, and that always feels like “WE WERE ON A BREAK.” That’s what makes our bond cemented for life. She has editorial control and I’ve told her that. She also cannot stop herself from reading because she thinks that I’m out to get her……. or does she? Because she says it frequently and then she’ll take a line I thought about for an hour, just slaved over to capture her perfectly, and send it to me with a “thank you for this.”

The main reason this whole thing is important to me is that I have never been this person before. I wouldn’t be as safe and secure in who I am now if she hadn’t been sure of me first.

What makes her unique in my life is that she managed to get past all the barriers I’d set up. All the social masking that didn’t make me look like an alien, all the catering I do to other people to make sure everyone is focusing on having a good time and not the fact that I am standing here, damaged, in a corner because I don’t want to get my crazy spatter on you. I have never been that person on the outside. Why I don’t always come off as depressed, anxious, ADHD, or autistic. It’s all just a bunch of spaghetti code in there.

One day I’ll reach “eof,” and I know it’ll compile……………….. even when there are so many lines I wish I could have commented out. But that’s the thing, right? The first step to finding things that do serve you is letting go of the things that don’t. I wish I could say a lot of good things happened this year, and I know they did in small measures. But mostly this year was about learning to deal with pain and rage. How much I’d social masked away all of those feelings as a child determined not that my emotions were bottled, but how many six-packs.

In a lot of ways, all my social masks failed at once, and then I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had to build myself back up from 12 on, adjusting to new emotions that weren’t there before and mapping out the dead spots. If you have not done this in yourself, it is backbreaking emotional work and depression/anxiety medication make it easier, not easy.

This year I’ve felt infantilized more and bothered less. That is because I do not have a world-ending autistic meltdown if someone doesn’t like me. I just find out quickly who my people are in those cases and move on, because I’m past the point in my life where I want to justify anything to anyone, because I have enough belief in myself to know that I have limitations and to ask for help when I need it. People rush to parent the people with mental processing differences and psychiatric illness, and I have to anticipate it. I have to deal with it, because there’s nowhere I won’t. That’s a social mask I do have, though, because it feels very much like apologizing for your existence because you’re queer or physically disabled.

The hard part is being a realist without being too negative because I can control my environment, but only to a point. I do not like telling people I’m a Christian anymore because it invariably ends up being an image of me in their heads that just doesn’t compute. Either I’m a bad Christian because my exegesis is bad and God didn’t really mean all that stuff about inclusivity, helpfully written right there in the RED LETTERS……………… or their God is about the letter of the law and not the spirit; homosexuality does not occur in most, if not all animal populations……. it is a demon to which I am solely responsible for its care and feeding. If I just stopped queer behavior, I’d stop being queer.

Gay men are widely accepted as priests in the Catholic Church because especially in the third world, that’s where you go not to get bullied. Most families know when they’ve got a priest on their hands by kindergarten. Please know that this is in no way trying to be shady. Gay men are pushed toward being priests because of their sensitive/more effeminate natures, because then their families don’t even have to meet the boyfriend. They’ve been eating at his table for years.

I’m just trying to let myself evolve, and thinking about systemic issues makes me happier than thinking about my own progress or lack of it, because I have so much that’s up in the air and little that’s solid.

That’s just how it is in a rebuilding year. Next year might be one, too, but this is not to be taken lightly. I cannot be my authentic self until all the pieces are together, or at the very least, scattered on the table in front of me.

Pieces, for me, are thought fragments. The most positive thing in the world that happened to me this year, above all else, was that in January of course I knew I’d found a flawless diamond in my beautiful girl……………… but by December, I realized she had, too.

TMI?

~ one4paws ~ 2 Comments

Hi, this is Bryn. I know, I just jumped in here and started writing without introducing myself. As a person who struggles mightily with self-worth, you may have to ask pointed questions to learn more, but if you ask, and I feel like you care, I’ll tell you anything. I’m an open book if you’ve earned it.

I used to just be an open book. Unfortunately for me though, that meant that I spent all my time living other people’s lives and versions of myself, instead of living my own life. Now that I’m a grown ass woman (don’t tell the others!) and have had many conversations with Leslie, I’m beginning to believe that I’m allowed to have my own opinion and if people don’t like it, they are welcome to come have an adult conversation about it, or they are welcome to fuck right off. I don’t have a lot of in-between on that anymore. Too many people have tricked me into believe their lies, but again, I must out myself on culpability. That’s tricky though because I feel strongly that the believer isn’t the culprit the liar is. However, when “I love you” begins to feel and sound like a lie and I don’t say anything about it, that’s where I become part of the problem. When I teach you how to treat me, and I am in a season of self-hatred, then chances are, the ways I am teaching you to love me aren’t going to be healthy or sustainable. I am (finally) beginning to believe that I am allowed to take up space, to make noise in the presence of others, that the ability to meld into any crowd is as much a trauma response as walking so quietly in my own house that I frighten people because they didn’t hear me coming down the hall.

It’s still such a process though, because so much of my trauma lives physiologically inside my body. Here’s an example; You know how when a bird flies away in fright, it often evacuates its bowel? Well, one of the fun ways my trauma shows up in my body is that whenever I need to take a shit and have that feeling, then my stomach butterflies go crazy and my heart starts to race, because my body, it thinks that because we have to shit, we’re probably also being hunted by a lion…in my fenced in yard, in my quiet little Christian town, with my 120lb guard dog next to me. It doesn’t matter what is happening outside my body, if inside my body it thinks that the entire cast of Jungle book is on it’s way and humans are a valid food source. So, in order to a)not shit myself on the spot and b)stave off the imminent panic attack, this leads to conversations (often out loud) I have with my body, saying things like, “Yes body, we need to shit, that’s what happens when we feed ourselves appropriately. I feel you body and I will look for danger, but when I don’t find it, maybe we can let the heart go back to normal?” This fun body byplay happens in reverse too! Say I’m needing to run to the store for one thing, I know exactly where it is in the store and everything. Just contemplating going to the store is enough to make my belly rumble and my butthole twitch. I’ll go try to get in the car, and my body will say “Mmmm maybe we should shit first, so that we can run faster when we’re being pursued by the grocery store hunters.” So I’ll go to the restroom and take a whatever my body wants to evacuate. Then I get back in the car and get to the store, and sometimes my body hits me again, before I even park, and sometimes she waits until I’m inside and on the other side of the store from the restroom, but inevitably I’m going to the toilet at the store, despite having just done so 10 minutes before at my own house. If I’m having a really bad time, and my anxiety is in full swing, it could be 2-6 more trips to the toilet. This is only one reason that I hate going to the store.

I’ve pulled into parking lots and just noped right back out again because just looking at the number of people and cars almost made me shit myself in my car.

Don’t even get me started on food. I’ve had some complicated relationships, but my relationship with food is still the most complex one in my life. When I start to go to therapy again, I’ll definitely be having that conversation tout sweet. What I do know, is that I love food. I love cooking it, preparing it for other people and having the opportunity to be creative in such a fulfilling way. Did you see what I did there? I’m hilarious, watch out.

So it turns out I may just ramble about myself when given the opportunity. This is new to me since I have been so used to taking up as little space and being as perfect as possible to be sure I earn love. What I hear about this site though, is that I can just be me and love me for me and write whatever I want (with my own cavate that it’s true, since the title of the site matters to me) and I don’t need to worry about whether you love me or not.

Facts are, if I don’t love me, I will never believe anyone else can either. Trust me, I checked, it’s true.

Talking About Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My friendship needs are different than most people. I’m bipolar and have chronic PTSD. I also have ADHD. It means that I get frustrated when things aren’t clear, so when people aren’t, I overfocus and they’re exhausted. I am not trying to hurt them, I am asking for more information. If you do not understand that, then I am going to be a straight up problem for you and I do not want to be fixed. I don’t have some stereotype to fill, because I’ve never been that for anything except maybe Arthur. Most people don’t know that ADHD presents like Asperger’s sometimes. Mine doesn’t come across verbally, but it does when I allow myself to write into and out of a problem. If no one will tell me how to understand, I will find out on my own. Whether it is right or wrong is of no consequence, because no one else is responsible for what I understand. It just helps if they’re willing to do the little bit of extra work it takes to communicate. Exhaustion leaves me in the same state of dread as he is here:

This is the first time I’ve ever gotten my own Arthur meme. It’s not that someone made it just or me, it’s that I’ve never related to anything so much.

Because I process online, I’ve noticed a beautiful symbiosis between David Sedaris and me. My style and structor is borrowed from him, and his style and structure seems borrowed from me in his new book, “Happy Go Lucky.” He takes a hard, hard, look at himself and his family and every word resonated.

He also talked craft in a way that I felt he was in the room with me. He said that when you’re writing these essays, you’re not writing about your friends. They’re the characters. You’re writing about their characters and not them.

He talked about my frustration with blowback, because it happens more than you think. “I don’t want you to write about me at all.” “Ok.” “It seems like you don’t like me because you don’t write about me.” This can go ad nauseam for years. This is especially true of people who also struggle with mental health issues because they don’t like being criticized and love being praised.

It comes across as that you don’t care you’re teaching us how to love ourselves, and in turn, how to love you. It is the mystery of faith, to be able to hold in your mind that you are capable of great decisions even after you’ve cratered your life over and over because of the very conflict I’ve mentioned. People don’t want to do that kind of work, especially bosses. We’re not aware of our interactions with you because we’re focused on other things.

We want to know how the world works, and stifling that is very difficult. No system is built for it. We just have to feel anxious or stop buying in. A lot of people lose their lives because the system for dealing with mental health is so poor in this part of the world, specifically our country (and thank God not my state).

Being ADHD means that through hyperfocus and medication, depending on whether it’s natural or drug induced, you lose your appetite until your body screams.

Nothing gets easier, and yet we pretend it does.

Edited to add that the prompt for all this was someone breaking a boundary. “Michael,” the guy I was chatting with, deactivated his Facebook account and started flirting with me. I said, “what I need you to realize is that when you deactivate your account, I don’t think about you at all.” It’s not because I’m an asshole, it’s that he’s already done it once, then when he came back, he called me “baby girl.” Those are trigger words for me because they do not belong to him. I told him that if he called me baby girl again, I would block him. So, when it happened a second time, I blocked him. If I tell you that’s a sore spot, believe it. I am made of nails right now and I need to be because I am not settling for fine.

If lightning can’t strike again, it doesn’t even matter.

Half a Line Bouncing Around

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
  • 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.

There Cannot Be Just One

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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.”

Popular

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

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.

Heather

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

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.”

Empathy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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.