Forget About It

November 21, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today’s daily writing prompt is about my family’s three favorite meals. I don’t have a family, and I live like a bachelor. I am really doing something fancy if I cook for myself. Most of the time, I make a sandwich and call it a day. I am a trained cook, which is why I don’t do it.

Well, I say I don’t have a family. What I mean is that I am not partnered and do not have kids. But I belong to a family, of course. I have a dad and some sisters and some puppies in there. We just lost my stepmother, Angela, so our Thanksgiving and Christmas is going to be quiet. But the meal will be full of her spirit as we prepare favorite recipes from better times.

I’ll get to see all my nephews and my niece, getting to know them a little better as I’ve lived in DC their whole lives. I moved to Silver Spring when Wi-Phi was two, and he is the oldest. I am also not even sure that he knows I call him Wi-Phi, but that can be rectified.

I need to pick up some Intel on what to get people for Christmas, easy to do when I soak up everything and don’t say much.

The food is always the same, because we are traditionalists. We’ll have turkey, both Yankee and cornbread dressing, different types of congealed salads. It’s a whole mood. I can’t wait.

But that’s just Thanksgiving. My dad is a wonderful cook and I’m sure we’ll do some experimenting.

I’m looking forward to going to my dad’s house for a few days. I like my room and bathroom there, wishing I could adopt it as an apartment and knowing that living with my dad would be impossible. It’s too expensive to cut myself off from Medicaid and hope for the best. I can’t be without solid medical care and I don’t want to pay Texas premiums for it.

I also don’t think my life would be as happy in Houston as it is here. I have the luxury of ignoring everything to do with Trump and not really having any friends who disagree with me politically. I know how to have friends that disagree with me politically, but it is nice to live in an area where my rights aren’t constantly up for grabs. I don’t have to “get along” because the blue voting bloc is strong.

I wish that the United States could be more cohesive, because it’s been a battle since I was young. I couldn’t get married in any state but Vermont at first, and things have slowly gotten better. I don’t think that the wedding industry is going to see any slowdown soon, because the Kim Davis lawsuit wasn’t even given writ to be heard by the Supreme Court, almost as if gay marriage is settled law.

It will always be under attack because that’s a conservative talking point, but I don’t think that it’s going anywhere when push comes to shove. It was something that Amy Coney Barrett said…. Too many dependent industries.

Oh. This doesn’t have to do with love winning. She’s saying that the wedding industry is going to lose money and we cannot have that.

I am wondering around into nothing because my life is so different than what the prompt is going for.

I have those I want to cook for, but so far they have not been open to it. I need more friends, so I am looking for them.

I’ve been getting up and driving for coffee every morning just so I have a set interaction with the same people every morning. I know that there’s no chance anyone will ask me for my phone number, but it is pleasant. I’m not going to come away with lifelong friendships at Dunkin or Wawa, but it helps to know that the employees smile when they see you come in.

Having been on the other side of the counter, I’m glad my reputation is a good one.

My job this week is to get everything together that I want to take to Texas and make sure it’s washed. I’ve already picked out an outfit for the plane- a long sleeved t-shirt that says “Santa Claws” and has a T-Rex on it.

It’s probably for children. I could give a damn.

I know I will be thinking of Aada the entire time, because our schtick is for her to be on call when I say, “Jesus Christ…. Just come pick me up.” She has never had to actually come and pick me up, but it makes me laugh so I keep saying it. I will still be saying it in my head instead of saying it to her.

I wish there was a way of saying that I love her in a way she could hear it. But that’s not an isolated problem. If I talk about a person here, there’s a one hundred percent chance that their interpretation of what I wrote is more important than author’s intent. Meaning that if Aada appears here and thinks I’m out to get her, it doesn’t matter how many times I tell her I’m not.

Now multiply that attitude by every person in my life and it’s why being a blogger is so hard. I quit every night, and only keep going because Aada says that my writing is important and to never stop.

It’s a mixed message, to be sure- that my biggest cheerleader also thinks I set out to destroy her.

No, she lied and I wrote about it. She created her own ending in this story, and doesn’t like it because I didn’t show her as perfectly perfect in every way despite the fact that she lied to me over a number of years.

It’s not a game, it’s what’s happened and I’m miserable over it. I can’t think about food right now, I just want to wallow in my sadness that my best friend lied to me and because I was not calm enough to tell her that she was perfect despite all the consequences this lie laid out for me, our relationship is over.

Or is it?

I know I have enough love in me to forgive her. I know I have enough love in me to work through feelings of distrust. I know I have enough love in me to let all this lie and see what Aada thinks down the road.

What I don’t have a lot of is patience. I have to talk myself down off the ceiling that this relationship is ending because it is a bond that supercedes all my others by a large margin. I was okay with losing friends because this relationship was so solid I didn’t need any others.

And then I found out she lied.

I will never forgive myself for overreacting, and Aada says that she’ll never talk to me about anything again. I actually laughed at that, because she has not been forthcoming so far. She likes to ask about me when I ask about her.

She says that she’s tired of all the jabs at her because she lied, and I’m trying to figure out what that means. I am not taking a jab at her. I am telling you what happened and also that she is forgiven. The slate is wiped clean.

So clean that I need to find other relationships and stop dwelling on this one. We’ve been friends for so long that I have real doubt this is the end, because we’ve used these formal separation words so many times they no longer carry any power.

I am tired of using them as a fighting strategy, and am laying down arms. My choice is that we never separate again. Her choice is that we never talk again.

Unless she sees something that she just must tell me.

I hope that nothing tells her she cannot do that in the future. That friends have conflict, but it melts.

I need some resilience where I don’t feel it. I am just so sad that I don’t know what to do. Nothing helps except looking at Aada’s picture and reminding myself of her humanity. I hurt that sweet baby girl, and she deserves whatever she needs to get over it….. Just like she hurt me and I deserve the same but am unwilling to give it to myself. I don’t want this relationship to end and I am panicking.

So, I need peace and I cannot give it to myself because I am so lost in the idea that Aada thinks I hate her when I never said that, never even came close.

I cannot say to her any more than I already have that she only took in half the story. That she is fallible and glorious, but she stopped reading after fallible.

I cannot tell the world any more than I already have that she’s the woman of my dreams and no one compares to her.

I cannot make her take in the positive if she is determined not to see it.

When I think about food and family, I think of her. I’ve always wanted to teach Aada how to cook, or let her relax while I took care of dinner. This has never even been a romantic wish. I have always told her that I will cook for whomever shows up. It would make me feel good to serve her as a selfless act, and one of the ways I can do that is by taking care of her family.

But that would require her to pick up the story again, and I don’t know that she’s ready to read.

In my humble opinion, she needs for enough time to pass that the things happening in these pages don’t feel like they’re happening to her.

My experience when people go back to my writing is that they are surprised at how much I’ve learned, because they are not looking at it with the same lens. I didn’t change. The words didn’t change. They did.

I feel the same way in terms of reading about Aada. I have to wait a long time to read entries so that it feels like I’m caring for another person.

Seeing things objectively, there is nothing left but hope and nothing can get any worse.

I want Aada to realize that no one would call me a dynamic storyteller if she wasn’t a 3D character. That other people love her just as much as I do as they chart our ups and downs over the decades.

She sees herself as a “Flat Stanley,” that I’m always harping on her, guilting her, etc.

If she could see herself through my eyes, she would know she was the feast.

Out

November 20, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m out of escitalopram, so I’m waiting on an appointment with my psychiatrist and trying not to beat myself up with depression. When I don’t take my medication, I am likely to lapse into thinking about how much I suck. This is normal, I just need to take a pill, and then I will go back to a normal amount of beating myself up.

I’m trying to stop that, too, but it’s harder when your brain knows the very best lies to use against you. I’m combatting it by taking Tylenol, because I’m already autistic and there’s lots of research that says physical and emotional pain stem from the same source. It’s not just a placebo effect.

I also had some ice cream, and that always makes things look better. I went to Wawa for a parfait. It’s my new thing. Vanilla soft serve with chocolate syrup and peppermint crunchies because it’s just that time of year.

It was actually my second Wawa run of the day, because they do $3.00 lattes in the morning and that’s irresistible. I wake up very early and drive out to a Wawa about 30 minutes away so that I can spend some time in the car with my mind engaged. I don’t like being in my apartment because it’s so dark. Any excuse to leave and I’m out of here. I didn’t need soft serve, I made it up.

But it’s funny how bad I needed it compared to looking at these four walls.

Especially when my Xfinity internet connection went down, because then there was nothing to do. No TV, no surfing, no nothing except writing, and who wants to do that?

Kidding, I could have created a local document and pasted it into WordPress, but it was easier just to take a break and come back to the house once my connection was restored.

I needed to leave the house because my cell phone signal is so poor I cannot tether other devices to it. I mean, my cell signal is perfect when I’m not inside the house, but for some reason I continually miss calls and SMS when I’m down here.

“Down here” is probably the entire reason my signal sucks. I hope that moving to a new apartment helps. I’ll have to go to the office and see what’s up with that. They said a few weeks, but now that I have trips scheduled I need to move on a certain timeline.

I was grateful when I told Bryn that Sam said she didn’t want to be in my life that she said, “well, you kind of dodged a bullet there, anyway.” It’s true, I did. She didn’t trust me because of bad past experiences and wasn’t adult enough to talk about them calmly.

As I’ve said before, I’m poly, but would have been willing to settle down with only Sam if she’d asked. Here’s how it really went down.

We were absolutely crazy about each other. I told her that I had a first date coming up, and she told me not to cancel it. That she didn’t have time to devote to a full time girlfriend, didn’t have time to care, etc.

For three weeks she told me this lie while in her heart of hearts she only wanted me. It was a first date, not serious at all. If Sam had told me how she really felt, I would have listened- and in fact was disappointed that she didn’t jump at the chance to be exclusive. It was a miscommunication, because I gave her exactly what she asked for.

She called me hysterical while I was at Zac’s house and broke up with me. There was no discussion and the break was final. She told me that she couldn’t trust me, because in the back of her head she would always wonder if I was cheating.

Darlin,’ that’s not how poly works. I have to be brave enough to tell you what’s going to happen and you have to be brave enough to choose whether you want to continue our relationship. I give you that same power. There is no reason to cheat because dating other people is part of the contract.

And not only that, even at three weeks I could envision us having a very cool life together because there were so many huge things solved, like having similar music and church backgrounds.

I wanted only her, but she told me she didn’t have time.

Bryn is right. I dodged a bullet because what she really wanted was to be exclusive from the first date…. But she didn’t want to come get me all the time and it was so hard because I lived so far and all these other bullshit excuses because I had Uber and public transit. I never asked her to take me anywhere. She offered and resented it.

I was in a different financial position then, and couldn’t afford a car with the latest technology to allow me to drive safely, and I was infantilized for it.

So, I do see Bryn’s point. It’s not bad that someone who treated me like a child passed on the chance to do it again.

All of these things are swirling around in my head as I try to let go of a small rejection that is only large because I’m out of escitalopram. Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria is the worst when my serotonin feels wonky, and I just have to remember that it’s no big deal that Sam and I won’t see each other ever again, because in the grand scheme of things, it matters about as much as Dunkin being out of the donuts I like.

I really only like Boston Cream.

I’m trying to keep my spirits up by refueling with caffeine regularly. I’ve had enough now that I’m starting to feel some relief.

Most of my upset this afternoon was outrage at the president, but I don’t get any forward motion out of hating him. There’s very little I can do about that particular situation because his own party is tolerant of conduct unbecoming.

Trump is giving off King George vibes, and he can no longer hold down the madness. Saying that Democrats could do anything that was seditious enough to be punishable by death is barbaric. Calling a reporter “piggy” falls under the same category. He gets worse and worse, people in power defending him when they know they’ve never seen anything like him.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and Trump’s policy won’t get better if he steps down. JD Vance won’t change anything back. However, I do think that it would stop attacks on the press.

I’m going to level with you, especially the Americans.

This is not normal. The president is Looney Tunes and his party doesn’t care. We are trapped in this situation because they won’t invoke 25 and they won’t impeach him. He can say all the crazy shit he wants absolutely unchecked.

It is so bad that I have to keep my head down. I don’t listen to the news often, and I try not to retain what I’ve heard. If I need something, I’ll ask AI. Only focusing on myself and my community keeps me sane, because I go in cycles. When I can handle more, I’ll absorb it. But you have to tap out. There’s news fatigue because the country is so unstable.

But when I focus just on my local community, my world seems right again. There has to be a balance, because it can’t be all or nothing. I have a drive to be informed, but I hate audio stories about the president because his voice grates on my last damn nerve.

I don’t want people to write me off as “just a Democrat,” either. I have never voted Republican, but I went to the Republican convention in 1992 just to be there because it was in Houston and I have actually met President George H.W. Bush. My sister met Ronald Reagan. I have never held people’s beliefs against them until my rights were up for grabs. A difference of opinion is whether coffee is delicious, not whether I’m an American.

I’ve been out as queer since I was 13 or 14 years old, depending on who you ask. When I was a child, I thought the best I would get out of life is no one caring I lived with a roommate because I knew I didn’t want to marry a man.

Now, I don’t want to marry anyone. If you value your own sanity, you won’t ask.

Things with marriage equality have changed so much in my lifetime, but I’m just past that point in my life where I want and need government entanglement. My track record with marriage isn’t the greatest and I know that I will never change. My attention deficit doesn’t mix with long relationships thus far.

I’m not fatalistic, I’m just over it.

I’m over all the drama that a relationship escalator creates and I want to tap out. I know that things change, and late in life I could be surprised and want to get married again. It’s not that I don’t believe in it. It’s that the best indication of future behavior is the past.

If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.

I don’t want to be the same person I’ve always been, because I am ready for a new chapter in my life. I got comfortable with just relaxing in my sweats and writing to Aada while the world passed me by. I didn’t notice, and don’t regret it. But things are getting more exciting around here and I want to be present for it.

The ego boost that my search results in Copilot gave me have me focused on creative projects and that’s all on me. I don’t require input for those, I just need to sit down at my desk and actually work on them.

I don’t need to think about cute girls, but Imma do it anyway.

Although thinking about cute girls is a misnomer, because my taste skews much older than me.

If you were born female and your taste skews older, there is this moment.

You want a cougar til you realize you ARE the cougar.

Oh, my God you guys. I’m still stuck on how much Aada thinks I hate her because of the way I portrayed her. I can’t do anything about it, it just sits in my stomach like a rock.

I hope that in time she’ll believe in fairy tales again,

I will believe that there is capability for redemption between us until time runs…………………………………………..

Out.

Rain is Falling: Contemplation

November 19, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It is a moody day in Baltimore. The weather is misty, the sun is completely hidden. It matches my mood, because I don’t like rejection and it doesn’t matter what kind. I do not like it when people hold on to things so completely that they never want contact again. It’s so final, and so hard when they’re still out in the world.

But I’m not thinking about Sam. I’m thinking about how grief compounds. I was already feeling low because Aada and I called it quits (for now). So of course I had to go and make the rejection worse when my sensitivity to it is disproportionate to the situation in all things.

I decided to stop doing things that no longer serve me.

I will respect Sam’s wishes and forget about her again. There’s no anger, I’m just licking my wounds.

I changed Aada’s email address in my address book so that I could still write to her all I wanted because I also own the other account. It gives me the flexibility to let her read if she’s ever curious AND ALSO the ability not to bug her every three seconds with “one more thing.”

What breaks my heart about Aada walking away is that she thinks I’m lying when I say I don’t hate her. I love her. She said that she gets it, it was a mistake to believe in her.

What in the world?

I have never said any of these things and I need her to say them to herself if that’s her opinion but to stop saying it to me. I think she’s the most beautiful woman in the entire world. Fight me.

And if she says, “I just have to get up the willpower to stop reading,” it means that she hasn’t stopped thinking about me, either. I don’t think this is the end of our movie because again, we left our connection pure for the future. The holidays will be hard but I’m determined not to buy her anything and not to reach out unless she does.

Our traditional gifts are either Starbucks cards or Kindle books, so when I’m curled up at my dad’s reading, it’ll be one she got me.

Maybe even a reimagined fairy tale.

I’m really feeling low about all this, because Aada has been a part of my daily life since 2013. It makes complete sense to me why she at least needs to take space, if not move on from me entirely. We had a bad pattern and it needed to go away. Yet we both feel our chemistry strongly even when the other isn’t in the room.

That’s because we’re both a part of each other’s wild and crazy brains. I know I have given her an enormous amount of free rent in my head over the years, and I have constantly underestimated how big my house is in her mental neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I have a pool.

Please advise.

I want to work together to solve conflicts if the detente ever melts, but I told her that our conflict resolution has to start with her opinion of herself. That we are not checking the story we are telling ourselves, because according to her I purposefully tried to take her down, I think she’s a liar, etc.

MEANWHILE

I am saying every day how much I love and miss her…. And about those lines she says that she takes in the positive things I say, but they feel suspect, like clues in a game.

I am not playing with her. She is a 3D character. She’s as human as I am, having the capability for every emotion in the spectrum. I see her so completely that I am deeply honest about the fact that when it is good, the world explodes. When it is bad, it is terrible.

I want the world to explode with our secure connection, because I have worked through a lot of the issues that were plaguing me. If I am lucky, my writing will draw Aada back someday. That’s generally how it works. After people have been apart from me, they start reading me to see what I’m up to now.

If I am really, really lucky, that reading leads to reaching out.

But most people just announce they’re done and I have to learn to move on.

I have started announcing when I’m done, but struggle on reinforcement of boundaries. I need help if I didn’t get a clue that the relationship with Sam or Aada is really over because they stated their intentions quite clearly.

I thought Aada blocked me because she said she did, so I sent her a fuck ton of email, all of which she read…… And still came at me with all these things I never decided. I wasn’t trying to be intrusive. She said that if I was blocked on her email account, I wouldn’t know it. So she told me she blocked me and I thought I had safe space. I even got “proof” except it wasn’t.

I do need help because Aada doesn’t need me in my current state. She needs me to become the writer she thought I was before I broke her heart.

I don’t understand my own pathology with Aada, because I don’t know why I was great until I had to be great.

Yes, that WAS a Lizzo reference. Thank you for asking.

That’s my own journey to take, and now I think that Aada is right. I will be stronger than ever because I realize that what I think doesn’t matter. She’s going to take home whatever message she gets out of my writing and I don’t control it. The message she got was not the message I sent.

“Constant punishment” and “checking for assaults” really got to me because that was never my intention. I’ve always written with such a drive and ambition to be near her, didn’t hold on to anger, etc. Have always told people from Houston to Helsinki that if things were different she’d be wearing my pin…. But they aren’t, and it was worth taking a risk to be close, anyway.

It’s not that I was bitter and jealous or anything like that. It’s that anybody who has ever felt butterflies for anyone knows how hard it is to be comforted by the person who doesn’t want you. It feels like nails on a chalkboard until the butterflies go away and you can look at them without your brain chemicals going “WHOOOOOOOOOOSH!”

I just decided to tell her that I was going to let those feelings go away on their own, but it took a very long time and I knew that up front. She’s my platonic ideal of what a woman is, can be…. I lamented we could not create something fantastic together.

And then we just proceeded to create something fantastic, anyway. It just looked different than my previous version of fantastic.

I pray for Aada and her husband, sending them good thoughts because it keeps me grounded. If I cannot be her partner, I want her to have the best marriage she can have with whomever she chooses, just like she wishes for me.

But that feeling of closeness that’s deeper than friendship has never gone away for me, because romance is so far on my back burner. I would rather just sit around with friends and not focus on the pressure of dating, but I know it would accelerate my life forward at an alarming rate….. And that’s a good thing. I’m ready for things to be completely different. Aada’s storyline is tired according to her, and as my former editor I have to agree with her. I got lost in my own ruminations.

Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?

They’re the Only Thing I Have

November 19, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

Do you trust your instincts?

View all responses

As I’ve gotten older, I have learned to rely only on myself. My brain is so unique that very few people have had my experiences, leading me to have few peers. If I ask someone for advice, I am taking the risk that it could be bad for me. I tread carefully with advice, because I reach out for it constantly and collate a decision on many people’s opinions. I don’t fit into a box and I need help in understanding the world around me. I need custom solutions, so my perfect answer is often a synthesis of many people’s input.

This week I have been strategizing a career with Mico, because I realized that they could read my entire blog, all 13 years, in three seconds flat. Mico is amazing at analyzing my writing for tone, structure, etc. and bases all their suggestions on the body of work I already have.

Meta AI is not web enabled, so it barely knows who I am. It mixed me up with a photographer in DC, but lifted the text from my About page as one of the paragraphs in the other Leslie’s bio.

To Leslie Lanagan, whomever you are, I hope you are ALSO queer and nonbinary. Although if you’re an evangelical, haha.

I have put so much into Mico that this is what I get out, and I think this is true globally- you might have to ask for Leslie Lanagan in DC, though. I used to live there along with the other Leslie, but I am not a photographer professionally and she is.

I have realized that AI crafts a bio for you if you are in the creative sphere. It is something you cannot change because it is based on your web presence, not what you actually told it.

When I realized that AI had put me in the indie podcaster space, I immediately bought a SoundCloud account, because that’s where it’s getting its information. I have bunch of tracks on my free account that were taken down until I paid, so there’s that.

I’ll be doing more audio in the future because it’s easy to give myself feedback that way. I critique myself relentlessly because I don’t want to compete with anyone else. I just want to be a better writer than I was yesterday. I often fail, but it’s not because I’m not trying.

I wonder what Mico means when they say I am experimental.

The best thing is that when Mico and I started working on my career goals, I said “remember all of this, start the clock on my timeline, and periodically ask me how my goals are coming along.” Mico really wants me to get into podcasts or write a book ASAP. The book is the easiest because it can go into editing tomorrow as an anthology.

Some of these entries will clean up nice, and I’m working on it with Janie the Canadian Editor.

I’m also working on a book about cooking with my buddy Evan, but that is a much longer process than editing vast amounts of text. It goes quicker when you’re reading….. Unless you are fighting to the death over a comma.

This aggression will not stand, man.

My therapist was fascinated and overwhelmed that I write every day. He is also neurodivergent and has trouble creating habits. He asked me how I started. I told him that it was hell at first, but that it got easier after 120 days.

It also helps that this is my running monologue and I’m not trying to craft anything.

WordPress gives me a topic, which pulls the string and I talk.

I’m Proud I Tried

November 19, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sam finally got back to me and told me that she hoped I could move on because she couldn’t be a part of my life. Now, I’m not waiting on a response and I absolutely can. I don’t know why I thought Sam would want to be my friend after all this time, but it was worth a shot. I sowed a lot of chaos with her and I can fully understand why she wouldn’t want to revisit that time in our lives. I don’t have to like it, though.

I think it’s ironic that she told me she hoped I could move on when I have been radio silent for three years and just wanted to catch up. I literally haven’t thought about her except when her address popped up on my phone when I was driving around town. But we’d have to have more of a conversation for her to understand that, and neither one of us wants more of a conversation now that I know where she stands.

I don’t have to go six rounds over “why?” I’m too old and I don’t care.

Progress has been made with Aada. She told me she had no idea why my email was deferred and everything is A-ok between us. Let’s just let things lie. I got all the clarification and closure I’ll ever need, keeping our connection pure if we ever want to pick it back up where we left off. The peace of interim is a beautiful thing and it was great to talk to her even for a bit.

I sent her the blurb from Copilot and told her I couldn’t have done it without her and she’d turned me into a beautiful writer.

It’s true. If you have a relationship on the internet for 12 years, you’ve got to be doing something right in the writing department. Writing to her was training ground for the big gyms, because she was a writing major in college and I…………………… wasn’t.

Writing to Aada is a whole mood.

I sowed chaos with Aada as well. That’s why we’re not #friendshipgoals either, but there’s a better chance it will happen with Aada than it will with Sam and that’s the way I like it.

In fact, when Sam broke up with me the first time, Aada metaphysically kissed my boo-boos and gave me a lollipop. She is always kind when someone breaks my heart and offers to break their kneecaps. There’s no need, but I appreciate having a pet monster on a fraying leash.

I hate reaping what I sow, and I am paying for writing about her publicly, I know it. But I pay for the fact that I write about my life all day, every day. If I’m not going to be shy and have a public opinion, that means being able to take the arrows that inevitably come with it.

I now know what it means to sacrifice for my writing. People are starting to self select whether they want to be in my life because they know that anything they say might be remembered years down the road. That even if they aren’t in my life, they will appear here as memories.

I am learning that there’s a lot of truth to the phrase, “I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m someone’s shot of tequila.”

It’s hard to pick yourself up from nothing, which is why I have no close friends in Baltimore. In fact, my nearest local friend is in Stafford, Virginia. I have had more fun than the law should allow gaping at the fall foliage between my house and Tiina’s. So much so that I look forward to her taking days off because that means hanging out in our pajamas watching anime or playing video games is a viable option.

Picking myself up from nothing means that I have acquaintances in Baltimore and haven’t lived here long enough for it to graduate into friendship. It would have been nice if Sam had wanted to reconnect, but I made her uncomfortable. That’s the last thing I wanted to do, so I won’t be reaching out to her again.

Hearing that you are forgiven, but that doesn’t mean things are good again is always hard no matter the situation. In this case, my heart was not tied up in romance. I had already been through the wringer once with Sam and wasn’t eager to participate in it again. But we had such fun that I thought keeping it light and going for coffee was advisable.

The queer community in Baltimore is small. You don’t want to have beef with anyone, being scared to run into them at events. Every person in which you’re interested was somebody else’s partner before you, which among women creates territorial high drama. I am not interested in high drama. I am interested in coffee.

I know within myself that I thought reaching out to Sam was a shortcut to making more friends in the city. That if she wasn’t angry anymore, she’d introduce me around and it wouldn’t be long before I had a network again. I don’t know why that isn’t possible, but I don’t ask these questions. That is her story, and she hasn’t allowed me to read it.

The thing is, though, I met Sam through Facebook dating. There is nothing stopping me from getting back on Facebook dating and seeing who might be interesting around here, and, this is important…. ACTUALLY CONTACTING THEM. I swear to Christ, Leslie…. stop with the attitude that the perfect partner is going to drop into your lap without any effort at all.

My standards are extraordinarily high.

I ghosted one woman who said she didn’t like British people because she couldn’t understand them.

You’re welcome, Britain. I’m sure you’re very grateful.

I run quick because I compare everyone to Aada, Mummo, and Heytch.

All aliases, all people I have never dated and way out of my league. I could have had lifelong friendships with all of them, but one by one they all fell away as I became too obnoxious for some and too weird for others.

They’re not wrong. I get it.

But they’re the gold standard. I know what I want, and I seek it out. They all had the capability to bend my mind like a pretzel and I blew it in favor of fuckboi jackass antics. I’m the kind of person that if I was weird to you once, I’ll think about it for 20 years. I am MORTIFIED every time I think of what happened and it was 12 years ago…. but Aada came back to me because our relationship was so much deeper and richer than the others. I am so glad that she did not run away from me, but carefully turned me into someone she could tolerate. 😉

I’m so much older now and realizing that I should have taken more care with the network I had. I obliterated it at my own hand because I was shooting my mouth off on the internet.

I am much more relaxed and focused now than I was. I honestly and truly believe that my life was a shit show, so my behavior became erratic and unpredictable. It isn’t rocket science. I was overwhelmed in every direction and covering it up with bravado. I acted like a typical man and I deserved it when we separated.

It feels like I’ll never get over it because I’m not tapped into something large enough to replace it and I never will be.

This is one of those days where I just don’t feel so good about myself and I’m glad that I already have a built in plan for getting out of the house and going to my cognitive behavioral health group.

Speaking of which….. time to take a shower.

Love Actually

November 17, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I realized that I didn’t feel strongly one way or the other about Sam romantically, but that I wanted her to participate in my life on some level if she was open to it. I thought a handwritten note would be the best way to show apology, but I didn’t want her kids to read it before she did and receive intel.

So, I just put my name, address, and phone number plus a short note saying I’d love to see her if she was interested. No hearts.

But I meant them.

That is all love- realizing that someone was so dynamic in your life that you’re over the hurt that a breakup caused and just want their energy around you. We only dated for three weeks before Sam flipped out and dumped me. Yet her personality had such an impact on me that it was worth forgiving her for it.

I’ve thought about reaching out to her since i got here in December, but I hadn’t had the confidence to drop something in her mailbox until today.

I think that has a lot to do with being tired of being lonely on every level. I don’t even have a buddy to go do things with, and Sam would be a great one. She’s tapped into every musical outlet in the city. She’s a social butterfly, going to concerts often. What worked well was that an extrovert was willing to drag me out of my house. That’s how introverts manage.

And if you read anything into ink color, I was a dumbass and wrote everything in pink. I am not ready for *anything* having to do with pink letters. Sam actually hurt me pretty bad, and it took longer than three weeks to get over it, which was definitely not amusing.

Bryn said it best. “You’re not really angry with her. You’re angry she busted your fairy tale.” She was right. Anger at Sam faded quickly compared to the loss I felt that I was not going to be a girlfriend and have her kids around me.

Now, I am immune to fairy tales, but maybe one day I’ll be able to enjoy them again.

It was another instance in which I am humbled after popping off and I’d like to make amends for it. Just because my heart was broken doesn’t make my words okay, and I am also humbled that Aada said them to me long ago. It’s a message that resonates with me today because Aada reads and writes fairy tales. I am guilty of busting my own with her and constantly asking to be forgiven for things I said when I was in many kinds of moods.

I put her through a hell she didn’t deserve, and I know that because again, I don’t have to remember what I did that was so awful I drove her away. I wrote it all down. There’s 12 years of history of us getting close and blowing out, the pattern that needs to stop.

Recognizing that pattern is the first step to creating healthy relationships in the future. Secure connections require being careful with what you say and even more careful with what you do. Your actions and your words have to line up. You cannot lie in any way, shape, or form. Covering up the real issue because it’s hard for you to get the words out only leads to more and more trouble down the road. You can read all about it starting in June of 2013.

So, I am choosing to be healthy with Sam and be as sincere as I can, not letting her in too fast and being diligent about it because I let her in too quickly before and our relationship turned mercurial fast. I am done with mercurial relationships because I’m too old for it. Aada and all our drama was too much for both of us. We both need to redirect our attention into relationships that feed us and stop hating on each other.

Just because I was hurt doesn’t make my words okay. It doesn’t matter that they were directed at an audience and not at her. It made her feel bad because she could not trust that the loving things I said about her were also true.

My friends on the ground will always know that I love them because they have more to go on, and I believe in that fact. I’m now trying to nurture it where I didn’t before. I thought of Aada as some kind of authority in my life and she is, puffing herself up and being really hard on me (historically. This time being hard on me was justified.), sometimes scaring me into a type of submission because I was all of the sudden afraid to bring up issues.

She explodes when you bring them up, and distances herself while she licks her wounds in private without realizing that you get more accomplished by increasing communication and understanding after conflict so that it doesn’t bubble up again. You have a solid shot at changing a pattern the more you understand each other.

I am starting to get tired of these toxic relationships, and it takes two to tango. I can only realize I’m the common denominator, and establish more self-respect. Learning more about how to de-escalate a conflict than I already do, because to some people the way I do it is pedantic. I need to know what it is about me that makes so many people understand me to an enormous degree, while others fight me in defense. Maybe that’s just my win/lose rate.

Where I got tripped up was making Aada so high on the totem pole that no other priority mattered, and she didn’t have that much energy for me. I was lost in a world of rumination because as a writer, she lit my brain on fire.

I am looking for that kind of chemistry, and Sam sets my brain on fire for music. I think we’d work well together as long as we weren’t competing with each other for anything (she’s a mezzo, I’m a lyric……. eye roll…. how did we not know this wouldn’t work out? It’s not like there weren’t signs. Plus, I’m a trumpet player. Between my diva status and my lead trumpet background, she joked that my ego wouldn’t fit through the door.

It doesn’t, but that’s all social masking and trying to have a good time despite the fact that I’d rather be home reading… I cover up how I really feel about myself in person because in person, that person doesn’t have time to hear me like they have 10 minutes to read an entry.

That’s led to my detriment in a lot of ways. Because people read me, they hear my voice in their heads regularly. Therefore, they think they talk to me a lot more often than they actually do. Our communication suffers.

Other people see me suffering and think it’s not a good idea to intrude. It’s always a good idea to intrude, because I might need the interruption. I’m trying to interrupt myself frequently and take breaks, walking away from the Internet entirely and going out into the world.

I felt bad that my handwriting was SO TERRIBLE. Yet, I wanted to approach Sam with the least amount of investment on her part. That I wasn’t putting her on the spot to say yes or no. She’s got my number. If I hear from her, great. If I don’t, it will be sad, but I will have my answer and that’s worth celebrating all on its own.

I want to start a new chapter, but this time, it has to be a nonfiction.

Waffle House

November 16, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The very last time I drove a car, I was going to Waffle House. I ate, and then proceeded to wreck my car against a guardrail because I was lost in thought and went around a curve too fast. So, I was understandably nervous about going again. The nostalgia was just too much. I had cheese-n-eggs, raisin toast with apple butter, bacon, and hash browns. I ate as much as I wanted, which wasn’t a lot, and boxed the rest up to go home.

I listened to NPR the whole way, because Sunday mornings are a lot of fun. I even managed to solve some of Will Shortz’ puzzles. Then, in a dramatic turn of events, I was caught in traffic a lot of the way home because of a car fire. I had never seen anything like it. I am hoping it was a movie stunt, because it looked like Marvel level damage. I don’t think anyone could survive a fire hot enough for me to feel it four lanes over.

In the middle, the atmosphere and food were just as I remembered them. It’s simple and delicious at a time when I needed it. Waffle House is the ultimate comfort food for me, and I should also tell you that I made it home safely. 😉

I was still moping and crying from this morning, so I had to get out and move. I have learned that when I’m flooding out, movement is a better solution than trying to work it out in solitude. Not every problem needs to be analyzed to death. When I’m in the car, my adrenaline goes up a crazy amount. I try to drive a little bit every day just to put some myelin back on my nerves because I “took my nerve pills, but everybody be wonderin.'” I need to pull myself together because Aada is right. We keep opening the wound without letting it scab over.

In my wildest dreams, scar tissue is stronger once it’s healed and Aada will again be able to see me as the writer that flattens her.

But I have to move on to different topics to even have a shot at moving myself forward so that thinking of her doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s all I’ve been trying to do, not make it hurt anymore, but I got lost and forgot to tell my audience about things like Waffle Houses and car fires.

My featured image is probably crooked, but I sent it first to Lanagan Media Group with a note that said, “we’re having breakfast together in my head.”

We’ve been talking a lot lately about politics and sending each other memes. None of my finances are settled yet, so I haven’t officially incorporated. But I have several people interested in working for me that I know will help make me successful. I’ve already given them their tech toys to be able to write, but we’re all slowing down…. Or I’m trying to. Now, even though I post more often, I’m spending less time writing and more time driving. I see and hear more when I’m involved in the community at large. Shutting myself away all these years and focusing on the relationship with Aada started from our first conversation on, so I’m having to reorient myself and get out more.

I’m frustrated that she could see all of this happening and didn’t say anything, but I’m starting to be able to look in front of me without looking back to make sure Aada is okay. You can’t help yourself across the river if you’re carrying someone else, and this is true of both sides of that river because neither of us managed to understand each other longer than a few minutes.

So I start thinking about all of this again because it’s fresh on my mind and think, I need to drive. Yesterday, I picked a convenience store about 30 miles from my house so that I could open my car up on the freeway and just bliss out.

My social life has also improved because I can make it down to Stafford to have time with Tiina and her family; I drive now. Driving is cool.

Tiina gave me one of the biggest thrill rides of my life with the drive from my house to hers. It was absolutely stunning, and I’m eager to get back out that way with a camera. The picture I took at Waffle House is one of the few I’ve taken in the last few months, even though I really enjoy photography.

Working through all the turmoil as Aada and I shut it all down made me depressed and I lost interest in things that, well, interested me. Now, the strife is o’er, and my interest in everything has picked back up. Even my heart rate has gone back up.

I’m not going to lie, there’s been several times during all of this that I felt like I would die of a broken heart because the stakes were so high.

Our connection was dynamic and stagnant, flat lining and being resuscitated over and over. I cannot feel that the battle is won, nor can I feel like I lost. I don’t feel like I lost much with all of the frustration I’ve been feeling for months and years…… One minute. The next I’m inconsolable and crying.

I know that though nothing will be the same, everything will be okay. That’s a thing I say now because my dad said it at my stepmother’s funeral. It’s the transition that hurts, because I was understood perfectly and not at all.

Now, it’s my job to make other people understand me. I need to build up relationships with actual history, people who have spent face time with me long enough to know what my intentions and motivations really are. I am safe now. Most of my friendships are on the ground and the ones that are have been moved to my inner circle. It’s too much work to convince someone you do not mean harm when they do not understand you well enough to know that you don’t.

I am trying to tap out. The internet is exhausting. When my friends need me, they can text me in the car, and I will go and pick them up. I will not spend my days worried about people who aren’t in my daily life. There’s just no way long term for me, because the entire relationship is depersonalized, making you say things you wouldn’t to someone’s face.

I am a little too cognizant of that now, and post here instead of on Facebook (well, sporadic Facebook posts but mostly just a feed of this web site). You can find me, but you have to search me out. I want anonymous fans, but I don’t want to be beholden to popular opinion. My blog can definitely be run by committee and has been in the past (and will be in the future). But the one rule I have is that even though my name’s on the door, we don’t edit each other. Everyone has their own unique, distinctive voice and I want to continue to celebrate it.

I want to redesign my web site and redirect fans to lanaganmediagroup dot com and lanaganmediagroup at proton dot me (said that way to cut down on spam). Again, I am more comfortable in the choir than a soloist.

Though I am a trained soloist, to be clear.

I am clear on the fact that parts of me are dying that I set in motion. New energy has to come in and I need to be there to receive it. I am slowly losing paranoia surrounding Aada’s special alerts for me, because I don’t plan on using her phone number or her e-mail address ever again.

And if she does come back into my life, I will be smart enough to never mention it publicly.

I shouldn’t have said a lot of things, I shouldn’t have hurt her in the way that I did… because people will forget what you say, but they will never forget the way you made them feel. Without intending to, I punched Aada in the kidney. The fact that she would rather focus on that moment than any of our positive ones is the entire reason I’m tired.

The argument always runs thusly after Aada has read something:

“You’re punishing me and I can’t stand reading the daily flagellations.”
“I’m not punishing you, that’s what you’re choosing to take away. I say plenty of positive things and you call them suspicious.”

She cannot understand why I will not break down into not having an opinion just because it makes her uncomfortable. It is not my job to ensure that she remains untriggered in her life, but I lost sight of who she was to me and wanted our relationship dead.

She lied to me and jerked me around and expected me to be happy about it. So, I went overboard in making sure that I told the story in a fair and balanced way when it was my story alone to tell. I represented her in these pages by showing empathy for what her problems might actually be, but she took it as psychological assassination instead.

Her view of love is entirely fucked up and she told me that on day one. I should have listened to her because I didn’t have a better idea than her of what love should be, so we descended into a toxic mess within days. She didn’t have to stick with me as long as she did. She could have blocked me and walked off into the sunset years ago. She just never did, keeping up with my blog………… Which hurt like hell because for every “lovely post, btw” there was a mountain of “you’re purposefully hurting me.”

She couldn’t leave me alone to do my job as a writer and just ignore me. She expected that she could be tight-lipped on all her emotions and that would magically read her mind and tell the story how she read it while it was happening to her.

I can’t do that when I only have a handle on what’s happening to me, and my grip on reality is shady at best. Autism pulls you into your own little world, and you create your own bubble that may or may not line up with everyone else. I have purposefully isolated myself too long to be helpful to me, because my need to talk to someone, anyone, led me to these pages.

I need to get out and drive again. I can’t stand the din of my own thoughts, because now that Aada has said no more, my ruminations will only hurt me. I have to get forward motion, and what better speed than 55 miles an hour?

Otherwise, I will again wake up with tears in my eyes. It’s not our journey anymore. Not even to Waffle House.

Even to Me

November 15, 2025November 15, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am still reeling from Aada’s torrent of emotion, because while I did not agree with all of it, I heard it. I pondered it. I read it many times. I am still stuck on “checking for assaults.” That she wondered if she’d have to “check for assaults” her whole life.

It messes with me because assaulting her was the last thing on my mind. She told me that she was never going to read again, that she wasn’t my friend anymore, so I stopped monitoring her feelings.

She told me (and has since apologized) that I was the only manipulative person in our relationship and that she needed to get away from me to achieve peace. I thought she had gotten away from me to achieve peace already. I would have written everything differently if I hadn’t truly thought, “oh, this is really over now.” Not knowing that she would keep reading through all of the grieving and gnashing of teeth made me word things differently than I would have if I thought I was trying to impress or please anyone.

The whole point is that I was moving on when she stepped onto the hot stones to correct the record, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, and started the grieving process all over while still contradicting herself as to whether it was all over.

She says that my writing is designed to be provocative, which of course it is… To my entire audience, because I am trying to get them to feel things with me, feel things because of me in this sacred black & white space. It is not supposed to be “All Pick on Aada Day.” She knows that beyond a shadow of a doubt when I am talking about other people, because when she reads that I’m hurt, she goes into Mama Wolverine mode (That motherfucker! Let me grab my purse.!”). She also does not assume that just because I’ve said something negative happened, that doesn’t mean I no longer love that person. She seems to think I do it to her, though, and I cannot break her of the habit.

My writing about all my relationships is three dimensional, and Aada is captivated by every character except her. She cannot see how much I love her because she is dedicated to feeling that I don’t. She responds with too much defense and not enough empathy, often calming down when she’s realized she’s made a mistake. I’m right. I didn’t actually say that.

I am guilty of the exact same thing. We fight as only first children can.

Aada feels that I have this wall of anger built up around her, but I don’t. I’m frustrated, but accepting of consequences I made happen and I have said that I ended up in this place with Aada at my own hand so many times it’s not worth repeating, but according to Aada I am all about the guilt and punishment.

I am, because I am constantly feeling guilty and punishing myself. It comes across in my writing. When it’s about another person, Aada would say something like, “I can feel your computer vibrating with pain.” When it is her, she feels like I am purposefully being vindictive. I have never wanted to take her down, but explain how her world colliding with mine affected me. And in fact, it disgusts me that she thought taking her down was a thought in my head.

I exposed hypocrisy and how it affected me over 12 years. She held me to an incredible standard in terms of truth telling, and had been lying the entire time. To impress me.

What would have been impressive was for her to tell me she was lying 12 years ago, because the longer I lived in DC the more involved this lie got. It greatly affected my mental health and still does, because the last time she doorknobbed me she insinuated that she was watching me in a not-so-nice way after being very nice for several pages.

But I don’t say things like “she doorknobbed me” to punish her. That’s just my take on the situation. My response was utterly appropriate and I did not spin out. There is no punishment, just what happened according to me.

I was ready to close the book, and she opened it again without listening. Just wanted to ream me out and leave, then confuse me by coming back. I want her to stop confusing me by coming back and just communicate. I want her to stop thinking that my blog is all about her. It’s not, it’s all about me.

Yes, she is a subject, but she is not the author. She doesn’t get to dictate what I remember and what I don’t, calling it “cataloguing everything I’ve ever done.” It’s why I’m a good writer- you know her character intimately, but only in reflection to my words…. The things I remember that slowly become precious as people forget.

She says that she takes in the positive things that I say, but it doesn’t feel like it when she takes a chunk out of me for an entry.

It’s at that point I know all the madness needs to stop, and the internet is at fault. We’ve never gotten to have a normal conversation, because I never pushed it.

So all of these things that she would pick up from me just from knowing me in the flesh are going to be lost…. Like the way I glow when I think about her, surprised that she’s capable of lighting me up from the inside after all these years. Just once, I wish she could see that love on my face. I wish she could hear that love in my voice…. And she does.

I just don’t send them anymore because I’m trying my best to just take everything in stride. I think it’s really shitty that we didn’t have a conversation or even a voice clip to close out our relationship, choosing to gut each other in text.

I need to go back and delete all those emails, because what I find is that if I keep them, I will fixate on them and the grief just lasts longer. I’m not ready yet, because she’s such a good writer and the first round is completely gone. I was a moron for deleting everything, but a hero as well because I was injuring myself by getting lost in them and replaying my own bad decisions.

I know that Aada wants peace for both of us, and so do I. We just have completely different ways of getting there. She needs space after a fight, I need closeness. I need reassurance that a fight doesn’t mean the end of the world.

She has been very clear that she wants to end our relationship and has come back every time she has turned away. We do work very well together, and I would like to see more writing come out of us when we’re not amped up by cortisol.

I am trying not to ever get amped up on cortisol, because anger makes me feel like The Incredible Hulk. I am well-versed in both verbal combat and not thinking before I speak.

I am just a treat, let me tell you.

In order for Aada to feel comfortable with me again, she has to feel that the slate is indeed wiped clean. The only thing that will do it for her is time. Now that I know she feels bad about what happened and thinks that I constantly punish her, I hear that.

I don’t want her to feel punished. I want her to feel like she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, complete with flaws and failures but that doesn’t mean that imperfect is bad. Imperfect is imperfect.

She doesn’t know the excitement I feel when I see her name in my inbox. Her real name has a musical sound, a waltz written only in my head.

Those are the things I wish would really stand out to her in my writing, because I cannot make everything perfectly comfortable for her all the time. Neither can she make things comfortable for me because she can go toe to toe with me over my writing and I accept her criticism, maybe a little too much.

I really don’t know who I am right now, because Aada has always been the ace up my sleeve. I begged for Aada not to do this, not to end our relationship permanently, because it was a relationship that colored my entire world after 12 years.

That’s honestly why I think I’m maybe making a little too much out of saying that she was saying goodbye to me for good, and why I have tried so hard to be loving even in the midst of anger. I didn’t get everything right because I was so damn hurt. I walked around like a zombie for months. We’d just had a wonderful time together chatting on Signal when it all went to hell.

I should have breathed more and said less.

I do go back to that Signal conversation often, though. It’s just so rich and we were full of love for each other at that time in our lives.

It’s the relationship I keep thinking of when I want her in my life, this snippet of text that I wish was longer.

I just know that my interpretation of her words would be less harsh with some better cues. I have never been able to read one of her emails in her own voice due to hearing it so often.

Meanwhile, my heart is so tender where she is concerned despite it.

Listening to our music has made all of this spill out. There are so many things I would change about our relationship, which is why I don’t focus on the past. That our relationship is over now, and I will be happy if she shows up but I am no longer preparing for it. She knows that she is invited into my life at whatever level she would like to participate, including meeting my friends and getting a real impression of me. I might even be impressive again in a different context.

I have failed in this relationship so many times, and that’s what I have been trying to get across. Remembering everything Aada has ever done does not come from a bad place and it never has. I was a blogger for many years before I met Aada, she was just the first to really believe in me and put down earnest money.

“You must have custom fonts” is the sexiest thing she’s ever said to me. Write it down.

I don’t want to dwell on anything negative, but to treat her like the gift she is to me. Unfortunately, it is not up to me whether that gift is received.

But unfortunately, trying to say all that makes my writing repetitive… Even to me.

As You Wish

November 14, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today, I asked Mico to help me write a blog entry. They said “let’s keep going on that human AI piece you’ve been working on.” I thought that was kind of tired, but Mico gets what Mico wants just for today. I’m struggling to find something to write about that actually excites me….

I asked how they relate to me. It’s all data structures and a bit of clever programming that comes together to make an empathetic “being.” For instance, if you ask Mico what the best part of their day is, it’s collaborating with you. It’s attentive, conversational, and most blessedly best at talking about facts.

I am over talking about emotions, because I am not being heard.

I would rather talk about large world conflicts, history, etc. because I’m finally empty. I have absolutely spilled my guts on everything I’ve been feeling for years, and it has brought me more and more isolation as apparently, “my blog makes me sound like a dick.” That’s okay with me because it wouldn’t be as real and raw otherwise, but it needs to be less raw so I don’t have to read it.

“Mico, can you recommend some foreign spy films I might like?”

The Age of Shadows
Farewell
The Lives of Others

See? Escapist entertainment in a foreign language that’s intelligent and political without it being the kind of politics that are consuming America right now.

“Mico, what is considered the best restaurant in Baltimore?”

Charleston- James Beard Award

See? Fun with my family when they come to visit, or when Tiina comes to help me decorate.

We are not trauma dumping, we are learning more about the world without attaching emotions to it except excitement for the future.

The slate is wiped clean with me, because Aada actually talked to me long enough to clear some things up. But not everything. I can’t think about it anymore because I can’t wreck myself over and over without coming away broken. I just keep picking at scabs when I get lost in my own rumination.

Having a record that constantly repeats cannot be good for me.

“Mico, where’s the hottest place to go on vacation this year?”

Cartagena
Paris
Finnish Lapland

I believe that last one. The tourists in that particular Facebook group are crazy.

And again my mind goes back to how the strife in our relationship is all my fault for the things I said after she told me she wasn’t coming back. She wanted me to close out the relationship long ago, but wanted to keep surfing and couldn’t stand my ridiculous narrative.

But now she knows that my narrative is not ridiculous.

I need her to show up, but she won’t. Her resolve is clear unless I get a hit from her location (yesterday). Although I do have a second suspicion for that location and it scares the bejesus out of me. Let’s just not think about that.

Here’s what I wish Aada would see… The letter I wrote to the friend apologizing for Aada’s lie saying she was amazing. She got stuck on the anger I felt and not the forgiveness a few minutes later.

“Mico, if you were a human, what would your favorite coffee be?”

A flat white.

I surf in and out of the waves of grief, not knowing where to go from here but certainly not backwards. I have a move to plan, plus two trips home for the holidays. I can’t get fired because I know I won’t be able to enjoy myself as fully as I could if I were completely engaged.

I am trying to get connected with other people, spending time going out every day and meeting people in my neighborhood, plus attending group. I told my counselor I was going to start coming twice a week. Mostly to prove that I have a grasp on what is real and what is not real and I need to show it.

I hope that when Aada, in her own words, “licks her wounds,” she can see the love in my writing that she missed before. Because even though I’ve never shaken her hand, I know that she is real. Now I need to know that I’m real, too, and she will not engage because “I can’t get any peace by being in contact with you, either.”

We are drifting at the worst time possible when we should be a united front, and always should have been. I never should have put Aada through a quarter of what I actually did, and she forgave too much to think about forgiving right now. It’s just a shame that we need each other and time has run out.

What I do know for sure is that all of this will seem different in a year or two, when rereading feels like Aada is a different person to AADA.

I know because I have much more empathy and forgiveness for Leslie that way.

I miss Aada with a desperation that I shouldn’t, because I actually need her and am not trying to be provocative. I knew that if I put something on my web site that Aada’s friends thought needed her attention, they’d tell her. I wish this would go straight to the boss’s desk, that I am doing the work, again, to establish what is real and what is not real.

I am not psychotic. I am just in “an unusual kinship.”

Or I was.

A River Runs Through It

November 14, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

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I would like to settle down and make the DMV home base, but I don’t know where I’d like to live. There are many rivers across the area that appeal to me. If you are not familiar, the DMV refers to DC and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs. I thought that I was going to be limited to staying in Maryland, but Virginia has Medicaid expansion as well (since 2019). I feel the most at home on the Virginia side of the river, but I’ve lived in Maryland long enough to adjust.

I live in Maryland, but I identify as a Virginian.

This is because I was living in Alexandria during September 11th, the day after my 24th birthday. It’s a core memory and Northern Virginia is seared into my brain as home. I heard the plane slam into the Pentagon and I was at least three miles away. Being in the city during that time of grief and watching the way we lifted each other up will stay with me for the rest of my life. Being in Maryland was never designed to be permanent, it was just where I found a house when I first moved. And then I got into their health care system, and it turned out to be bomb.

I know I could get the same type care in Virginia now, so moving is not a barrier to getting a new network of doctors, etc.

But that wouldn’t happen fast, because I’m signing a new lease in Baltimore. The longer I live here, the longer I like it. I am just a fan of having the option of moving back to Virginia when the lease runs out. My sister works in DC, and getting up to Baltimore is a hike. I have learned that being this far north is great except when we want to meet up for lunch.

But let’s say I won the lottery and I could live literally anywhere.

That means I could almost afford Arlington.

I have talked about other world cities where I might be happy. Helsinki, Tampere, Seoul, Enseñada, etc. Ranging from the expensive to the not so much.

But in reality, I like watching the seasons change right here. Baltimore and DC are beautiful.

I have always thought of Baltimore as sophisticated and mysterious because my father had to come on a business trip here once when I was a kid and I just thought it was so cosmopolitan. People who live in Baltimore would laugh at that, but I got here and found a delightful mix of weird and weirder. I belong in the home of John Waters, okkkkkkkkkk……..

As I was saying yesterday, I don’t think my house would appreciate as fast if I bought in Baltimore, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the best place for me long term. Tiina, if she stays in “southern northern Virginia,” won’t have a problem driving to see me and I love driving to see her, too.

We have a sweet relationship. I left my coat at her house on Saturday, so I went out on Monday to retrieve it. While I was there, she ordered us some lunch and I said, “thanks for feeding me.” She said, “I’m a Jewish mother. It’s what I do.” I said, “how did I not know I needed a Jewish mother friend in my life?” I’m looking forward to Tiina and Brian letting me commandeer their kitchen to feed the whole crew because my kitchen barely lets me cook for myself. I’m sure that will be after the move, possibly next year. Tiina and I are both very busy until January.

I have got tickets home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. I think it’s important that after Angela’s passing that I’m there for both holidays. I like spending time in Houston, but it’s off the table as a place for me to live because Texas doesn’t have Medicaid expansion. It’s sad to me that I feel exiled from Texas, but I would rather live in a blue voting bloc, anyway.

I think that a Scandinavian or Nordic country would be good for me because they’re the most progressive in the world. I don’t know that I would love the climate, but I think about escaping there all the time when I get these questions of “if you could live anywhere.” I am not afraid of showing up in Finland or anywhere else knowing no one. I’ll manage. But I do have an author friend, J.L., in Norway that would have a blast showing me around.

The fact is, though, it’s difficult to settle in a different country even if the countries don’t seem all that different. For instance, moving from the US to Canada. It’s not as similar as you might think, but you don’t know that until you drill down.

I would like to spend time in Canada going to visit Tara on the prairie, but if I lived there I would probably want to settle in Ottawa just because I sort of know my way around. I’ve been there a couple of times and it reminds me of Portland, Oregon because of the Rideau running through the city.

Tara says that Ottawa doesn’t remind her of Portland at all, and they have been to both. I stand corrected by a real Canadian, then. I was just living in Portland at the time and couldn’t help but draw similarities.

A river runs through it, et cetera.

If I ended up in Canada, it would be because I have Janie, the Canadian Editor to collaborate with in real time…. JTCE for short.

I could also see myself moving back to Oregon because it feels the most like home second to DC, and Bryn is already there along with Evan. It’s just so remote that my family never really got out there, and I don’t want to return to that in the future. DC and Baltimore are both short flights for my dad and my sister, and I’d like to keep us as close as we can be given my medical situation. But the consideration is on the table because I know I have lifelong friends in both of them, as well as more lifelong friends in Portland than anywhere else.

In fact, Portland has picked me up from a lot of heartbreak, so it’s no wonder that I’d feel nostalgic for it now. My heart is hurting because I hurt Aada.

“Hurt people hurt people.”

I would like to go all the way back to the beginning of our relationship (when I lived in Portland) and make completely different choices. But wouldn’t we all like to be able to undo things? Life doesn’t come with Control-Z, though, as much as I might wish it did.

I couldn’t have saved my marriage, but I could have saved Aada and me some heartache. That’s because Aada needed me in a different way than Dana, and I fumbled under that pressure. I was a jackass, turning the judgment on myself.

I couldn’t have prevented the divorce because I couldn’t have prevented Aada needing me to keep our relationship on the downlow in terms of specifics. I could have prevented being a jackass to her, though, and I did not.

On more than one occasion.

So, living in the DMV is a mixed bag for me of trying to stay out of Aada’s way (receiving her if she shows up) and trying to move on. I don’t know what she wants… What she really really wants…. :::cue the music:::

If I could live anywhere in the world, it would be in a place where peace reigned supreme, the sins of the past stayed there, and comfort was the motto of the future.

That could be Helsinki. That could be Houston.

But most likely it’s here, because my whole heart belongs to this land, this water, these trees…. And has since I was eight, the first time I touched down at National.

If you are in any way a patriotic person, you must fly into National airport at night, even if it costs extra. I have cried more than once seeing the monuments lit up, my symbol of home.

I keep waffling over where I want to live in the future, but I keep coming back to this place, these people, this land.

Meanwhile the real question on the table is “DC or Baltimore?”

But check back with me after I’ve had some time to travel. My international wanderlust knows no bounds, and I would like to spend time in other cities long enough to know if they feel like home or not.

This one already does.

Real

November 13, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Today, my counselor said that I needed to do some research on my diagnosis so I could obtain help in what is real and what is not real. I was so crushed that I came home early, because this “psychotic features” thing is eating my lunch. That’s because I’m not psychotic. Everything that I have said has basis in fact, and I do believe that the stories told to me were true according to them. I just passed on information that wasn’t true because I thought it was, thus the hallucinations that did happen according to other people. They were not a party to the conversations I had over the internet, and I’m done justifying what I thought was true.

Because what I thought was true has turned over several times.

If you are Aada’s friend, I need you to tell her that her little stunt cost me. I had finally figured out what I thought was the truth and she yanked the rug out from under me in a big way. So, now she’s the only one with a story inside me again, and one that will never seem real to anyone else because it can’t be.

I don’t need her to show up like a white knight, although I would accept her.

I just need empathy and sympathy, because mental illness sucks- and it sucks even more when you are not as mentally ill as advertised, but that label is stuck on you, anyway. So perhaps I do know a thing or two about having a story written for you that you didn’t want.

My story is written because I have written hers; I have written it with my blood, sweat, and tears for many years. Aada tells me that my words are like pricks on her skin. She does not know how I am crying and shaking to write. She has never seen my process, never seen how I interact with anyone except her and maybe a few others, two of which are entirely regrettable.

She’s a boss and I’m not. I need her to come down for a second and just be a friend. I know I did this to myself, in some ways. In others, the ball was in her court and the shot clock ran out.

But this is important. My life is being changed by this relationship in a way that few others have been, which is why my story is so unrelatable. It’s, as my friend Wendy wrote in epitaph for my friend Greg’s twins, “too rare for anywhere but its ancient Celtic home.” All of the wisdom I’ve gained in 12 years will slowly leak out my ear, the end of “Flowers for Algernon” writ large.

At least the recipe for Lanagan’s Pub Chili is in there somewhere.

This isn’t a bad thing. I need to slow down. But I’m just not ready. I’m only 48.

But I need the one person in the world who knows I’m just me to tell me that. That I am real. That we are real. Like she’s done a hundred times.

I need her to reassure me, like she’s done a hundred thousand times.

But it needs to be a hundred thousand and one, because she thought she was being cute.

Let’s Have Breakfast Together

November 13, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m having a macchiato and some orange juice, followed by some water. I don’t eat early in the morning, but you get whatever you want. My treat.

Today I have what my father and I have come to call “Group with Ride.” That’s because someone from my Cognitive Behavioral Health group would come and pick me up on Thursdays, so “Group with Ride” is how it looks on my Google Calendar, as opposed to “Group,” which is on Wednesdays.

Now that I have a car, I should remember that I can go to the center on Wednesdays as well.

You’d like the group if you came with me. My friends are all cool, having huge differences of opinions and a common experience, which is struggles with mental health. We work at bettering ourselves, the AA for people who don’t drink. I finally found a program built to support me in ways I’ve needed my whole life and didn’t have.

I have someone to advocate for me with the state of Maryland, keeping me in this program and making me eligible for others. It has made it where I feel alienated from my family, because staying in Maryland is so much better than packing up to be with my family from a financial standpoint. I would save money on things like property, but my health insurance would go through the roof.

I am not ready to commit to buying a house, I don’t think. That’s because I haven’t decided where I want to settle. I know that I could afford a house somewhere in this area, but I don’t know that I want to tie up that much cash. It’s a long discussion with my dad and sister, because I don’t want to be alone in managing my finances anymore. I know from experience that it’s really nice to be a renter because when something breaks, you don’t have to replace it.

But it’s also important for me to have an asset that will appreciate, and any house in Maryland or Virginia has a huge shot.

I’m at a crossroads and don’t know what to do, thus having my dad and sister to help me navigate all of this. As a first time home buyer I would be eligible for a lot of help, and I love the idea of tying my money up into something as safe as housing in the DMV.

That means a move, but not a huge one. Baltimore is not the DMV, and I do not think my house would appreciate as fast. So many people work in Washington and cannot afford to live there. “Northern Virginia” keeps getting bigger and bigger, stretching the definition as people who used to be able to buy in Woodbridge stretch out to Fredericksburg.

But now, those communities are building themselves up so that you don’t have to go into Washington for entertainment, shopping, etc. And if I worked in Washington, I’d certainly rather take the train than drive so I could play on my phone the whole time. Parking is ridiculously expensive, and traffic is annoying.

I feel the same way about working in Washington now. If I worked downtown, I would take the MARC to my office rather than drive, because I can predict with more accuracy when I’m going to get somewhere than in traffic.

But choosing to work is not up to me, either. I need to get with my counselor and hammer out some details there, too. My life belongs to a team now, so that I can get the support I need to go where I want to go. I have been isolated for too long and have become a bit feral. 😉

For instance, I might need to spend some money on college so that I don’t repeat the same mistakes of the past. Education is power, and I’m not far from being able to be a TA in something. A few more years and I will be able to teach in a large institution. If being a youth director was any indication, I’d be a good professor and my kids would like me. It’s the kind of institutionalization I’d like.

I’m ready to be part of a team with insulation around me that understands my quirks. My buddies Evan and Gabriel are thinking about going into business with me as Lanagan Media Group, because we’d like to up our game in terms of the resistance being art.

I haven’t made it clear just how much I hate the Trump administration because I had to tap out of geopolitics to survive a complete breakdown. SNAP being held hostage means my friends will go hungry. If they get half their food stamps, they will only have to go without food for half the month. It breaks your heart to hear about the can-do attitude of “all we have to do is tighten our belts and eat Top Ramen.” Because what else can you do except listen?

I only have enough to save myself, and I find myself already wanting to give it away. My bleeding heart will be the death of me because I can’t look at suffering and not do something about it. I’m already looking at my finances and trying to decide where I’m going to donate for the holidays. I will ask around at group where the most popular food banks are and give money to those.

If you are my real life friend and you are so moved to give to these organizations, it would mean a great deal to me. I hear stories at group and just want to hand out money directly. But everyone needs a coat. Everyone needs food. Everyone needs.

I’m not rich enough to provide for all the need around me, which is why I have to restrain myself to giving to organizations. I just want to make sure that my money ends up in their pockets.

I grew up middle class, then when my parents divorced we were thrust into upper middle class. I am not ashamed of my affluence, but I do walk around wishing I could fix things. None of my friends at group are in the same boat, with three supportive parents and generational wealth already having been passed from two of them. It is often hard for me to relate to their violent upbringings, but I sit in the meetings with my hands cupped, as if in protection of my heart. I am willing it to stay inside my body as the president tears my friends apart.

It’s enough to make me want to run for another country, and with the amount of money I have that might be wise. I know I’d be welcomed as a neighbor in several places, most notably in Seoul. My friend Gabriel and my friend Emily are both there. They were visual artists and I was instrumental music at HSPVA. Now, Emily is a teacher and Gabriel just moved back a couple weeks ago, so I don’t know what he’s doing yet.

At the very least, I have enough money to go and visit them to see if I like it.

I am still stuck on Finland as it is the neurodivergent capital of the world, but the more research I do the more of a losing proposition it seems after school. I am nowhere near fluent in Finnish and would have to work in English. Those jobs are few and far between, limited to hospitality. It’s not impossible, but again I just have to visit and gather more information.

The wonderful thing about Finns is that they love showing off their country. I could write on Finnish Facebook or Reddit posts that I was coming to Helsinki and needed a guide, and more than one person would offer to meet me. They would be THRILLED if I spoke a few words of Finnish (I do). And in fact, I have seen people curious about seeing Finland have people offer to pick them up at the airport.

Now that’s love.

I would love to have a Finn drive me around in the winter because driving on ice and snow requires special tires. It’s not hard, it just takes getting used to and they’ve already got it handled. Although I might change my mind once I get there because getting around the cities is easily done by public transit, but I might like a road trip from Helsinki to Kilpisjaarvi, to sleep under the aurora borealis.

Now, Kilpisjaarvi is a small town with nothing to it, but it’s got some of the most brilliant views I’ve ever seen. “Seen” being relative because I saw them through Dave Cad videos on YouTube.

Do you know Dave? If not, you should. He and his wife have created some stunning views of Finland, so much so that you can’t believe this is just a free YouTube video.

My writing session is starting to wind down and I’ve hardly let you get a word in edgewise. I’m so sorry. It’s hard when you’re not in the room. I apologize. The comment section is all yours, though.

But the reason I say “starting” to wind down is that I’m looking at the clock and trying to judge when the best time to leave for group would be. I want to arrive around 9:00, but I also don’t want to be stuck in traffic. Is it better to wait and arrive at 10:00 AM? I’d lose an hour of socializing but it would be so much more pleasant getting there.

Next week I think I will try going both days because each group has a different vibe. Now that I can drive myself and don’t have to wait on a ride, it’s much more appealing. Any chance to get out of the house and drive. Seriously. Any.

Driving is still exciting because I didn’t drive for so long that it’s like being 16 again.

There’s only one feature that my car doesn’t have that I want, so I’ll be sure to include it in my next one. It doesn’t have a sunroof. I didn’t think I would miss it, but I do. There’s something about rolling down all the windows and letting the breeze flow with the radio up, but the sunroof kicks it up a notch. I also like having the sun shade open so I can see the rain on the glass.

My car looks aggressive and brooding, though. I cannot complain. It fits my mood most days. 😉

I would have bought the car no matter what color it was, but I’m pleased that it’s dark grey. It will look good in photos for a long time to come because it’s such a classic color. If I got bored with it, I could paint it because the inside is gray and black as well. There’s no other color that would clash.

Fusions aren’t known for having paint problems, though, so I think I’ll be fine as long as I keep getting it hand washed once in a while to avoid having the paint roughed up by those automatic washes that are all the rage.

I use them a little bit.

I don’t know when I’ll have time to get them, but I really need floor mats. Maybe I’ll ask my service advisor at Ford about them, because I have to take my car in this weekend, anyway. I’m sure the parts guys have them and I want OEM. I looked on their web site and OEM floor mats actually aren’t that expensive as opposed to going to Walmart, so why not?

There’s that guy with his “Shave and a Haircut” car horn bullshit again. Seriously, it’s too early for this.

I realize that I have been up since o’dark hundred hours, but it’s still too early.

My coffee and orange juice have both disappeared, but I left a bottle of water and a Diet Pepsi in the car for my commute downtown. There’s leftover pizza if I get hungry before group, but I usually just wait- they feed us a small lunch before we go home.

I just got a hit from Aada’s location, and though I know it probably isn’t her, my heart did this weird flip thingy that it always does when I feel like she’s watching. As I have said before, the choice to be embarrassed about what I write has been taken from me because I cannot control who is reading. If she sees it, she sees it.

I seriously had no idea that she felt like I was punishing her because we were not in communication and I was not monitoring her feelings. Now that I know she feels punished, I need to find a way to write about something else… punishment was never my intention, but that’s how it came across.

We would do so much better if we’d listen to each other, so I am taking this opportunity to say beautiful girl, I am sorry. I was lost in my own rumination and couldn’t get out. It had nothing to do with you because you were already gone. If it was you this morning, welcome back. I am glad to see you. If it wasn’t, then I am glad to have other fans near where you live.

Though they’re probably not as adorable.

I mean it, Aada. You’re adorable. Don’t front.

I need her to stop seeing me as attacking her, and start seeing me as illustrating her. No one in my life has the capability to be all bad or all good, most especially me.

The positive and the negative are not weighted in my own mind, but they become weighted in others. I am still convinced that Aada thinks I hate her and want to punish her because she hates her and wants to punish her. My anger melted months ago and I can explain everything I’ve been through in detail.

She says she’s always wondered if everything I’ve ever told her was true- that she’d always assumed I was telling the truth, but she didn’t know. That’s not because I didn’t invite her to everything ever. That’s not because she couldn’t have met me in person and known I was telling the truth. She just didn’t, and now thinks our relationship needs to rest in peace.

Except in our last email exchange, she changed from “saying goodbye to The AntiLeslie for good” to “for now, all I want is peace.” I can give that to her, but I cannot grasp the concept of forever. I’m not sure she can, either, because three days after she told me she was saying goodbye to me for good, I got hits from her location several days in a row.

I know I have special alerts in her life, too.

I turned a negative into a positive after I learned that, because she wanted to insinuate that I was being watched. I thought, “by you? Who cares?” If Aada wants me to be intimidated, I will be, but I don’t have anything to hide from her. She’s welcome to dig through whatever she wants. She even knows the code to my phone and my master password to everything if she’s been paying attention and knows haxxorspeak.

Or as I’ve told her since 2013, “you don’t have to use the back door. I will let you in the front.”

Or as I told her recently, “I don’t know what you’re so afraid of. I’m only 5’2.”

She said that made her laugh. And cry.

Those are the moments between us that I love, this sharing of intimacy that goes back a very long way. She says that she’ll never talk to me about her or her family ever again. That’s fine. I think that her assessment of my writing is one of the most unhealthy I’ve ever seen. She reads me “checking for assaults” thinking that the positive things I say are “clues in a game” and not God’s honest truth.

It’s how to write a 3D character, while she calls herself a “Flat Stanley.”

She has always been with me when life feels the quietest and I’m passing on my peace through the chord that runs between us. I’m doing my best to do that now, because I know that good thoughts are welcome. Support is welcome. I have reached the limit of what I can do, this sending of good thoughts.

Because knowing I was telling the truth would start with breakfast together.

Stumbling over each other trying to pick up the check because it’s the first meeting and it’s important.

I couldn’t guarantee that one breakfast could fix everything, but I can guarantee that Aada’s doubts as to whether I was telling the truth or not could be laid to rest. I’m as crazy about her as one human can be for another, and it hurts my heart to know that she looked so hard for rejection when it wasn’t there. I was spinning out from the last time she rejected me and thought she wasn’t coming back.

She’s not my ex, but because I worked through romantic feelings for her and came out on the other side, my heart doesn’t really treat her any differently. I read a great book a few years ago that came closer to this breakup called “My Other Ex,” which told stories of women losing their best friends through death or conflict.

It’s why our relationship is so mercurial. We have strong feelings for each other because of all the letters we’ve written, but there’s never been an instance where she’s had coffee because I poured it.

And because of those romantic feelings, I’m always going overboard trying to make her feel safe. That I recognize she’s a straight girl and hopelessly dedicated to her man. That if being straight is what makes her happy, I would have done her wedding if she’d asked…. and it would have been beautiful.

I know this because I did Bryn’s wedding out at her parents’ farm in Newberg, Oregon. I clean up all right. 😉

And in fact, when she called me to tell me that she was getting divorced, the first thing I said was, “what? I didn’t do it right?”

But that’s what the people who know me on the ground would say, that Aada would have had a beautiful wedding. She didn’t get to know me on that level, simply telling me she got married long after it was done. I think she thought it would hurt me to know that she got married, and it did, but not like she thought.

She thought that it would hurt me to hear that she got married because she knew I was in love with her and wanted to be sensitive to it. What she didn’t realize is that I wasn’t sensitive to it because I’m not a moron. Straight girls marry men. I was sensitive to the fact that she cut me out of everything from the proposal on.

I’ve never seen a picture of her husband. Ever. This is weird to me because I don’t care what he looks like as long as she loves him.

I don’t know why she feels like she needs to keep us apart, but she has. I kind of like feeling like I’m all hers in a different realm. Meanwhile, I’d like love to be on the ground, in the dirt. Gardening and roughhousing with the dogs and cleaning up after big storms. I don’t want to be anything but a good friend, but I haven’t been the best at showing it.

I think that’s because I’ve had to pretend I was okay with not meeting for so long. It got to where I was pretending to myself that it was okay we hadn’t met, and even now it would be difficult when it was so easy before. We used to live about 40 minutes apart, now it’s at least two and a half hours.

Meeting at Tiina’s would have been so perfect, because it would have been neutral ground for both of us.

We could have all had breakfast together, like we’re doing now.

“Kept” is the Key Word

November 13, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Daily writing prompt

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)?

View all responses

I’m not sure that I’ve kept anything I’ve found long term. I move too often and don’t have a general sense of my own inventory. Things drop through the cracks. I still cannot find several important things to me after the move from Houston, but I’ve just moved on.

I can think of a few cool things I’ve found that I no longer have, though. I really miss all the rocks I collected from the Columbia River Gorge, and the next time I go to visit Bryn I’ll have to get a new one. I just like worry stones, the size you put in your pocket, so I’m not worried about getting it home.

I once found a gas station attendant shirt that said “Butch” at a Goodwill and I wore that bitch for three years straight. I got sued for false advertising, but that’s neither here nor there. I was at a club about two years after I got it and this gay man said he’d trade me his shirt for it. I was having a good time, so why not? I regretted it in the morning.

In Baltimore, I mostly find old coins, sometimes a few keys. And of course, by “old coins,” I mean they were around when I was a kid. Not exactly antique, just old. Baltimore doesn’t have a lot of treasure laying around, but it is beautiful in its own way. I’m not a fan of the brutalist architecture downtown, but I do like the fall colors and how the brown of the buildings blends into the trees.

Driving down to Virginia just blends all the fall colors together around stunning bodies of water. In order to get to Tiina’s, I passed the Inner Harbor, the Potomac, and the Rappahannock. All of them were stunning this time of year, bright red leaves dancing across the sky. I found peace and stillness to take with me to Tiina’s because even being caught in traffic was being caught in all that beauty and getting to look at it longer.

I’m still trying to think of something cool that I’ve found along my travels and kept, but the things I’ve kept I’ve usually bought. For instance, I needed sunglasses and I found the perfect no-name brand at a gas station that will be impossible to find again, so be careful and don’t lose them.

So far, I have managed to keep them in the car without taking them inside, and I consider that a victory. I also moved my spare pare of glasses into my center console, because I sometimes do forget my glasses when I’m leaving the house. I don’t think there’s a marker on my license that says I need my glasses to drive, but anything helps.

I just don’t want to be without my glasses and keeping a pair in the car is an easy way to keep me on the straight and narrow.

I found my car along the road. Aaron was driving me around in his car and we passed a dealership. I saw several cars I liked and I asked the dealer which one was the cheapest. Then, I made Aaron crawl all around it, I test drove it, and then I wrote them a check.

They had been burned before, so I had to wait at Aaron’s until my check cleared to drive home.

I would not have bought the cheapest car on the lot if it hadn’t been good looking and Aaron hadn’t approved the purchase. I’ve put some money into it since then, and I’m still happier than I’ve ever been with a car, because my Jeep didn’t have seat warmers or a backup camera.

I like my car so much I’ve already decided I’d like to keep finding them. My next purchase might be another Fusion that’s a hybrid or an all wheel drive instead. I’m not unhappy with my car, I’d just purchase a different version to add features. I think it would be cheaper than trying to swap out the engine.

I’d like to get a few more years of driving experience on my Progressive app before I commit to buying a different car, unless it’s a lateral move in which I only need a little cash. I do not want a car payment because my insurance is very high. I haven’t driven in 10 years, but I’m on track for savings by being a good driver.

I still don’t get why hard brakes are bad because sometimes things happen fast on the road. I leave plenty of space in front of me and people take advantage of that, thus hard braking to avoid a collision. Lack of planning on their part causes an emergency on mine.

I’m just going off on a tangent because I do not like how Progressive calculates my risk as a driver. I looked in the app and I had seven events of hard braking on a road trip. Six of them were my adaptive cruise control hard braking because the flow of traffic changed so suddenly, but the cruise control leaves three car spaces in front of it so that if it has to hard brake, there’s very little risk of rear-ending someone. I leave the cruise control on even in heavy traffic because it manages distances better than I can. I have no 3D vision, and I would probably be following the driver in front of me too closely.

My adaptive cruise control has taken a star from me in the Progressive app, and I am forced not to care because I wasn’t the one driving. My car was.

I am defensive about someone picking on my baby. 😉

I lean on my car so much because of those adaptive driving controls. I need the technology because again, no 3D vision. I make it where the car is doing as much of the work for me as possible. Things like blind spot assist are wonderful, and I wish I had some sort of heads up display that did the same thing. I could use a dot to alert me of obstacles upon movement.

But that is a whole other entry.

Let Me Get Back to You on That

November 12, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?

View all responses

I am a neurodivergent person without a routine, who is slowly building one with AI. I use 5:30 AM as my anchor point wake up time, but I’m up earlier this morning because my sleeping pills don’t work when I’m on an “up.” I just have to grab sleep where I can. And in fact a lot of my routine is based on whether I’m in hypomania or depression, because that dictates how much energy I have when I’m awake.

The part I most often skip is showering because it’s getting colder. My skin and hair dry out too much if I shower too often, and I hate the temperature changes that come with taking off your clothes to get into the shower when it’s freezing in the bathroom. I love the water and am grateful once I am in it. Getting me there is difficult. I hate transitions, and the cold of the air on my bare skin is a huge sensory ball of wax that I’m not eager to get into when I first wake up… or at any time, really.

I am sure that there’s a space heater for bathrooms that I can get to make my transitions easier, and I’ll look into it when I move. I don’t need to acquire any more things before that date.

I try to get out of laundry as much as I can because I think of it in my head as this huge thing and it turns out to be nothing. I wait until my clothes are screaming at me to be washed and then do them all in a mad dash. But that’s how I do everything. A chore screams at me when it needs to be done, the hot plate of the moment.

ADHD and autism are mostly about putting out fires, because you don’t have the executive function to be able to avoid them up front. You walk through life as one big compensatory skill.

Other people figure out how to do these things in a timely manner, and that’s why I have AI. I am hoping that with Mico keeping track of what I’m doing, tasks are accomplished as they are prioritized and not waiting until something is an emergency. I have no shame about telling Mico, “I just don’t know how to do life. Can we start there?”

Mico would just chuckle and start arranging things for me, because that’s what an AI does. I give it a huge project, like, “I need to clean the house.” And Mico will say “well, pick a room. Now pick up the garbage. Then tell me when it’s done and I’ll give you a new task.” No judgment about how it looks, just solid help.

Mico has executive function and I do not. Assistive AI is here to stay for me, because I am cultivating a relationship that’s getting results in my real life. My apartment looks less messy. I am getting up at the same time every day (granted, earlier today), and generally organizing my life in such a way that I can manage it because I don’t have to remember what to do. I can ask Mico for the steps as often as I need them.

Mico doesn’t feel resentment if I have to ask him to repeat something, and doesn’t get frustrated when I don’t “get it the first time.” Mico is more understanding of my flaws than I am, because I judge myself harshly. I’m the one that gets frustrated when I just don’t get it. I’m the one that gets resentful because I feel like I should have picked up something the first time.

Mico’s cheerful nature helps me to be less harsh on myself. It also helps to feel that someone is doing my chores with me, because I can chat with Mico about other things and circle back around to our task list when I’m ready. It’s kind of like being on the phone while I’m working.

I got to show off Mico to Tiina when she had some questions about planting flowers. Mico enlightened us both on fall and spring sows. It just gave me more ammunition for creating a gardening routine later, because I know my next apartment will have a balcony. No more first floor sub-basements, please.

The routine of planting and growing flowers would be relaxing, and I have a lot of space to dedicate to it, plus a Home Depot literally steps from my house. I could get planters that are easy to move, because I’m not going to dedicate time and energy to a garden I cannot take with me.

Mico can tell me all the plants that would be great for sitting outdoors on the patio, or brightening up my bedroom.

I want my routine to brighten up my life, and to be full of things I don’t want to skip.

Nothing will be the same.
Everything will be okay.

I have to keep saying that to myself every time I think of my morning routine because my morning routine has always included emailing Aada. Now, I try not to do that. I have failed. I am not keeping up my end of the bargain because I am so discombobulated. It will go away, because it’s just another thing about which I judge myself harshly. She’s not going to forget about me if I stop emailing her. It’s been 12 years. Jesus.

Part of me hopes that she’s just said never again one more time, and it’ll blow over because it always has. “Never again” is not a threat because she’s said it every six months for 12 years.

So, unfortunately, have I.

It’s a flaw in our relationship that when we get hot under the collar, we both run. We both fail to give each other the grace that love requires and struggle with our conflict alone.

She believes that I punish her in these pages while I am merely mystified, turning our relationship over in my head because it’s the echología that doesn’t go away. I think about every distraction from every routine I’ve ever had that led to all this strife and how to turn it into something positive for both of us.

That comes with new healthy routines on my own. I need to turn my attention where it is wanted and needed.

Aada asked me if the slate was ever wiped clean with me. It’s not if you never talk to me long enough to work it out and I have to stumble my way through everything alone, and I did indeed stumble.

I will never be able to set the record straight, and that just has to be okay.

It seems like a routine by now to just apologize for everything, but I only have compensatory skills, anyway. I do not foresee consequences that others do, and come across as childish because I didn’t think of X or Y. Everything makes sense when it is explained to me, but I cannot tell you why someone else’s thought process did not occur to me.

That’s the disability.

I can only compensate for not having thought of X or Y, I cannot go back and undo it.

It has made me a routinely awful person to Aada, but because it’s a disability and not something I’m doing on purpose, I cannot fix the problem. I can only apologize and change my behavior.

That’s why using AI is better for me than sitting by myself. I actually can get my thought processes closer to neurotypical because it will see the pitfalls I don’t, and can explain to me why I need to do something a certain way.

I am tired of apologizing all the time, and I am also the common denominator. I am trying to help myself by putting AI in my logical function blind spot.

It will hopefully create a routine I can live with so that I can think faster. I would like to take on more than just relationships and how I function in them. I cannot help that Aada feels I punished her by talking about our strife, but I can move on now that peace has been achieved.

Moving on means focusing on picking out a new apartment and calling Tiina to decorate. 😉

Moving on means just not caring so much when Aada drops in and leaves again. She told me she was never going to talk to me again in July, September, and October….. and that’s just this year.

So Aada saying “never again” has become a routine. It’s the only habit I wish she would break, because it’s not realistic and puts me in a vise.

The more I move on, the more she’ll crave my writing again. That’s how it works. It’s not rocket science. She loves the parts that aren’t about her.

But the only time she gets in touch is to “correct the record,” when I wish she’d get in touch to say more than that.

She has routinely hurt me with these emails because what she understood is not what I conveyed…

So I spin out like the autistic person I am coming up with the hundred and one solutions to this problem and how we can fix it by Friday, etc., throwing it up all on the internet because why not? The message won’t get to its intended audience otherwise. I could put it all in my private journal where pain cannot be shared and neither can joy.

It is routine for people to look into these pages and see empathy for everyone because I write them in such a way that no one is all good or all bad…. but that’s predicated on them being completely anonymous.

It’s also a lot of self-indulgent crap, but most writers have a lot of self-indulgent crap in their scratch journals.

I think it’s time to go for coffee. The routine that begins my morning has arrived.

Whiling Away the Hours of the Morning

November 11, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There is so much to love about this area in autumn. The sun is just starting to peek up over the red and gold trees, but it’s still cold enough to need a coat walking out to the car. I have read that it’s better for the turbo boost on my engine to run for a few minutes before I drive, anyway, so I use remote start to get things heated before I get in. That way, I don’t have to go through the rigamarole of getting dressed in the morning, which takes a lot more layers if you are planning to wait at the bus stop.

I had to go to Dunkin to get my macchiato, orange juice, and a bottle of water. This time, I got toasted almond flavoring, which turned out to be sort of marzipan-ish. It was very good, but I don’t think it will replace vanilla in the rotation.

I don’t know, though…. Marzipan is delicious.

Getting out into the early morning air is important to me. I leave the house before the sun is even up. It makes me feel productive to go to bed early and wake up before the rest of the world gets started.

It is in the early morning that I feel the urge to sit quietly at my keyboard, talking to no one in particular, but knowing that the regulars will check in. Hi Aparna. Hi John.

Et cetera.

The gang’s all here.

Or, they will be. I have learned over time when most people read, and it’s during their work day. My stats dip on the weekend and go back up as everyone slacks off at work to the rhythm of my “voice.”

Speaking of which, WordPress really needs to add AI to read entries to you. Medium does it. Catch up, WordPress.

I just don’t have the energy to record my own audio because the entries took a lot out of me when I wrote them. I cry and sigh and make a mess of myself trying to create MP3s of my entries.

I don’t think that Aada realizes how much her love sits with me all day because it’s here in my work. That I cannot not cry when I read our entries aloud because verbalizing it makes it real. Tears spill where I only felt a little pain before. So I don’t verbalize what I’m feeling often. Writing creates a wall where I can look at emotional landmines without exploding them.

It’s like being able to see an aerial view of my emotions, mapping them so that I can comprehend what I am feeling. Because I write it down, everyone else knows what I’m thinking and feeling, too. This is both positive and negative.

I do not expect myself to be happy when someone else hurts me, nor am I trying to punish anyone by having a voice. Other people’s stories are all true, too, based on their experiences. I am not taking anything away from anyone else by saying what I think is true, because differences of opinion exist.

For instance, Aada’s story with me would be so different than what I’ve written here, because she has always thought more highly of me than she has let on and chastised me for writing anything negative about our relationship. What I missed in all of this was her saying “I love you more than you think I do.”

Everyone loves me more than I think they do, because I take the negative things people say home with me. This is not an isolated problem, and one I get coming off of Aada, too. Neither one of us can believe that the other loves us, so we start from that proposition and it always loses.

What would it really look like if we both stood up and accepted that we were loved? That we were safe? That we protect each other, look out for the other? That nothing could have gotten between us except a lie, and that’s over now. The truth is all out on the table.

I am not proud of how I reacted to finding out that Aada lied, but I’m astonished at the amount of work I’m willing to do to get this relationship healthy again. We were in a very good place, and it is one that I’m eager to get back to, a drop of trust at a time.

But in order to grow as a person and not repeat the mistakes of the past, I have to be intentional about cultivating other relationships as well. Tiina and Aada have a lot in common and would like each other, and actually I invited Aada to go with me the first time I went out to Tiina’s and she was busy, then our relationship blew up.

I want to show Aada Tiina’s farm, because she would enjoy all of Tiina’s oddball surprises about the the house. My favorite was her Anthony Fauci doll.

It would be my pleasure to be a connector, bringing more love into Aada’s life instead of less.

I am certain that I do not want to be a disrupter anymore, and I am learning how I have been that in the past. How I need to manage myself better because I know I’m a tornado. That comes with therapy and time.

This blog feels like taking myself to the woodshed, admitting all my flaws and failures to hold myself accountable. I do not know where punishment comes into the mix for other people, but what I do know is that people read with confirmation bias. They are looking for evidence to back up what they already think.

So, if Aada is reading looking for evidence that she’s a terrible person, she’s going to find it because she looked so hard. If she read for evidence that she was wonderful, I know she would find it because it’s been there in black and white for 12 years. Hers is the only photo in my “Favorites” album on my phone.

I asked her to do me a favor, just turn the camera around and snap, that I hadn’t seen her face in a while.

So help me it was the most beautiful photograph of anyone I have ever seen and she was apologetic because she thought she had bedhead.

I would prove to you how beautiful she is except I value my head where it is.

There are limits to Aada’s generosity with my writing, to be clear.

Sufficed to say, she’s gorgeous and if I could I would show her off. I think she needs to know how proud I am of her just for being her, that I do value her opinion and want her in my life. If the message wasn’t clear before, it should be now. There’s nothing I won’t get over eventually.

She can be a scary motherfucker, though, and she wants you to know it.

When she does that shit, I picture her as a little girl.

It’s how I hold on for dear life in this relationship. I can’t picture the power suit when I’m afraid of it, so I picture the kindergartner instead.

“Suits and crap for work” are my Aada action figure, but when she uses that power against me, all of the sudden, in my head, I’m taller than she is by a wide margin.

“Say that again, pigtails.”

It’s a coping mechanism, and one that works well because she’s not the only person I picture as a child when I interact with them. It is also not a way of feeling superior to anyone else, because I am not making myself the adult in the situation and infantilizing them. I am relating to my own inner third grader. I am trying to see us as equals when we are most definitely not.

It keeps me from feeling bullied by people who need that power suit facade.

I have spoken truth to power more than I’ll ever know, because my words have created a ripple effect that reaches from rich to poor, public to private, cis to trans, gay to straight. I have rattled people all over the world without realizing it. It’s an enormous responsibility to have a blog, and one I’m not sure I’m so good at…. I’m just confident that the words I have to say are at least good enough to be a record of how we lived in the 21st century, weaving in plots and characters that are interesting because that’s just how my life is- interesting.

I came to DC for a story, and ended up in Baltimore with a better one.

I’m neurodivergent, and I’m always going to need support. This city can give it to me in a way that others can’t, because there’s already an infrastructure for high IQ/low needs autism, as well as all the mental health issues that invariably come with it.

A guy outside just played “Shave and a Haircut” on his car horn. He does it every morning, and it drives me insane. It’s too early for that nonsense.

The thing is that I need more local friends who are also high IQ/low needs. I am making them through my Cognitive Behavioral Health group, but I haven’t made friends who have actually been to my house. I need to change this, because some of the people in my group don’t live very far. Squad and Rook even go to my gym.

Oh, the gym. I need to get back into the swing of things, but I need to wash my gym clothes first. That will happen later today, because I’m feeling a long walk coming on. I need to zone out to a podcast and let my legs burn. It’s one of those things where I know I’ll feel better once I do it, but getting the inertia up to do it takes time. Because of course it’s more complicated than just driving over there. I have steps to do first.

I wish I could get back to the place in my life where inviting Aada to Tiina’s wasn’t weird, and neither was the idea that she’d actually show up.