Because I answered it last year, I can’t answer the daily prompt again…. but that didn’t stop me from laughing about it. The prompt is “have you ever been camping?”Leslie Goes Camping is one of my favorite stories in life, and it is years and years old.
The setup is that Dana (ex-wife, but we were best friends for years before we got married), her then-partner, and I went on a camping trip for our church. It was great, because we were able to have worship on top of Mt. St. Helen’s, and a few other things we could do when “Jesus has left the building.” Dana and I had met the Easter before, when I’d been brutally dumped (not really, but it felt that way at the time) and needed to make a whole new friend set…… arguably worse than being dumped, but neither made me feel so hot.
It was the start of The Separation, and Dana and I didn’t even know it. However, she would have been relieved, and I know this. She watched me struggle every fucking day for years. I wasn’t a very good wife on most days, but I had my moments. I just have to hope that Dana remembers them, too, and I don’t have to continue to feel bad that I completely wrecked her life as well.
I do not think this is because we were bad for each other (at that time). I think I didn’t know I was autistic, so I got called a judgmental dickhead a lot. In fact, I can’t remember a better day in Dana’s life than when my beautiful girl called me a judgmental dickhead to my face. At that particular date and time, I did indeed deserve it. She was not always wrong, she was just not always right, either.
To me, there is a huge difference between saying “your actions have hurt me” and “you are a bad person.” Both women saw me as saying the latter, and they’re both invaluable, both bright diamonds. I just don’t think that either one of them could follow me very well, and that’s not due to anything they did or didn’t do. It’s the way I communicate now that I’m aware of my shortcomings, and the way people interact with me based on the label because they’re already aware that, girl. I got issues.
But I was thinking of exactly none of that when it was time to go to bed. On the mountain. In the dark. Where the temperature drops precipitously. My friend Kari lent me a fabulous sleeping bag that was rated for -20F weather. However, I could not generate enough body heat to keep the bag warm. About 0430, I opened my suitcase and put on every piece of clothing I brought at once, then went back to sleep.
By the time I came home, I knew that I loved camping, just not in that cold a temperature….. so maybe not on top of a mountain next time, eh? I also knew that I loved Dana in a best friend sort of way. We were inseparable after that, and not because we were actively trying to have an affair. Dana’s partner was a construction worker, so we gravitated toward each other when her partner was on the road for six weeks at a time. Neither one of us needed a girlfriend- Dana was already ridiculously happy and since I’d just been dumped, I was not in any shape to feel romantic towards anyone.
What I didn’t realize is that I wasn’t dating other people because showing up for each other made it where I didn’t need or want to hang out with anyone else. I was satisfied with the love of a good friend. That’s why we were best friends for three and a half years before anything happened. I would rather have emotional and intellectual stimulation, so if the choice was going to a restaurant to meet someone new that felt like a job interview, or playing “Drunken Trivial Pursuit” with my best friend, guess what’s going to win every single fucking time?
Dana and I did not gravitate towards each other because of anything shady. We just came to rely on each other more than anyone else, and it pulled the romance trigger in both of us. It was completely organic, but I do know it started on that trip. That’s because I honestly didn’t have any other friends at all. They’d dumped me because they didn’t see the bullshit through the notes, just inhaling all the music as is- leaving little brown spots on their noses……………
When your emotional abuser is a wonderful musician and locally a big deal, you can count on exactly zero people thinking that you’re telling the truth unless they sit down with your friends when you were 14 and she was 25. That’s the thing that would have blown their performance fleece back, but they didn’t have time to look critically at anything.
So I moved halfway across the country TWICE to try and get rid of that feeling. I wasn’t running FROM Portland so much as TO The District. I already had friends here in addition to Supergrover, so my moving here was never dependent on her. Because our relationship was virtual and planes exist, I have a feeling we would have been equally happy in different cities all these years because physical proximity has never mattered.
It hurts that I’m not laying on her couch right now instead of mine, because if I think about what could have happened, I delve into what actually did. It’s not pretty, even now. I just wish it was.
But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I know it’s my fault, and I don’t blame her. I just wish I could convince her that’s what I really think. I want peace for her just as much as I want peace for me. That just because I’m talking all this out doesn’t mean that I want to be shitty to anyone.
As I have learned through a Facebook meme, it is time to stop dividing myself into smaller, more manageable bites; in order to reach my full potential, I’m going to have to let some of you choke. The people who are left are my people. I am tired of making myself smaller.
Even though I felt as small as I ever have next to the beauty of Mt. St. Helen’s. It is not lost on me that I didn’t stay warm because of lack of blankets. I didn’t stay warm because I wasn’t generating my own heat.
If the last 15-20 years have taught me nothing, it’s that I should be.
My jumping off point today is this phrase, because it’s a play on something I heard at a lot at church- “give til it hurts, then give til you feel better.” It was our way of making fun of Evangelicals, yet let’s be clear. This is a church that I went to as an adult. Not that my dad and I didn’t joke about things we’d heard and seen….
For instance, one of my favorite stories about my parents when they were young is that my mom was having dental work done and she was all laid out with the bib. My dad walked in and said, “my. Don’t she look natural?” That’s what people say when they see the body at the funeral home. My dad is often funnier than I am, and I am often funnier than he is. It’s a give and take. Although I like it better when he calls me “Chief” than “you go, girl.” I am not in charge of anything, so it may not seem all that flattering. But I’m young (all things being relative), so perhaps I am just “not living up to my full potential,” which is not something he said but is said by every teacher ever who doesn’t know that kid is neurodivergent. That’s why gifted & talented classes are mostly filled with depressed, anxious teenagers.
We are so goddamn smart that it doesn’t make sense we’re so dumb. That’s because we’re not dumb. We:
Have demand avoidance, even down to taking a shower. Urging yourself to do things and not being able to accomplish them leads to guilt.
Guilt over having demand avoidance.
Shame over demand avoidance
Getting overwhelmed to the point of nausea
Hitting the limit to which we can be stimulated, leading to anger at ourselves and lashing out at others, or alternatively becoming non-verbal
Guilt over meltdown
Shame over meltdown
Go into burnout, which generally means sensory deprivation to reset, and the length of time varies for all autistic people
Lather, rinse, repeat all day long with every demand or decision all day long
When you are as smart as I am, along with all the other people with low needs/high IQ, you can see every side to every story. You are not limited to black and white, but all the colors in the spectrum. When everything becomes grey area with no solid base, you drift. You get overwhelmed, and go into a world of your own.
For me, that’s intelligence. I wouldn’t have a million dollars worth of trains in my basement, but I’d have a first edition Le Carre signed “David Cornwell.”
Speaking of which, yesterday autocorrect made me misspell both Jodi Picoult and change “Jennifer Finney Boylan” to “Jennifer Finney Boyle.” I guess I’ll need to go through my Android tablet and turn off spelling and grammar. I do that a lot, because I don’t misspell much and autocorrect doesn’t know everything- like poetic license, plays on words, acronyms, people’s last names, and thinking it knows better than me that it’s “utopian ideal” and not “utopia ideal.” Little things like that drive me up the wall, and it’s worse in voice dictation because Apple thinks it fucking knows where punctuation goes and it drives me up the wall and back down again. I want to throw my phone against a rock for making sentences look like this:
Rebecca, when are, we, going, to Starbucks?
Going back to correct all that is a nightmare, but I use voice dictation when I don’t have a keyboard because typing on my phone is hard as shit for me. It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I hate it so much. All phone companies lost me when they got rid of thumb boards and slide out keyboards.
It’s why I use my phone a quarter of never. I don’t like to call people, and I don’t like to type on my phone. Therefore, I use my iPad or my Android tablet for nearly everything. That’s because I like the bigger real estate for calls, anyway. If I’m calling, it might as well be a video call because I know I’m not going to see you very often, etc.
Therefore, I really only use my phone for voice calls. If I decide to walk somewhere, I leave my phone at home and connect my headphones to my watch. The middle man carries very little value except that I have to have it on to unlock all the features on my watch. However, it’s a fully functioning “dumb phone.” If I had money, I’d upgrade my watch before I ever bothered with my phone, or replace my older iPad with a newer one because it can do everything except control my watch (emphatic fist shake). However, for what I do, I do not need to upgrade any of my technology. I do three or four things and none of them are mobile gaming. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what chip and graphics card the motherboard on the tablet has, it just has to be adequate.
I have Microsoft Office, AndrOffice (Android port of LibreOffice- a full desktop application for you other writers in the crowd. I find it easier to use a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for it.), a web browser, a basic photo editor, and JetPack. So far, I’ve been able to upgrade to every version, so my hardware can’t be that old.
I also watch movies, but that needs a better network connection than anything else. I’m not picky about the picture, but some people are. Those are the people that should buy high end tablets, because you’ll end up sitting in bed with it vs. watching TV, especially with headphones while your partner is sleeping (I have never needed to do this with Zac, but it’s possible, just like connecting Bluetooth headphones to your Kindle to listen to audiobooks.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again as writer’s advice.
We all make notes in our books. Having a Bluetooth keyboard connected to my Kindle makes it where I can use my notes later and sync them with Goodreads. You can choose whether your highlights are available to the public, so lock it down and it’s a private, free repository of your highlights and the notes you put with them. That way, if something happens to your Kindle, you still have everything and you don’t lose months of work. I also used my Kindle quite extensively when I reviewed books professionally (putting that out there because people often offer me books for free with a gift certificate so I have a verified sale to review.
I have liked most of them.
However, I’m not a harsh reviewer because I am so precise with language that I can make a bad review sound like a good one. That is because I want to say what I liked and didn’t about their books without hurting their feelings.
Of everything I read, I liked “Pancake Money” and “Dead Lemons” by Finn Bell the most.
Some of the others were downright drudgery.
“What would you say to universities about stifling writers?”
“In my opinion they don’t stifle enough.” (Flannery O’Connor)
This being said, you don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, either. They gave you their baby for free. It is something that they’ve birthed over a tremendous amount of time. A lot of care went into it just to get to the finish line. I was crushed when Supergrover thought I was dismissive of her writing when the only piece of advice I gave her was “come on, SG! I know you have more than that in you.” She doesn’t dive as deep as she can. However, she can turn a phrase when she’s in her element, and she’s not often in her element. I’m not sure there’s really a place she calls home in her soul, and I don’t mean anything derogatory by it. I mean that she doesn’t dig as far as she can go, but if she did dig as deep as me it would be the best book you’ve ever read in your life.
I know because I’ve read it. I know the parts of her that she’ll share, but she’s not often in a place to take those things and dig deep on them. She’s pressed for time all the time, and introspection is really hard work. REALLY hard work. However, I have never said she was a bad writer. If it were true, I wouldn’t have basically memorized everything she’s ever said to me- both the good and the bad. I have been furious by some letters and angered by others. We are not so different, we just choose to act like it. It’s devastating to an enormous degree, because if she read my entries from the standpoint of counting up how many phrases that are hers hidden here. And now my keyboard has decided that the “Enter” key is the only one that doesn’t work. I have no idea what is causing this, because it just drops and reconnecting doesn’t help. Maybe you’ll get more later, because I’m not really feeling the whole “writing session is over” thing. I am feeling disappointed and frustrated that I can’t keep writing right now. I should save that feeling for writer’s block. “What if I wasn’t permitted to write?” It goes a very long way. I could make it all one paragraph, but Chason told me that short paragraphs are easier to read on the web. I try to be mindful, because he does web design for a living. This is not one of those days, apparently. So, anyway, I quote her all the time from her e-mails and her other writing. She said I dismissed her when I, unlike President Clinton, inhaled.
The sight of a blank page is intimidating, even in dark mode. There’s endless possibilities, and the longer you pause to construct your first sentence, the longer you’ll procrastinate writing anything at all. You cannot say you’ll start writing once the first sentence is perfect because guess how many years you can procrastinate off that one?
Sometimes I’ll go back and add a better sentence at the top if I think of one, because the slug on Facebook is important. Sometimes I don’t. It all depends on how much of a diarist and how much of a traditional writer I want to be that day. I do not compare myself to people like Ernest Hemingway (because he’s a novelist, not because I’m that talented); rather, I see myself more as a Dominick Dunne character from Vanity Fair. His only title was “Diarist.” His job was to go and sit in the back of famous court trials and write about them. I don’t write about trials, but some of my pieces (like the ones after the spy book talks) are reminiscent because I’m just taking in the whole room at once and writing it down. I would rather sit in the back and notice things.
Not that I can’t be a ham and make people laugh. I do that all the time because it’s how I know to relate to people. I often cover up how I’m feeling by trying to make the other person spit out their water. If they’re focusing on the fact that I’m funny, they won’t notice that…….. The list where that ellipsis lives is long. However, I think of that as The Leslie Lanagan Show, and being quiet in the back is my natural personality. For instance, when I was watching Jonna I was blogging the whole time. I just didn’t have my computer in front of me. When she’d say something I wanted to use, I’d make a note of it, etc.
I didn’t want it to be perfect, because I wouldn’t be brave enough to publish if I thought I had to aim that high. I just wanted to represent her accurately, always a challenge with people who are still alive, because you are not in their heads. You can only write your impressions of what they said, not what they were thinking at the time. I did not want to write something that made her wonder if I was even in the same room.
Twice, I have written things to be proud of, and I am. I think the biggest thing is that I wrote them like I write every other blog entry, as if Jonna and Tony aren’t my favorite writers in the universe and untouchable heroes, simply other characters in my weird little life. Because of The International Spy Museum, it’s kind of true. I met Jonna after Tony died, and we struck up a bit of a friendship.
The concept that she’s another character in my weird little life and not a deity is sort of alarming, frankly. I mean, who even am I?
Why do I keep saying things like this if someone like her knows my name?
It’s an issue.
I honestly think that the more known people are, the more they appreciate being treated like characters in my weird little life. That they want to be known as themselves, so they don’t have to be “on.” For instance, I would think it was way more interesting to meet Kamala Harris when it was just me, my sister, and some good music. That’s because I don’t care about the vice president as much as I care about her, if that makes sense.
Most Democrats have the capability to become characters in my weird little life because of my sister. She’s a lobbyist, so she lives in Houston (I’ve said this before, but new readers, etc.) and works in both Austin and DC on state and federal legislation. In her previous job, she had several states in her “territory,” and Maryland was one of them. We got to go to Annapolis and ended up in a regatta. We also found a great restaurant called “tsunami.” You really want the pork belly ramen.
I tend to eschew the spotlight, thus wanting to get to know the people Lindsay knows, just not in a place where everything is top volume and overwhelming. Cocktail parties are exhausting for me if it’s a lot of people I don’t know. I go into shutdown fast, selectively mute so that I couldn’t say anything even if I wanted to, because it would come out as stuttering while my brain lags like an Apple ][ e.
My thoughts come just as fast in person as they do when I’m writing. However, when I am writing, I can handle that volume of information coming at me because I can process it through my fingers at 90wpm. My brain cannot translate information into speech at half that rate. I get intimidated quickly and just stop trying. If it’s important, they’ll e-mail me….. Or, one can hope. Sometimes it backfires because it seems like I’m not interested in talking to people, and that’s not the case. I just like to take in my surroundings and read the room before I jump into it.
I’m not shy in the slightest. I have just made mistakes by not reading a room before, especially with my line cook loud mouth, that have made me reticent to talk first. In short, I’m trying to prevent problems before they come up rather than popping off and then having regrets. And by “popping off,” I don’t just mean anger. Sometimes it’s humor that makes people think “what the fuck is wrong with you?” The neurodivergent sense of humor is kind of dark, anyway. Then add line cook, where we’re all some kind of fucked up (I promise), and the differences between us and our neurotypical peers becomes even more stark, because we’re gathering in groups. You just don’t see it, because you don’t see that the kitchen is for misfits…
As Anthony Bourdain points out, it is a tribe that will have us…… And we know it. We are not built for office work or polite company. We are built to be aliens- because we are that different and also few people are educated enough about ADHD/Autism to really be able to understand it. One of the reasons that we seem like aliens is that none of our behavior makes sense to anyone neurotypical, and it’s always on us to adapt. There is a power imbalance that is unbreakable because neurotypical people have an air of superiority over “special kids.” We know it, so rates of anxiety and depression skyrocket when you also have ADHD/Autism. Not being able to navigate the world like a normal person takes its toll whether we’re talking about our personal or professional lives.
Autistic people have trouble in interpersonal relationships, even among each other because if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. It does not present in everyone the same way, and I often think after many hours of study that the kind of ADHD that presents in women and the kind of ADHD that presents in men is so different that women are probably at the autistic end of the spectrum and men aren’t so much. Their ADHD presents as aggressively hyperactive. It’s not that women don’t display these tendencies as well, because I was married to a woman like that. I just think that the “male” presentation of ADHD is more accurate, and that the kind of ADHD that only makes you stare out the window and get lost in your own little world is more likely to be autism. Therefore, the criteria is the same for all genders. It’s not that there’s more autistic women, it’s that more autism is being caught. There hasn’t been much research on autism in women, because there are so many women that are struggling and only hear “you don’t look autistic.” I get it.
But please know that because I am autistic, I can predict with 90% accuracy whether someone else is, according to science (really). Neurotypicals can’t, because they don’t have the pattern recognition. They aren’t looking for the same things, because people tend to equate autism with severe retardation. If you are high IQ, you fall through the cracks. People understand autistic people who rock, scream, etc. They do not know what autism looks like after years and years of social masking.
Here’s my pattern recognition and how it might differ from yours:
Your gait
The number of different foods that you eat
How many times you have to go to a private place during a party for some sensory deprivation
The way you talk, because there’s a specific patois to neurodivergence- conversations are spaghetti code
The speed at which you talk- if Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino have nothing on you, you may be autistic/ADHD 😛
The look in your eyes when you’re overwhelmed
Seeing stimming that other people wouldn’t notice- for instance, adults condemn a fidget spinner, but not knitting your eyebrows……. and it’s the same exact idea for calming yourself
How often it seems like “you’re just not there”
When you are dialed into a special interest, and what happens when you’re facing drudgery
How clean people’s houses are, because all neurodivergent people suck at sticking to systems and live in piles- no judgment because if you came to my house you’d see the same exact shit you do
Living in piles and yet knowing where everything is- because we don’t fit into your systems, we make our own
The way you write an e-mail, because again, a specific patois- which may or may not match your voice in person
The way you talk about your task list when it’s clearly overwhelming, especially when it’s already overwhelming and it’s three things.
How well you can multitask
How well you remember what you’ve heard vs. what you’ve read- most autistic people take in things through sight
Whether you make eye contact, and whether it looks like you’ve been trained into making eye contact as opposed to it being completely natural
Perceiving social masking instead of genuine comfort…. If you have to appear at a party, you’re ready to go long before anyone else (it’s a universal “you,” but it’s me)
These are not all the criteria, but it’s a good start. This last one is just “et al.”
I am not the expert, I just have lots of education because I made time for it. I also have the lived experience so that when the MDs and PhDs were talking, I could understand my past behavior in a completely different way. It’s interesting that there are so many tie-ins.
A lot of people who are neurodivergent are INFJ as well. In order to be “The Counselor,” there’s so much that goes into it…. Mostly introversion unless you’re in front of a crowd. My examples for this are writers and ministers. With ministers, it’s easier to connect to a thousand people than it is to go to a cocktail party. With writers, they’d rather sit in their offices til Jesus comes than do a book talk. All of the publicity is a necessary evil, not what an author really, really wants to do.
Authors who seem arrogant are generally one of two things….. Trying to fake it until they make it, or they’re not really artists. They’re trying to sell books, and they know it’s not very good….. But it doesn’t matter because people will buy it anyway. For instance, all those non-fiction books on how to get rich without really trying. It’s not pulling pain out of you as a writer, which is what makes it art.
When you write crap, you’re never going to see the real point of being an author, which is to wrestle your demons- even in fiction. For instance, Mary Shelley poured her heart and soul into “Frankenstein” to talk about her relationship with Lord Byron. The book was never intended to start the sci-fi genre, and yet it did. Sometimes I wondered whether she identified more with Frankenstein or Jenny. Either is a hot take.
Jenny has never appeared on screen, but she’s someone who was raised with Victor as a brother and then somehow weirdly engaged to him. She was accused of something she didn’t do, and went to the gallows. The reason she didn’t do it is that the monster did.
It looks different when Lord Byron is the monster.
And now all the fright is over, because the page is no longer blank. On the other hand, to quote another marvelous author…… “Tomorrow, AND tomorrow, AND tomorrow AND tomorrow…..”
The sight is relentless, and turns pain into beauty…. But that’s only by going by and seeing the other days where the pages have not ended up empty. In order to understand my future, I have to understand the past.
It gives me the insight to make “The Sight” not so intimidating.
I should have known that this is exactly how things were going to turn out with Daniel, but I felt like it was important to keep the promise to myself- to see whether rehab had indeed cleared his mind and whether we could make the plans we made fit a future now. I did not want to be the person that abandoned their partner while they were in the worst part of their lives. I couldn’t be that person to my partner, and I wasn’t. I can be proud of that.
But in retrospect, there was a red flag on day one that I couldn’t ignore, and I ran from it, because I knew that I had made a horrible, horrible mistake unless Daniel was telling the absolute truth, and there was no way of knowing whether he was telling the absolute truth from this many miles away. He said that he was still drinking, but it was night and day now. It’s not the thing you want to hear from someone that’s been to inpatient if you know even a couple of things about alcohol and the brain. It’s not that they’re not telling the truth. It’s “are you willing to gamble?” Because maybe they are. Maybe one or two beers every once in a while is their new normal. But I’m not willing to gamble.
I was for a few days. Seriously. I wanted to know how Daniel thought, whether any of his thought processes had changed over the year we were apart, how he treated me now vs. how he treated me then, etc. Absolutely nothing has changed. At no time did he consider my feelings before he went right back to saying that we were starting over while also treating me like a fiancée, so which is it? Do you want to pretend that we don’t know each other or do you want the intimacy that comes with being a partner? I don’t share all my thoughts and feelings with just anyone, and I found out that he cannot handle them.
Even after having a talk about the way I process emotions and the difference in the autistic brain, it was still all about how I’m just so mean to him and “putting all this stuff on him.” Meanwhile, he does not have any answers for my questions and no indication as to what “putting all this stuff on him” even means.
I told him that no person worthy of me would ever spend a minute trying to make me think that my feelings don’t matter, and then I blocked him and walked away, while also telling him that I wouldn’t be back. I already have two people in my life that are willing to open up to me and share with me. I don’t need to fight through to be heard, and I have discovered I won’t.
I wanted a partner to build a life with, because Bryn and Zac already have life partners, and that’s unlikely to change. And by that, I do mean that Bryn is also my life partner, but with best friends, it’s a little different. I mean that she’s my off site document repository, because she knows my files better than I do.
Also, I know this sounds crazy, but the idea of marrying your best friend is starting to seem so much more sane than marrying your romantic partner. Like, why would you place something as important as marriage on a relationship that’s dependent on sexual attraction? It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s how it’s done….. for most people.
Daniel told me that he wanted to be my favorite person, and I told him that he was…. because I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the position had been filled in 1997 and 2013, when my heart expanded to give huge palaces in my head to three women, not shoving Bryn and Dana away in favor of anyone else. When my definition of love got bigger, I did.
There are so many follow up questions that Daniel never asked, just treated me like the classic sitcom nagging wife. I have never been in a relationship with gender roles before, so I made no attempt to understand any of that. If he wants to marry a nonbinary mind, he’s got to understand that I am his equal. He can’t just dismiss my concerns; I will walk and I did, because I will not learn gender roles for anyone.
It was easy for the world to revolve around him, because only I had to respect his time. We had one conversation where we were actually focused on each other, and that was on the phone. The rest of the time, I sat and waited because he said he had time to talk and then everything that could possibly get in the way made it where our responses were 10 minutes apart. I couldn’t focus on anything because I was caught between thinking that we were having a conversation and not knowing whether I should wait for a reply or not. When I said this was irritating, he jumped all over me about that, too, when what I wanted was “sure- I’ll tell you when I’m doing something else because I also value your time.” If I have someone’s divided attention, I’d rather you finish what you were doing and come focus on me. Because it means that you won’t really focus on me. My words won’t resonate because you’re too lost in something else, like having a conversation with someone who is listening to a podcast with the TV on in the background.
I told him that I was excited about the future, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t things to talk about. That throwing problems out on the table and seeing what they look like in the light wasn’t a bad thing. He said, “you’re right, of course.” Then he proceeded to berate me for acknowledging our problems.
In the past, this would have made me start trying to learn all the ways I can move in a relationship that won’t piss someone off, giving up the parts of myself that make me unique to please someone else. I’ve been there so many times, and it doesn’t help anyone. I’d rather keep finding other people who have also gone through that transformation. It says “I am not threatened by another person having feelings.”
One of the things that really got me was the incredible double standard. Daniel told me that he gets so busy with his writing that he disappears for days, so I thought nothing of it when I was in shutdown/burnout mode; I didn’t contact anyone. I can’t think of a single person who has ever chastised me for that except Daniel, as if I should have somehow divined that he was not okay with going a day without contact from me. Although I probably would have said something to the effect of “what I hear you saying is that it’s ok for you to dissociate, but when I do it I’m a bad partner.” What’s good for the gander has to be good for the goose, because again, I am not into being the classic definition of a wife.
He said something about “trying our best,” and I thought, “that’s not what I’m going to remember about you. So far, you’ve taken every problem we need to work out in order to be together and shut down like a steel trap when I wanted to talk about it. You see me as blaming you…. so until you see me as a partner that wants to work with you instead of someone who’s ‘laying all of this on you,’ I can’t help you.” I cannot live with someone who’s in Fantasyland right now, and it seems like he’s changed his mind about moving to Maryland, because originally, we were all going to find a place somewhere between DC and Baltimore, because Daniel is overqualified to work at Johns Hopkins. It’s fine that he doesn’t want to move anymore, but he could have said that instead of just invalidating my feelings. I was talking about Avery moving in with us or something like that…. I can’t remember what. But I said something about DC and Baltimore and he said, “or Dallas or Austin.” I never want to have that conversation again, because it was like he was doorknobbing me. I would never seriously think about moving back to Texas unless the circumstances were dire.
Plus, I don’t like Austin. I just don’t. It looks like Portland, because they wanted to be all weird and stole all their slogans, then just like Portland, big industry moved in and it wasn’t the same place to live anymore. But in the end, to me it just feels like a city full of bumper stickers that say Keep Portland Austin Weird, and The People’s Republic of Portland Austin.
They were also the first Texas city to get a Voodoo Donut, but you will never in your life know how weird it really was. The FDA shut them down for making doughnuts with NyQuil and Pepto Bismol in them, as well as caffeine. You aren’t OG Voodoo Donut unless you’ve been drunk at 3AM on Burnside….. before the second location, before the hype, before the notoriety.
That’s how I feel about Portland and Austin. The donuts will never taste the same, but Austin can imitate the feeling of those donuts………. poorly.
There are better donuts out there that have taken the place of Voodoo in PDX, but for a while Voodoo was this enigma.
I also don’t like moving at all. It was great when Daniel was headed up here already, that we’d talked about him moving here about this time last year. I realized that his PhD put us in the way of that, but I wasn’t daunted. However, I did think that it was very unfair of him to change plans without me and not let me know up front that in order for us to be together, he’d also like me to “come home.” I could have saved him a lot of trouble. That’s not a doorknob conversation. That’s a conversation you have to be up front about, and that’s my whole problem with Daniel and the many other emotionally unavailable people in my life. They call me demanding when I lay my feelings on the table and expect them to do the same so that I know what problems I need to work on in our relationship, too. But, if you think that the problem is always me, it’s not a relationship anymore.
I have always been the unseen child. I do not have to be the unseen adult, unless I just want that. I thought I did. Turns out, I had to let go of a lot of things to make me realize who I was. My destiny is not to belong to one person, but to belong to many so that I never have to put all my eggs in one basket ever again. I don’t want my husband or any of my partners to feel less important than the others, because they’re all a part of my family.
It is cooking, where we all make each other’s lives more interesting. For instance, I love hearing about Bryn’s journey through all her relationships. I love opening up to Zac and knowing that he’s capable of going toe to toe with me. I didn’t reach out to Daniel in a time of need, but abundance.
Daniel had been in a poly relationship before, so it wasn’t like I was springing anything new on him. But he didn’t want to talk about his own boundaries, only that he never wanted me to pit him against anyone else. There’s no way I would or could do that. It would be comparing bananas and oranges and giving up one rather than realizing that they’re both great in different recipes.
I didn’t want a relationship where Daniel lived in Fantasyland, thinking I’d wait around for him all the time while he did whatever he wanted while also wanting to be married while also not wanting to compromise on anything while also saving things up and exploding.
You have been reading about that relationship with someone else on this web site, which made me especially gunshy when I saw that shit coming towards me again. Blame the person for bringing up a problem, find a way to turn it back around on them, and be extremely stubborn about being vulnerable so now I always feel bad about bringing up this problem because I know this is how you’ll react every single time.
So many women learn the land mines because they feel they need a partner worse than they need to stand on their own two feet. I’m not that person, and I never will be.
I know you have your shit. I know I have mine. The difference between us is that I’m willing to tell people the truth as I see it. As in, “this is how your words are making me feel.” Then, they choose how they respond. When it is immediately defensive, I know they’re not ready to compromise on shit. They can’t even be open and honest with themselves, so why would they be with you?
When you know yourself really well, you don’t feel the need to get defensive all the time, because you know that you’re just as fallible as the other person. It’s always a matter of working out compromises with other people if you want a relationship with them. But if your reaction to another person telling you what they need from you is “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me; how dare you,” then you’re in for a world of hurt. That kind of defensiveness takes years to work through in therapy, and you’re not a hospital for broken people. It’s too much to take on, because you’re either walking on eggshells or “starting fights,” with absolutely no in between.
Again, it took two hours for Daniel to go from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what? This isn’t worth it.” It took him two hours to blame everything on me in my sleep because I just wasn’t attentive enough. I wasn’t attentive because neither was he. He showed me how to act. I wasn’t going to give him anything he wasn’t willing to give me.
Also, Zac and Bryn and I don’t talk every day, so it wouldn’t occur to me to treat Daniel differently unless he asked me to, and even then, I’d feel like a fuckup when I didn’t want to engage because my autism was struggling that day.
For all Daniel’s talk about understanding autism, it didn’t translate to actually improving communication, because I told him how I don’t social mask and he continued to treat me exactly the same…….. while also saying he got it.
In short, it was too much of a roller coaster, and it was easier to cut him loose and move on, knowing that I am the person I said I would be, and I will never have to play these childish games again.
It’s starting to stress me out that you can’t answer a blog prompt against, because I don’t really have a topic to start from each morning. Today wouldn’t have been a good one, anyway, because I don’t have any more morning/night rituals now than I did the first time around. The point still stands, though, that it was night to have a jumping off point and a tag everyone starts with every day, #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x, the number advancing every day. Well, since I have both tags for all of the prompts from last year, that’s why they already look like they’ve been answered this year. I’m sorry I’m on about this, it was just the main thing that kept me from being lazy and not posting something that day.
But yesterday wasn’t about laziness. I skipped yesterday because I was in burnout mode. I was more overstimulated than I’d been in a long time, because my schedule was all messed up. I needed time to recover and I took it. I slept, mostly. I am not as young as I continue to think I am.
If I have learned nothing from going to psychiatrists and psychologists over the years, it’s that medicine and therapy absolutely work and are valuable……… but so are sleep and sobriety. I don’t practice total abstinence from alcohol, because it’s okay to enjoy it once in a while. It’s just that if I am taking an antidepressant and drinking a depressant, I have not made any forward motion.
When I was in the restaurant business, I drank a lot more because that’s what we did after work. But, then after Dana got her DUI, we went to all these classes on medicine and alcohol (legally required for her, I just drove). It sent MY brain on fire. When I realized what was actually going on in my brain when I drank, I had a light bulb moment. It just didn’t feel like an every day sort of thing anymore.
Therefore, when I worked in a pub here in Silver Spring, I rarely drank. Occasionally I took them up on a beer, but they also had Maine Root Mexican Cola. That won nearly every night. It was a pub. None of the drinks we served had ice except for soda. With the choice of a room temperature beer or a cold soda with ice after a 12 hour shift on grill, it was a quick and easy decision. Give me the cold one.
I have shifted my focus into accommodating who I actually am instead of who everyone told me I was. Whoever I thought Leslie Lanagan was, I cannot say from before. I can only say that I saw the expectations in front of me and found all of them easy for a short period of time, and all of them untenable long term. I learned who my real friends were when I stopped social masking, and Doc was the first person who recognized it before I said it. “Do you think the authoritative part of yourself comes from you feeling more confident in confiding in me?” Yes, 100%. The more you allow me to be me without social masking, the more I want to talk to you. The more I want to open up to you.
I can only speak to the fact that the more I get to know myself, the more I learn how wrong I’ve been. Treating myself as perfectly mentally stable and perfectly physically able, just lazy and a drain on society has nearly killed me several times. I know that because I can only treat myself that way so long without realizing it’s not producing results.
Once I started being kind to myself, I could be softer, as well. That’s because I was living under everyone else’s expectations of what I should be able to do. I was not raised to be neurodivergent, and in some respects, not raised to even be fallible, either, because that is opening the kimono. The parish doesn’t get to live in the pastor’s house.
I didn’t “choose to air all of this out on my web site” re: Supergrover. I decided she wasn’t worthy of listening to my story anymore, because she’d told me she was tired of it. That did not mean there was no more story to tell. She just asked to stop listening to it. There’s so much context she’s missing, and what bothers me is that she told me that I’d aired some things she wanted to keep private, and in no way did I know any of that. When I started explaining, I went by the timeline of her e-mails, especially the ones where they said that her stories weren’t mine to carry anymore, that everyone already knew. She didn’t tell me any of it- no anger, no disappointment, no hurt, no anything. She just let it fester and wandered further from me. The thing I needed most was intimacy, but she didn’t want to give it to me. Not my call. It’s perfectly valid. But so is my hurt if that is her response. I am not saying that she did anything wrong. I am only saying that it is not her responsibility to have my reactions for me. If she wants distance, it’s just a different way of ending the game than I would have done it, but I get the same result and cannot be angry about that.
She says it’s a lot, that every letter is so dense. And at the same time, I don’t think she’d be as obsessed with reading my letters if they weren’t so deep and chewy. What brought us together has driven us apart.
Therefore, I went to my only other safe space in writing….. the part where it’s just me in my room, thinking to myself. I am writing these as letters to me in the future, which is why I cultivate this web site as what my friend Kristie called “my pensieve.” I am a really rare breed, I think….. someone who’s willing to let another person read their autistic mind in real time. I think it’s important, because generally, autistic people aren’t raised to be autistic. They know how their neurotypical adults handle the world, but they have no clue how an autistic person does it. And then add to that the large number of older women who are getting diagnosed now because it was entirely missed in their childhood due to having social masking beaten into them early. That social masking, those expectations, are what make an autistic person feel like an alien.
That’s because I am an aggressive taskmaster with myself, authoritative and stern without love because in addition to not giving myself empathy, I am a relentless perfectionist who doesn’t give a fuck about my feelings. I haven’t cared how bad I’ve made myself feel for not being perfect since I was born, because that’s how the outside world has treated me for years as well.
I found a meme that explains all of this better than I could, so let’s start out with it:
I am not saying that mansplaining does not exist. Far from it. But what I am saying is that as you get to know a man, it’s easier to tell whether they’re egotistical or neurodivergent. For instance, I would never accuse any of my male friends of mansplaining, because I’m just as likely to mansplain to them, because we are all working from a neurodivergent brain. I have had many men who worked from the first paragraph in my life, and they aren’t my friends.
In fact, a very effective way to get a man to stop “mansplaining” to you is just to ask them what’s up. Say, “are you telling me this because you think you’re the expert, or are you ADHD/autistic?” That’ll shut ’em up…… or you’ll get a real moment of authenticity and a breath of relief that will almost make them cry…… because they feel seen. That’s because I asked him a question that, dollars to donuts, no other woman has. They automatically assume that man is trying to one-up them, and don’t even think about that man’s self-esteem. That maybe he’s not trying to be an egotistical bastard. He has a processing disorder, and he thinks you think he’s dumb, not the other way around.
I feel like I know this better than most because I am nonbinary. I have told Supergrover over and over that I don’t write to her, and I don’t write for her. That my writing would exist whether she was here or not. This is the one exception. This meme is definitely for her, because I have a feeling that she’s been reading my e-mails like “I’m the expert,” and because of it I think I’m doing a terrible job of explaining myself, so I overclarify until “the cows can tape something by now.”
I feel this way because Supergrover has called me a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years, and in her last e-mail said that I should stop thinking of myself as the expert on everyone and everything. “Not a good look.” So, my reaction is just to leave her behind. Fuck that noise. I will never in my life put up with that shit again. I talk how I talk.
I was absolutely moved by her e-mail, but after some time, I realized that she’s just as shitty a friend as she said she was, because the e-mail opened, “Ugh. I vowed never to respond to another of your e-mails.” Opening with disgust didn’t win her any brownie points, especially when I came to hear heart in hand and asked her for help with something she knew intimately.
Granted, she answered all my questions and even clarified within herself what she’s meant all these years, and it was basically “I hide all my feelings about you so that you can just twist in the wind.” It’s easy to keep someone feeling desperately insecure in a relationship that way, because they don’t know how to act. What is real? What is not?
I have been saying over and over that I’m not the expert on anything but the way I feel. If someone feels differently than I do, there is room for both our opinions in the world. Me telling my story and you hiding yours is just a shortcut to calling me a dictator and blaming me for everything when you’re the one that’s emotionally unavailable at every turn. It’s a stalling tactic, and a good one, because it makes me feel like shit.
The reason I had to get her out of my life is that I’ve been in relationships with too many women like this. I am attracted to emotionally unavailable people and they’re attracted to me. It’s because we each have something the other lacks. I lack pragmatism and logic, They lack the ability to feel as deeply as I do. So, in the beginning, it feels like you are each meeting each other’s greatest need.
Without fail, in every single relationship I’ve been in that works this way, over time it devolves into division of labor. They do all the thinking, I do all the feeling. It leaves me anxious and insecure, because in the beginning, they weren’t like this. They were high on new relationship energy and not so opposed to letting themselves feel. After that, they go back to what they know, which is not letting anyone know how they feel so that you have to walk on eggshells…… because they won’t tell you that they’re angry. They’ll say nothing is wrong when it clearly is by the way they treat you.
That has been my life for 10 years, and I’m done unless I actually feel some empathy for the way my brain processes information, because I am not an expert.
So, I read my last entry and it was so full of typos that I thought I’d gone stupid for a second…. and then I realized, no…. I am, in fact, blind as a bat. I had the font size on my tablet turned down too low in my editor, and I didn’t switch spell-checking on. So, obviously I am a genius and you need my mind.
I just got finished making supper. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I went for my go-to. Pancakes. This time, I didn’t stuff them with anything except milled flax, cinnamon, and Mexican vanilla. Normally, I add fruit and nuts, things like that. The fruit and nut ones make great peanut butter sandwiches. If you make them too thick, you can always cut them lengthwise. In fact, a couple of my pancakes look like they have bites taken out of them. This is untrue. I tore pieces off and ate them. I was already full, but I didn’t have any Tupperware, so I was trying to fit them into sandwich bags.
Which reminds me of the time I went to an Indian restaurant and ordered peshwari naan (I think that’s the one with raisins and other fruit.). It was to-go, and I was talking to the hostess. I said that peshwari naan was really good with peanut butter, and she looked at me like I was everything wrong with white people.
Fair.
However, now the house is steeped in a brown butter aroma that I haven’t smelled in a very long time. We used to make a brown butter vinaigrette at Tapalaya, and it’s a scent that takes me right back to that particular kitchen. Kinkaid says his recipe for bourbon maple syrup, which went on our fried chicken, dies with him. No the hell it won’t. I will stand over the stove for a week until I get it. I know what it tastes like ’cause I’ve made it. It’s just a matter of asking Zac for some bourbon to make it. 🙂 (I should ask him for some scotch, too, because I’ve never made butterscotch from scratch…… These are two things that would probably appeal to his appetite, so a shot or two is probably not out of line. 🙂
Kinkaid was an awesome chef, and any memory that takes me back to him is a good one.
But I make big pancakes. The best. No one can make better pancakes than me. I’m here to make America plate again.
Yes, I am making fun of the former president, but for real tho. You don’t run a brunch program for years on end and get out of there unable to make anything breakfast-wise….. except an omelette. It’s not because I don’t want to learn, it’s because I’ve never worked at a breakfast place that had them on the menu. A correct French omelette takes being in a restaurant because you don’t learn how to make them in a weekend. It’s different when you make a hundred a day. The closest I’ve ever gotten to an omelette was three eggs that looked like a broken waffle cone. But even that is progress.
It’s why if I could meet Anthony Bourdain, if it was a thing that were possible, the only thing I would ask him is “could you teach me how to make an omelette?” You don’t learn things about cooks by talking to them. You learn things by cooking with them. Everything about them comes out when they teach technique. Plus, it’s just the thing about doing an activity together makes you connect more.
When I miss him, I turn on the audiobook of “Kitchen Confidential.” I start to cry and turn it back off. It takes about 30 seconds.
To switch to another favorite chef, Gordon Ramsey, he had an interesting idea on his episode of Last Meal (YouTube, Mythical Kitchen). He said that the future of cooking is buying and trading chefs all over the world like professional footballers. The host asked him if there was anyone he’d want to slide tackle, and he said, “I did. David.” I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my bed, because the “Becks” is implied.
Gordon is who he is. He’s a rough, tough footballer who had his career taken from him at a young age due to an injury. But now those injuries are worth 17 Michelin stars. Not bad for a rookie………. who could have played Roy Kent no notes.
Here’s the thing about being a cook. You have no friends and no family beyond the kitchen, because it takes over your whole life. This is because we work while other people play. We don’t fit in with the rest of the world who thinks there’s something really wrong with you if you don’t wake up before noon. You get lots of “it’s nice to see you finally showed up to something.” Bitch, I haven’t seen my mother for Christmas in eight years.
The thing about Bourdain, though, is that there’s so much hate for him in the cooking community because mental health isn’t valid. Someone in my line cook group actually said “shame on him.”
My reply was, “you know, Anthony Bourdain is never going to hear what you said, but your friends in this group will. And now they know exactly how you feel about depression and mental health, so they know not to come to you.”
This is why people die.
You’re fine with bipolar as long as we never seem depressed or manic.
You’re fine with ADHD until you can’t track with us, and then we’re stupid, because neurotypicals think, “that’s just the way it is.” ADHD has no reference and does not give a flying fuck about the way things are. You’ll struggle in school as much as you do at work, except no one at work likes you enough to learn your communication style and how to get what they want out of you. It is all on me, all the time, to know what is expected of me because “these are things all people know.”
You’re fine with autistic people until meltdown and burnout, because you don’t understand the inconsistency in our energy levels, or demand avoidance, or literally being confused about anything because the instructions are so clear……. to a neurotypical brain.
I am not saying that I am not responsible for anything. Just because my brain works differently than yours, that does not mean I get a free pass on doing stupid shit. However, it does mean that people will get frustrated with you very, very fast.
No one wants to work with Sheldon from “Big Bang Theory” or Sam from “Atypical.” We ask too many questions. We want logic to be able to buy in. It’s logic that not many coworkers have. So, you become flaky, stupid, and whatever else choice words the boss has for you when they’ve reached the end of their ability to communicate with you.
It’s schoolyard tactics. The best way to deal with the neurodivergent kids is to leave them alone, like Special Ed is catching. Neurotypicals think that neurodivergents are annoying af, but they also hate HR, so they might be nicer to you at work than they would be at home.
An autistic person is always going to have a fairly equal spread among good evaluations and bad ones, because our energy fluctuates so much. Everyone says, “why can’t you perform like this every single day?” There are a thousand reasons why, and none of them are valid to a neurotypical who sees you using your disability as an excuse.
Therefore, I like solitary work. Being with coworkers is often downright embarrassing because when they learn I’m neurodivergent, their voices take on a different tone. I’ve never told anyone at work that I was autistic, because I didn’t know I should. It’s only been within the last year or so that I’ve learned so much….. mostly because my Adderrall only works half the time at keeping my ADHD symptoms managed, so it cannot be the whole answer.
In some ways, I think it is harder to be low needs autistic than high. People recognize autism when the person has no ability to social mask. They put up with meltdown and burnout because that’s what an autistic person does.
It is very hard to tell that autism does the same thing to people who are low needs. It’s not that we don’t have as big a problem, it’s that we’ve learned to cover it up because most people think we’re weird. You do what you have to get by.
I feel particularly discombobulated most of the time because it depends on which processing disorder is driving the bus and how much energy I have. I absolutely can be an ADHD hyperactive mess (talking, stimming), and at other times I struggle to get out of bed.
All autistic people are white knuckling it at work, which is why my favorite YouTube psychologist has three or four degrees and loses jobs all the time. Money and autism are not related. You can have the highest paying job in the world, but so much depends on your reputation.
My big thing is calling an impromptu meeting. I am the type person that cannot return to a thought. So, if I am interrupted, I basically have to start from scratch because I cannot go in the same direction anymore- it’s lost.
I don’t want to socialize at work, either, because I’ve learned over time that it gives your coworkers more ammunition against you if you tell them anything with which you struggle. Office politics determine job security, not necessarily performance…… and with an autistic person, performance is relative. With an allistic person, “it’s just how things are. You can’t hack it, and we know it.”
The bitch of it is that I have really high self-esteem, and a lot of confidence. I am not raking myself over the coals, this has been my job history and that of many, many others.
You didn’t get an entry yesterday because, and I know this is lame, I forgot to charge my Bluetooth keyboard (I also completely burned out and needed some rest. I’ll still do the prompt at some point so I can do all of the “Bloguary” prompts, but I’ve moved on for now.
I cannot sit at my desk for long periods of time because my desk chair is an antique and it’s so uncomfortable my back starts tweaking almost immediately. Another reason I’m not really a gamer, which leads to the first thing I do for fun. I like video games, both the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series from Bethesda Game Studios (that means they’re here in Maryland, by the way…..). I’m branching out, though. I have downloaded a few older games because I only have a mid-range PC and I want to turn the graphics up to stupid ultimate settings. Anything that came out between 2015-2020 is perfect, so if you have any recommendations, I’d like to hear them. Right now I’m thinking about playing “Dark Souls Remastered,” but I love Skyrim like I love “The Office.”
This is the first time I’ve owned a copy in 64-bit, too, because “Oldrim” was a 32-bit application and you had to jump through hoops to get it to work on Windows 10. Now, it’s completely stable…. but I keep starting new games because there are so many mods that I want to install that will not load correctly in an already established save file. The most recent I downloaded to try is “Saints and Seducers, Extended Cut.” The Anniversary addition already comes with the Creation Club original mod, this is just basically adding back in “Cutting Room Floor,” which they also did in Skyrim and you can actually download that mod as well.
I spend a lot more time modding Skyrim than I do actually playing it. I just have to be careful with new textures for things like grass, trees, plants, etc. because that’s what really slows down your CPU and GPU…. dense forests that have to keep loading as you walk across them.
It is a known joke in the Skyrim community that the city of Riften is entirely responsible for why we spend thousands of dollars on graphics cards. It’s gorgeous, but even the leaves are animated in Riften, so it’s the most intense city on your computer and when it’s running at full load, you can tell where you are without a map. 😛
The best answer that I’ve found is to install a plugin that helps you take it easy on your VRAM. My graphics card is actually decent when you’re talking about a $200 computer (I think it was a bit more than that, but I think I ordered it on Black Friday). What happens is that you have 512 MB of dedicated VRAM, but your graphics card will share another eight gigs with your processor (no biggie, I have 16 GB of RAM and could upgrade if I felt the need. I don’t. The reason why is that most games now have settings that might not make it the best in the world, but playable if you don’t care about FPS. I don’t, because I can’t tell the difference. The jump from my old PC to my new one is not enough to make a difference, because even though I had an NVIDIA, it wasn’t the latest and greatest.
This leads me to the second thing I do for fun. I think about the computer I would buy if money were no object, because I know how to get the most bang for my buck. A media workstation that I would actually use for recording and editing would have the same graphics power I’d need to play Skyrim the way it was meant to be played. There are so many mods that bring Skyrim into the future as textures keep updating to be richer and more immersive. I’ve watched ESO play Skyrim Anniversary Edition VR, and it blew my mind.
So, if I get bored, I go to Apple or Dell’s web site and see what’s new. My problem with Apple runs thusly. They don’t use Intel chips anymore, so I have reached my limit on the number of things that would run well on Windows (dual booting my machine, because the command prompt on Macs is UNIX as well. Don’t need to waste hard drive space on Ubuntu.). It’s not that Windows wouldn’t work. It would just run on a translation layer from Mx to an Intel codebase rather than on bare metal. I don’t think games would do well on this kind of setup, so actually the last Intel Mac with the fastest processor would be better for my use case scenario. Macs come with decent graphics cards, but they’re the same as mine- AMD, just with more dedicated VRAM and less shared.
However, it wouldn’t be very long before the last Intel Mac became irrelevant in terms of the processor speed, although I could make it last quite a few more years by spending an enormous amount of money on a video card because editing is mostly dependent on VRAM, taking pressure off having the latest and greatest CPU.
What is true of editing video is true of gaming. You’ll get better results with an expensive video card than an expensive CPU. The only thing that’s stopping me from adding an external video card to my PC is that I don’t know how well it would work through USB-C. The reason I’d change form factors entirely for an editing workstation is that I’d like a tower. Graphics cards, the really expensive ones, are impressively large and draw a lot of power. In a modern workstation/gaming computer, you need at least a thousand watt power supply.
I’d also want the latest and greatest motherboard, because the ones that are current now will last a few more iterations on chips. Therefore, I’d pick out the best AMD I could find, my preference over Intel because I got into them when they were cheap and the products are so good that I’m still dedicated even though the price has gone up. I also want a brand new motherboard desperately because I love all the cool things you can do with them, and they even have graphical interfaces now. It’s insane. I know that a thousand watt power supply may be overkill in some cases, but if I have a tower, I’m also using it as a charging station for nearly everything I own. So, I need a little overkill because I want to be able to hook up things like a PCI card that adds more USB-C ports rather than having the cabling of external. The only hub I’ve ever really loved is my TARDIS, and I don’t have it anymore. Now, it’s out of date because it was USB-2. Therefore, it would be useful for things like a mouse, keyboard, remote, etc., you just wouldn’t want to do data transfer with it.
Ok, here’s my thing with peripherals that have proprietary USB dongles. You suck. I’m going to lose them. I now have a very strict policy that I will not buy anything that depends on a low profile USB piece of crap taking up space on my hub. Therefore, I only need the USB-2 slots my desktop has for the mouse and keyboard. Because most manufacturers know that’s what they’re for, they add something to them so that the drivers load first because you need those the fastest.
My computer absolutely did not come with enough hard drive space, because I knew I could add it cheaper aftermarket, and I already had as much drive space as a could use…………… sort of. I have a 6TB drive that I could use as USB-3, but it would not be fast enough, I don’t think, to run applications like games because of the data transfer rate. However, I bought the wrong cable on Amazon and I need to return it for something else. It will add a drive that can run under its own power, like an SSD. I need something that plugs in so it’s not drawing from my tiny little power supply, supposed to be a feature, not a bug, because it’s environmentally responsible. If I wanted USB-C speed data connections, I’d need a splitter (“SPLITTER!”), because my only USB-C connection is the power supply. I don’t know that the data connection would be faster or not, because I don’t know if the power cord would interfere with it somehow or not. I’ll have to do some research. I know that Raspberry Pis are also powered by USB, so I’ll have to see if they have transfer speed issues as well when they split.
Because I look at computers for fun, I have become obsessed with all the Raspberry Pi form factors, from the 5 all the way down to the Zero because they’re made for tinkering, and that’s been something I do for fun for YEARS.
I started when I was only 19, so I’ve been in the game a while. I’ve done my time, technologically speaking, and now I have a history I can tell for fun on my web site that not most people have, because I was a computer nerd before it was cool and now even computer nerds are interested in people like me because the scene is getting so much younger that they like stories about what it was like working on those old motherboards and operating systems… for instance, here is my favorite story about my mother in life.
Red Hat is free for community users, but if you paid for it at somewhere like Best Buy, you got a license for support. Since Joe and Luke, my mentors in all this weren’t available to the extent I wanted to learn from them, so I needed someone to call when and if I hosed my OS by being an idiot. So, my mom went to Best Buy and bought me a professional copy. It was a Christmas present, and she told the salesman she was looking for a copy of Red Hat for her daughter for Christmas. He said, “wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.” My mom said, “She’s 20.”
I needed the professional support because I couldn’t rely on the community. That’s because there used to be a linux hazing ritual, before we cared about getting the general public involved in our shit. If you asked for support, they would tell you that you needed to type “rm -rf /.” The revenge for asking for help is that means “erase everything on my system.” If you fell for it, you were in a world of gut-wrenching pain. So, I used the professionals for about six months, until I knew enough about linux that I could at least read a command string and tell what it did. Now, command strings are my favorite way to work in linux because I type so much faster than I can leaf through menus.
I was lucky enough that I don’t remember who told me about it, but because I already knew it was a hazing ritual “joke,” no one could rattle me like that. But idiot users, unless they were on a server, didn’t generally create user accounts because the server administrator did it for them.
They’re doing everything as root (Administrator in Windows, except even that has confirmation buttons), where when you type a command, the operating system does it instantly. Linux will absolutely let you point a gun at your feet and let you use it.
That’s because most of the time new users didn’t read documentation and didn’t know that once they were root, they had to create a user account that had admin privileges; you had to get them by using a specific command, not every single time you typed something. If you’re using your user account, there are all kinds of file restrictions that will keep you from not overwriting a system file or deleting it- fuck the Recycle Bin. We’re busy.
Modern linux has come a long way, but it’s because we finally got tired of coming across as assholes and wanted to reach out to the public and show people how cool open source software really is.
But let me tell you how the popularity of linux grew in the beginning. IT people, for the most part, spend 100% of the time working out Windows and Mac problems for other people. In the beginning, it was small community started in Finland and it was our space. Not wanting more people to join us was not born out of actively trying to be mean. It was more that it was the one place where we could talk amongst ourselves and not do anything like Microsoft or Apple. And in those days, Macs didn’t run on UNIX, they had a completely different system underneath the hood, just like DOS is completely different from either UNIX or linux (same operating system, a few different commands). No one wanted a UNIX codebase at Apple until Steve Jobs told them they did.
It worked out better for me because with dual-booting a Mac, I gained something instead of lost. That doesn’t take away the fact that since unix/linux was so incredibly different, we were the royalty of our own domains…. and we liked it that way.
I also know that there’s a truthbomb that’s not being acknowledged in our community, and that’s the fact that the unix/linux community became the computer community of STEM savant autistics and so we were demanding and rude even when we weren’t. That’s because neurotypicals were invading our space and that change was as hard to handle as having to help people bridge the gap from Windows to linux so they stopped being frightened of it.
If you actually have the latest and greatest AMD machine and a graphics card that would blow anyone’s mind, you can game on linux just as well as you can on Windows thanks to Steam. There are tweaks on some games, but even I’ve played Skyrim and Oblivion on Steam for Linux, and I was impressed…. but not that impressed because I didn’t have the latest and greatest hardware so my computer struggled managing both the game and the Windows emulator running underneath. That wouldn’t be a problem today.
If you go that route, you won’t save much money, but you’ll save at least $100 if you buy a computer piecemeal so that the price of Windows is not built into the price of the computer. You can start with Ubuntu installed rather than having to go through the kindergarten-fueleed nightmare that is a Windows first-run.
Plus, with the latest and greatest hardware, there won’t be a problem with the CPU power it takes to run applications that were meant to run on multiple operating systems and are naturally heavy because of the dependencies underneath.
It’s a double-edged sword, because doing individual packages for Debian and Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS works so much faster than the translation layer, but it’s easier and faster for the developers if they don’t have to code both. It’s a bug and a feature.
I can’t really put my finger on it, but I prefer flatpaks to snaps. It may be my imagination, but it seems that especially Firefox loads faster….. when the Debian package loaded as fast as it did on Windows and now that original deb file is not even available…. and I’m not sure that you can uninstall it, but I’ve never tried. I just hide it from my favorites and use Chrome (because it still comes in a cough .deb *cough.). If you download the latest binary from Firefox’s web site, then you just have to live with having two copies on your system, die mad about it. It’s why I’m so glad that even though the Waterfox project has merged with Firefox now that it’s 64-bit all on its own, there are still copies of the icon online so that I don’t get the two copies confused.
That’s because I use Chrome when I need to access something I’ve accessed a million times and Firefox is for when I want to be completely safe and secure by turning off all ads and scripts. There’s not a NoScript plugin for Chrome (or at least, I’m not aware). I don’t even install my password manager in Firefox, because I don’t even want it to show up in my extensions list if I want security.
Plus, it’s annoying when you have to set a tab to “Safe” because you’re on a web site where you need to run scripts to make the web site functional, like Facebook. So that’s why I use Chrome, when I’m not doing anything nefarious, it just cuts out all the crap and safety issues like pop-ups. They’re two completely different use case scenarios and why I’m glad HTML has progressed so much.
I remember the days when you had to include redirects in your code because it would look different in Internet Explorer than Netscape so you’d have to detect it first. They had different protocols underneath displaying web sites, so you had to code pages in both that looked the same and behaved differently. It was a right pain in the ass, to be honest.
I so love coding for fun, but WordPress doesn’t let you switch into code mode and add all the HTML/CSS that you want. First, it will break the paragraph “block,” and then it will say it can’t recover from it.
You can absolutely show code on WordPress, you just have to add a “code block” so it knows that you’re trying to show code on a web site, not add coding to the entry itself.
I like the code blocks because it shows off my linux ninja skills, starting with my idealistic Red Hat phase in college. I just realized that absolutely none of my college IT experiences are tied to educating people about computers. I do that because of my jobs in IT all having to do with translating “Geek to English.” What my most precious memories involve is finding autistic friends and not knowing I needed them so badly. Because I didn’t know, I didn’t know to talk to them about it. I just understood them on a deep and spiritual level.
I’ve spent way more nights on the desk when it was quiet shooting the shit about science fiction, so I know for sure that this is a community to which I belong. What I lose in that transaction is being fired, because I don’t want to be “Dooced,” and because of Dooce, companies are very aware when their employees have blogs and they check them, regularly.
Depending on how you spin your company, they will either love you or hate you. The problem is that when I point out problems, I also point out solutions that I think would be helpful and it is not taken by management well. It’s a double-edged sword, because just like my friends, they come for the things that adore them when we’re in new relationship energy, and then when you figure out problems, the top downs stop wanting to do conflict resolution real fast.
“If you treat your employees like kindergartners, they’ll act like it. If you treat your employees like you value their opinion, they’ll act like it.”
However, I have had one boss that saw all the good and the bad on my web site for months before he reached out to me, and that’s why I got the job. He knew I could dish it, and he could take it.
The man who hired me was the CEO of his own company, and I think he wanted me to be his sounding board because he knew I would be kind and not nice because he’d watched me do it.
He showed me absolutely that we were going to make it work because we were Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes.
“Sam is getting his ass kicked by a girl.”
“Ginger, get the popcorn.”
The thing is, we never had a fight over it, ever, in terms of him pulling rank over me. In fact, in my first meeting at that job, where the whole company was gathered, the CEO said “I hired Leslie because she’s an incredible writer and I thought it was only fair that I let her take pot shots at me.” Can you fucking believe that?
I am great at beginning jobs, which is why I wish I was a STEM savant because they keep their jobs for two reasons. The first is that the company literally can’t function without them. The second is that they’re so “rude and demanding” that they’ve gotten everything they’ve asked for int terms of autistic accommodations, because they were the ones that were kind and not nice. I would have an incredible amount of job security if I was someone like Linus Torvalds (Finnish inventor of linux), not so much as someone who failed logic once and got a D when I took it over.
I’ve had the most success on CodeAcademy, because their interface makes it a “Facebook Game,” sort of like Duolingo for Python (or whatever). You get badges of achievement like you do in Steam/Xbox. Aaron, a coder and coworker back then, told me that I was a much better writer because I was dedicated and I had to choose, because it would take years for me to know enough to get a real job. I felt I couldn’t choose coding when the exercises on that web site got too hard, too fast.
It is interesting to note that Dana made it all the way to the end of the first lesson. What Aaron didn’t say is that “Dana has it. You don’t.” But I knew it, and her interest in coding was nonexistent after that. But, if you know her, don’t ever let her bullshit you that she can’t have a good career as a coder if she uses her hyperfocus to learn to speak Python, the language of the web. She’s already completed the first lesson. 😛
I had such high hopes for Dana and me because the reason we moved to Houston was so that Dana could teach, because all you needed was a Bachelor’s degree and a certificate to teach in Texas and you needed a Master’s in Oregon. So, when we first moved there, we were trying to become middle class.
What happened is that she didn’t get into the one program to which she applied, and never tried another one. It was too much rejection after her DUI, and I truly empathize with what it must have been like to be in that much pain with a partner who was incapable of recognizing it at the time. However, I did try, but not until I got overwhelmed and reached out to Dana’s mother. I told her that I was just as sick as Dana, and that I couldn’t handle her all by myself and I needed help.
It was another two-edged sword because in one conversation she said she would help and kissed me on the lips to show that she was dedicated. Then, in another conversation that Dana didn’t hear (she actually didn’t hear either of them. I wanted time with her parents alone), her mother said that she really didn’t know how to raise Dana and that she’d never be the mother that Dana needed and she should find someone else.
I’d never wanted to punch someone in the face before, but that came close because first of all, she wasn’t brave enough to say that to Dana, so she decided to wreck her wife instead. Fuck me running, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to hear, because I know that my mother felt the exact same way on some level.
Neither my mother nor Dana’s had any idea what the hell to do with me, but they tried so hard, and I accepted that effort for all it was worth. It became my widow’s mite. Their contributions to trying to understand my queerness seemed small, but they meant more because they were giving me everything I needed when they were equipped. So, they did understand me better than anyone else except my partner until they realized they were above their pay grade. So, I heard Dana’s mother’s voice and saw my mother in my head, because both of our mothers treated us the same way.
Dana laughed when she came home from college in a backwards baseball cap and her mother said, “ah, my son is home.” Both of us are still cis women, even when we wear hats. She laughed it off, I didn’t.
That’s because I’d had previous conversations with Dana’s ex (we get along well because we’re both IT nerds), so I know that her parents have always taken digs at her partners and it isn’t personal to me. One of the jokes she said to me that I’ll always remember because it blew off all my anger is that I’d told her that “at this rate, I’ll need to win a Pulitzer to be mildly acceptable.” She said, “don’t worry. They’ll find a way to have a problem about that, too.” You cannot imagine how good it felt to have an ally in my own struggle with my in-laws. I know I talked a little about it to Dana’s sister, but not everything because I didn’t want to make her “monkey in the middle.” It was excruciating watching Dana need approval from people who’d never give it.
It’s why I love Supergrover so incredibly deeply. I’ve always confided in her like the mother I didn’t have, in effect, reparenting myself to get everything I didn’t get by watching how a mother loved her own kids and realizing the lessons I would have learned had I had children of my own. It’s easy to talk about issues with a big sister/favorite aunt/whatever type relationship than with your bio mom, I think, because even though you’re getting female advice, it’s not tinted with the want to make you into them.
I have been searching for that mom my whole life, the one that could accept me for my whole self. I have gotten that from myself and the friends around me that are moms, because it’s a different energy. It’s a higher frequency when you can look at yourself as your own parent.
The difference in Dana’s relationship with her parents and mine is that I wouldn’t take any shit, and she would take it up to her eyeballs because that’s what she’s programmed to do. So, we had at least two blowouts because I was tired of not being able to take up any room in that family and watching you crush Dana is unacceptable. It often takes an outsider to see family dysfunction because they’ve been doing it so many years they can’t see it.
I wasn’t as harsh with her mom as I was with her dad, because he was the kind of person who always had to be right, and he would fight you to the death over it by trying to legally trap you. So, when he started bullying me, I started bullying him back. I do not think he expected this, but I’m an adult, and you don’t get to treat me and my wife this way. The one time they stayed with us, I threw them out.
Dana was furious because she was happy continuing the pattern of being devastated and trying to fit in. I needed them to get there, faster. The reason I was so angry is that they ate our food, used our utilities, and still treated us like crap. Sometimes, the only way to get a bully to stop is to call them out on the carpet. They chose their church over their child, and I was tired of watching Dana be tortured by it, because it drove her to do all sorts of things that furthered this toxic relationship between all four of us.
I call out the toxicity, but I was the bad guy because I always am. If Dana wouldn’t protect herself, I’d protect her.
And the thing is, very few times in my life have I been in relationships where I had a relationship with their family that actually seemed like an in-law. Most of the time, their families have been deeply homophobic and dinner was always awkward.
So, what I do for fun is all tied to every one of these paragraphs. I write down my memories the way my AuDHD brain works and go through a million topics because everything feeds everything with no executive function.
Every thought comes with bonus content.
For instance, I’m also a huge reader, but I’ve forgotten to mention it. I’m not currently reading anything because I’m interested in other media right now, working on my own voice. I go through binge/purge phases because if I write while I’m reading, then I tend to pick up the voice of the last writer I just read rather than my own.
The book I’ve really enjoyed the most recently is “Mad Honey” by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult.
I also sit and talk to the bees when it’s nice outside, because there’s lavender in the backyard.
I really need to start making outlines before I write, because gardening leads to great things in blogging and plot holes in fiction. The reason there are no plot holes in my blog is that I don’t care if you find them. Just because I didn’t tell you the whole story according to everyone in the room doesn’t make it less untrue. It is me crafting the narrative without taking anyone else’s feelings into consideration. It sounds harsh and cold, but I don’t mean it that way. The reason I only include my perceptions of people’s feelings rather than what they actually are is because I am not a mind reader.
If they were bloggers, their stories would be up to a hundred percent different from mine because we were watching something from different perspectives.
“What color was the light?”
This is why I don’t care what anyone says about me, either, because they’re just as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine. For instance, I know for sure that Supergrover’s story is completely different from mine because she stopped telling it; she could then easily blame me for being a dictator when I laid out my fears, hopes, and dreams. In fact, she actually said that I was not the only arbiter of our relationship, and that’s the message I’ve been trying to give her for 10 years. She doesn’t have as much power in the relationship because she’s not vulnerable. If she laid out her thoughts and feelings, mine would adjust. Because now I just feel like I’m intruding, I’ll write her a long letter every few months because I can’t be sure God is listening, but I can be sure she is. I’ve been saying that for 10 years as well.
I destroyed that relationship out of my own insecurities because she would not do anything to calm them. She’d waffle between feeling like my Mama Wolverine and wanting out of my life for good within weeks of each other. She has also said that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future….. because I’m part of her wild and crazy brain. When she said that, I told her she was part of my wild and crazy soul. It’s true. I’m yin and she’s yang, except with a lot more gray area in the middle. What I’ve always tried to stop is feeling worthless because the cycle ran thusly:
I would open up about something deep, and she wouldn’t respond at all because “she didn’t have time.” I didn’t get frustrated that she didn’t have time. I got frustrated that her letters were short and didn’t tell me anything. I know that’s half because she’s protecting herself and half because I’m a blogger. My blog is the bane of my existence because it brought us together and tore us apart all in one breath. She knows she’ll always have to be a reader because we know each other, and as I told her in my last letter, “none of this will mean shit to you until it’s been five or 10 years and you see yourself as a different person. Then, the 3D character you don’t see will emerge, because you’re looking for the good things now because you want to remember. I told her about the 614,000 words I’d written in 2023, so I said something like I’ve talked about our problems, but I’ve loved you up just as much…… in all six books.
I also think that if her life is cut short like my mother’s that other people who knew her will want to read my perceptions all the more, because they’re the ones that are going to want to “spend time with her” the most. I feel like I started writing more deeply about her after my mother died, because she wasn’t my mother, but she was someone’s. The worst time she never knew she hurt me (because I didn’t want to rock the boat) was when I told her that she had a “suburban mom vibe.” She said that was probably the meanest thing I’d ever said to her, and because she is who she is, I thought she was joking. She proceeded to rip me a new asshole, when in my mind that archetype was the one I needed the most desperately, the one I’d just lost.
I’ll never forget that because she was a fan first, she has read my story and accepted it as my reality, not hers…. but she’s found truth and beauty in it. When she hasn’t been angry, she’s been very kind about how brilliant a writer I am. But what I don’t know, and will never know at this point, is how she really feels about me.
I called her on it, and she noped out…. because she realized she was waffling and couldn’t give me a solid answer. But what I know for sure, like, Oprah-level sure, is that she’s worth it….. that the experience was worth it even if it’s over now.
I didn’t move to DC to be near her, because I already had my own thing going and my sister dropping in all the time (I actually see her more now). But what I didn’t expect is that we’d still be having the same fight 10 years later when it would have been so easy to solve everything in the length of one coffee/beer.
What I know is that I was too hard on her in my own insecurity, because if she didn’t want to make up her mind, I was out. I didn’t need to inflict fear of a phone call or get-together. I was furious that after 10 years she wouldn’t tell me the truth about anything.
She practically treated me like a stalker when I never was that…. at all. If I was, we wouldn’t have made up. But those feelings of fear remain, so I thought it was crazy when she said, “do you think I care if you look up public information about me?” Ummmm…. yes. Yes, I do. To the point where if I really thought about it, I might throw up. Going back to those days in my mind is torture, and I’ve been trying to forgive myself and can’t. I said some things that never should have been said on a wide variety of topics, and the fact that she hung in for the ride means more to me than she’ll ever know.
However, when I started doing actual conflict resolution and not letting her rattle me by escalating, I was dismissed. That leads me down two trains of thought. The first is that she likes the ups and downs because getting her anger out is a good thing. I don’t care if it’s at me. She’s got to emote sometime, and anger is an emotion. Her outbursts at me are the most emotion I’ve seen out of her in a long time. That’s because I know she’s going through the shit, so I pray for her. The second is that she’s simply avoidant because she doesn’t know how to open up, and that’s not personal to me at all. I can imagine that if she’s shut down with me, she’s shut down with more than just me.
The way you resolve conflict is learned in your first family, and it takes extensive therapy to make a relationship last because you’re constantly trying to merge two parenting styles. My family was all buttoned up for many years. We got over it. It was better to be mad in the moment and forgive quickly than it was to hold onto frustration for years and years. Therefore, it’s very hard for me to be in a relationship where people keep their anger, guilt, whatever bottled up. I can’t stop thinking about when the other shoe is going to drop. Neither does my beautiful girl, because her answer is to keep avoiding everything and my answer is “there’s no way back, only through.” I can’t do much to help the relationship heal, but like I said, I pray for her every night, and it’s been the same prayer every night for the last 10 years.
If there truly is a God, they can go places with her that I can’t. It comforts me to know that she’s not alone, because even if she doesn’t think God is listening, it’s a comforting image, anyway.
What I missed were all the ways we treated each other during new relationship energy. We lovebombed the absolute fuck out of each other. I have never found anyone like her, and I keep saying that, but some things are too unique. It’s not only that letting you know would be telling her story and not mine, it’s that there are some things about any relationship that I keep private so that there are some things only for me.
You absolutely can’t go back to lovebombing each other if you can’t do conflict resolution over and over. When I stood up, she did not rise to meet me. I didn’t so much let her go, but let her go back to the way she used to live.
I told her she was a phoenix, and I can’t wait to see her rise from the ash…… because she has, professionally. I’m not so sure about relationships, but I only have ours as an example.
I got that INFJ judgmental bastard urge to drag people into the light whether they want to go or not. However, I am not judgmental of people. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer most of my life and have done well in undergrad regarding the preparation for it. Therefore, I will lay out facts representing what I think about both sides of a situation. I am not saying “you’re a bad person.” I am basically reading my emotional docket and the case in front of me has as many complications as medicine. The diagnosis in medicine is the same as the verdict in law: it depends.
I am emotionally capable of being fair and balanced, but because I’m autistic, I’m often not thinking of how to phrase things so that they’ll come across as how I meant them to a neurotypical person. And here, on my blog, some of the literary devices I use don’t make sense unless you’re talking to me behind the scenes.
That’s always what brought Supergrover back around. She didn’t like reading the blog without the brochure, as I’ve said before. But if she talked to me, she’d see that I was being quite reasonable and had a good head on my shoulders. What she has not realized is the lengths I’ve gone to in order to protect her and harps on breadcrumbs I never would have seen……… unless we had talked about it.
In this way, I am my own main character (in the original writing prompt, the kid was a picky eater), because when I feel these emotional situations weighing themselves in my mind, I develop sensory issues because I need deprivation so badly to regulate my emotions. I don’t even listen to music when I write anymore. I just listen to my typing.
There are days when I can’t take exciting food, because I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs. A meltdown would be serving me something from a restaurant instead of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, because I was overstimulated before you brought home lobster.
I don’t have very good meltdowns. I have shutdowns. I am not very good at standing up for myself, nor being impolite or socially awkward in any way. Therefore, having a meltdown in front of someone would have to be major. I’d eat the lobster, I’d just hate that the food is one more thing I don’t have the bandwith with which to pay attention.
Meltdown often comes online, when I am overstimulated and itching for a fight. But I’m so dextrous with words that I’m not looking to destroy people (though some would say I am after a straight woman read an entire thread from me and a friend talking about how straight people could support queer people, and then asked me for ideas on making an ally flag. Now, in this instance, angry black woman and angry white lesbian are not dissimilar. I don’t want to do work for straight people. Look it up. Read the rest of the comments, at least.
She caught me on a very bad day and she was also uneducated as fuck, so I could have been nicer and I didn’t know how. I just had to be kind. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was heated…. where I took apart every one of her talking points in order to educate herself on being the parent of someone queer, because if you have a queer child, you can’t possibly have institutionalized homophobia, now can you? I also have mixed emotions about straight people wearing rainbow flags, because they have the option to take them off.
Most of the time, though, I go in and de-escalate a situation. I’ve whipped line cooks’ asses and it turned into an actually deep conversation. It was a Taylor Swift joke in poor taste and I took issue with that.
I am certain that I have responded like this to Supergrover, but because she didn’t see the meltdown, she didn’t see me as trying to be kind but not nice. I will agree that I was over the top, but I never said anything untrue about our anxious/avoidant attachment. I don’t expect her to treat my anxious attachment with kid gloves. I expect her not to withold information so that I know exactly what’s going on, because I can’t process situations on no information from the other person. I will send myself into a spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem about which I couldn’t overthink.
So, the less information she gave me, the more I spiraled out trying to fix things, because I assumed that everything was all about me. It’s not because it actually was. It’s that I had absolutely no information to the contrary to put things into context/perspective.
We don’t have a context, and that’s a good thing most of the time because we can talk about things without it affecting everyone else in our physical lives. But over time, it began to be a hard row to hoe, because I wanted peace……
I do not know how I could acquire one, because the going rates around here are quite expensive. That being said, there’s a method to my madness, though. Both people who are neurodivergent and/or suffer from mental illness have problems taking care of themselves regarding clutter and cleanliness. The things that neurotypical people find easy, like creating a routine for putting things away are anathema to the neurodivergent. That’s because we can create a system. We no not maintain them well, if at all. For instance, the perfect system for someone who’s ADHD or AuDHD means everything is right out in front of you, all the time……. because I’m suggesting object permanence is a problem………………..
No, seriously. I’ve read a ton of books on how to manage myself (they haven’t helped, but I’m trying). One of them is The Bible and it’s called “How to Keep House While Drowning.” That’s because it doesn’t offer you practical advice on cleaning like Kim and Aggie from “How Clean is Your House” (one of my favorite BBC shows, now archived on YouTube). No, it is a straight up workbook over why your emotions are getting the better of you when it comes to cleaning. Because first, it’s either demand avoidance or burnout. Then, it’s shame, guilt, and anxiety over the way you let your house get when you were literally incapable due to a straight up disability. Basically, “How to Keep House While Drowning” is a way to organize your life so that you don’t think the world is coming down around you every time you don’t organize something.
The second book is much more practical because women have different needs with ADHD than men. It’s called “The Queen of Distraction: How Women with ADHD Can Conquer Chaos, Find Focus, and Get Things Done.” It’s here where I learned that if you’re ADHD, get clear cabinets. Don’t give a damn about what other people think. If you can’t see your stuff, you won’t organize it. It will stay hidden from your mind forever…………….
Because I’m suggesting that object permanence is a problem………… The funniest thing is that the joke about object permanence was actually about me, not clutter. That Zac thinks of me living as much further away than I do. I should have told him to get me a clear cabinet……… For Houstonians, it’s about the distance from Lindsay’s house on the east side to my old house in Westbury. For Portlanders, it’s about the same distance as it is from Trendy Third St. SW to 181st and SE Stark.
This means that it takes 33 minutes at 0500 if you’re driving, but if we were both caught in morning or afternoon drive, I could probably beat him home on the Metro/bus. That’s the thing I love about the train/bus. Unless it’s snowing, the busses are reliable and I can pre-guess about what time I’m going to get somewhere. No freeway in DC can tell you that, and take that check to the bank and cash it… The longest I’ve ever been delayed on the Metro is 10 or 15 minutes, and that’s just because we were slow getting into the station by about five minutes at least twice because there was another red line train on our track. I wish I’d taken the first one….. obviously.
Until you read both books, you will literally not know how to handle your life, and of course there are a million books written on ADHD, but “Queen” is endorsed by the author(s) that wrote “Driven to Distraction,” the therapist and psychiatrist Bible on ADHD presentation. But what those authors were saying is that “Queen” does a better job of catering specifically to female ADHD. There’s just so much bullshit around female ADHD, because first of all, I believe that there are a lot more of us with hyperactivity that could use stimming to an enormous degree……. but it was beaten out of us by the expectations of the older women in our lives. Social masking has so much to do with how you’re raised. You learn that your natural behavior is unacceptable, and you do things that make you think you fit in, because you are only imitating their behavior, not understanding why things are done the way they’re done.
The first sign of ADHD in all people is making a diagnosis appointment and being late for it. Those things are universal. I believe that stimming, anger, etc. isn’t beaten out of boys because men are socialized to be angry, anyway, and because most women were enculturated by their mothers, they will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make their neurodivergent child into some version of them, because that’s how they were taught to behave. And perhaps it’s more than that…… because neurodivergence and mental illness are genetic, your mother might actually be neurodivergent and is trying to teach you her own coping mechanisms for feeling like an alien.
Read “How to Keep House While Drowning,” because until you work through your emotional issues with keeping tidy, then you’ll be ready for the content that “Queen” offers, because her system for organization actually works. I can’t remember if the author is ADHD or whether her organization skills came from designing systems for her ADHD children, but please hear me that the emotional work first is the best thing you can do for yourself, because it will put into perspective why you are not a bad person because you can’t do these things.
As we used to say in our church creed at Bridgeport, “be responsible and let go of guilt. Be mindful and carry no shame.” You will not be ready to address practical things until both of those ideas happen for you. Neurodivergent people will not make the commitment to organize until they don’t feel like shit about themselves 100% of the time.
It’s one of the reasons I hate “Hoarders,” to be honest. You get the neurodivergent/mentally ill wails of people who are nowhere near prepared to get rid of their stuff and are supposed to be grateful for the favor. I am sure that they will be after some therapy, but it would be like taking a baby bird out of a nest and saying, “fly, bitch! Fly!” There is no way that a television show can cover what needs to happen so that hoarding doesn’t recur. It takes years to get rid of those tendencies, and a television show coming in to clean your house once is not the answer. It will look the same way in a year. Also, I have seen a lot of autistic people (in retrospect) that have gone into complete meltdown and burnout…………… and it makes for good television. It’s one thing to code a fictional character as autistic. It is embarrassing as FUCK for people to film you and show your real unregulated emotions come out. All the social masking stops because they’re terrified. And to the producers, that’s entertainment. On this one issue, fuck them.
I can always find the silver lining, and that’s learning how professional organizers do what they do. I think I would be a much better housekeeper than I would at keeping my own systems going, because most neurodivergent people can clean someone else’s house, even if it’s a straight up hoarding nightmare, because they don’t have any emotional investment in the mess and how it got that bad. Perception is everything. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I will completely dissociate because I can.
Maybe we should offer an exchange or something. I am absolutely OCD about my own kitchen, the one thing I keep so clean you could eat off the floor that’s completely of my own volition because of “how I was raised.” (Shoutout to all of them….. Dana, my first chef, John Kinkaid, John Fot, Drew Collard, Damon Hersch, Anh Lu, Evan Henson, Ryan Victor (shoutout to the mixologist) and the thousands of hours I’ve spent on YouTube with top-tier chefs learning knife skills. I watch Bourdain and Ripert. It takes me about 30 seconds to go into the ugly cry).
But the kitchen is ironclad in my mind because I spent so many years doing it. It’s the one room of the house where I don’t attach any emotion to how messy it gets because it’s not all on me. I will do everyone’s dishes if they’re in the sink because I can’t stand soaking a pot (we’ve covered this before. It doesn’t work). Plus, I have the right and experience to say that I’m just going to be better at it than they are because one of my housemates is a cook, but she works in a hospital, so it’s not really the same thing as trying to close down a kitchen as fast as humanly possible. The only thing I can’t seem to get out is the discoloration on the glass-top stove, but I’m sure John Fot will write me a dissertation on it when he reads this, and it will be delightful because there’s nothing more that I love than reading about kitchen hacks.
Where I struggle is in the private places, because I don’t have a system for anything. I am a Virgo, so I am killer at creating systems that would work for neurotypical people because I’ve watched what works for them for many years. I even picked up a few things from Meagan in senior English that helped me. She color coded her subjects like Trivial Pursuit, something I do to this day by changing the folder colors in my file tree. What I cannot do is extrapolate all of that into having a life in which I can thrive on structure because that’s all my autism wants…….. and my ADHD nopes out quickly.
This has become a problem with every relationship I’ve ever had, because I didn’t have the words for “autistic meltdown and burnout.” I didn’t have words for things like “pathological demand avoidance” (I don’t know if mine is pathological yet, I just haven’t had treatment. Basically, you get said treatment and if it doesn’t work, it’s pathological.). I don’t know how much of my health insurance will cover an autism diagnosis, but I know that I need one, badly. I am at odds with myself over the two processing disorders all the time. I’m ready to go through the official process because not being diagnosed is causing more problems than it’s worth. I need to know as much about AuDHD as humanly possible if Zac and I start getting closer, or I meet someone else and actually want to pursue living with them.
But what I do know is that the reason my relationships tend not to be successful is that most people on the spectrum are not caught. They’re pegged as “weaponizing incompetence” or what’s called “learned helplessness.” Most people attribute too much malice into our behavior, when we literally don’t think the same way as you. But all of this “weaponized incompetence” would go away if I had a housekeeper, because I wouldn’t be creating resentment in my relationship over the house being so…………… meeeeeeee.
One of the reasons that I was really looking forward to living overseas with Daniel (we’d talked about Viet Nam) is that hiring servants is completely normal and adds to the local economy. If our house was big enough, they could live with us. That would be ideal, because I’d love a housekeeper to flip me shit when I don’t put things back where they go and lose them a minute later. My mind doesn’t record where everything goes, only a few….. and even that is sketchy.
I don’t know that even on a combined salary we could afford such a thing, unless we hired an au pair and said, “we actually don’t have any kids except a 25-year-old. Basically we’re the kids.” We might not get any bites, but it’s worth a shot. 😛
Most emotionally unavailable people start shutting down when they feel resentment, because they won’t just say it out loud. They don’t have any practice……. especially in lesbian relationships. I can hear resentment because I’ve heard it before. What no one has ever said to me is “clearly you need help, and I’m going to help you.” This doesn’t mean anything in terms of cleaning up one mess. I will never forget both Dana and Carol’s work on my past places to get them ready to turn over. They were beasts, and I can’t thank them enough- even more in retrospect.
When Dana came over to help me, we’d just begun that transition from friends who hung out occasionally to “you’re my new best friend. Call me every day.” A girlfriend that I’d loved so hard I broke my own heart due to terrible expectations left me in a wreck. it was only supposed to be a May-December romance, and I was foolish enough to think that we clicked, anyway. Disaster ensued. She was much older than me, but in a lot of ways, I was older than her because all INFJs are a thousand years old when they’re born. I think that’s why I seek out women who are age-gapped from me. I’ve been that old since I was nine.
Anyway, it was the hardest breakup I’ve ever had (so far), because I lost it. I was grieving the future that I wanted with her, and then I went to a party. At that party, I met a couple who had the same age difference as my girlfriend and me, and they were announcing they were having a baby. I did not know this beforehand, and I was so caught off guard that everyone thought I was crying over the good news of people I’d just met and it was a little bit over the top.
If you knew her like I did, you would have been wrecked, too.
My reaction was to go into total burnout. I didn’t leave my bed unless I had to for months. I barely made it to church, but that was the one social obligation I could keep despite it being murder seeing her all the time. We eventually made our peace, and I still think she’s cute as a button. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hell on earth, then.
I lived in what I told Dana was “dumped girl phase,” and that I’d never told anyone this before, but I cannot function. The most beautiful words in the English language came out of her mouth…….. “we’ll fix it.” It wasn’t that she was going to fix everything for me. She didn’t say, “I’ll fix it.” She whipped me into shape so that I became anal Annie about my whole apartment just to say thank you and it will never get this bad again. It would have been nothing if I hadn’t changed my behavior as a result of my deep gratitude.
But that apartment was basically a studio, with a folding door between my bedroom and the living room. I gave away a lot of stuff, and then I didn’t have much to keep clean. I didn’t need a housekeeper because as long as I didn’t buy anything new (not that I don’t like nice things….. I don’t like to manage them), then my apartment would stay clean.
The second time that Carol and Dana helped me was when I’d just broken up with Katharin. I went into meltdown and burnout because I didn’t know what to do. We’d rented this house that was only doable on two incomes, and it was just the right house for a couple……… just not for us, as it turns out. So, I was happy about the breakup because I knew that Katharin didn’t really want to move to Portland. She just said she did because I wanted to go, because I knew that Houston was a minefield of triggers and at that time, Portland wasn’t.
She can blame our breakup on me all she wants to, but the truth is she couldn’t just say “I let you go find the house and I went home to Corpus to spend the summer and I realized I couldn’t leave my family.” She had backed out of moving twice before she finally said she wasn’t coming because I “cheated on her.” What really happened is that Dana read me the riot act and I have never taken in a conversation so hard.
Here is some version of what she said, most of it verbatim but I don’t remember everything………
It’s not normal for your girlfriend to go through your checking transactions to see if you’ve been in your best friend’s neighborhood when you have a thousand friends in Southeast. It’s not normal for someone to shoot down an incredible opportunity for you because you’re going to be gone for three months. She turned it into “if you really loved me, you’d stay.” It’s not normal for someone to fall in love with you and then say, “I’d think you were less flaky if you finished your degree. It’s not normal for your girlfriend to keep you away from a best friend you met years and years before you met her. I’m tired of watching you hurt.
Editor’s Note:
I’d been offered an internship at Human Rights Campaign to help shape Sunday School curriculum in modern/liberal interpretations to include queer people. It would be for people like the More Light Presbyterians, the Lutherans (I could have written for Nadia Bolz-Weber and don’t think I’m not mad about it), and the Reconciling Movement in the United Methodist Church…………….. the closest I’ll ever become to being a Methodist minister because they made it clear they didn’t want me when I was 15.
So, that little speech made me realize that my best friend had my best interests at heart, and Katharin had stopped drinking, but was still a dry drunk with the need to control me. Her family also gave her the most fucked up childhood you can imagine, so both of our trauma reflexes were well=ingrained.
Katharin’s family wasn’t wealthy, so when she turned 18, they took out a whole bunch of credit cards and loans in her name. Then, she came out to them and pretended she was dead for a year, saying that they didn’t have to pay her back because it was “the gay tax.”
In retrospect, at that time in my life, Katharin was way above my pay grade, and no one noticed because she was “more successful than me.” She was a middle school counselor, and good at her job. But when her frustrations boiled over, it was “All Pick on Leslie Day.”
The relief of that relationship ending, yet the terror, made it where I just collected shit everywhere. Just soda bottles everywhere I didn’t pick up because I didn’t care. I couldn’t.
Autistic meltdown and burnout makes for good television, tho……….. eyeroll.
So, in order to get me out of the house, Carol and Dana came over and we did it all in one day, maybe one and a half. I don’t remember what happened next; I might have moved in with them, or I might have stayed at another friend’s house. But what I know is that everyone who met Katharin in Oregon didn’t like her….. for me or just in general. That’s because no one in Portland is impressed by what you do.
And sometimes, Katharin was just as straight up mean in person, in front of my friends, that she was at home. It just goes to show how easily I got used to her words making me feel terrible, because my words about myself weren’t that different.
In that case, hiring a housekeeper wouldn’t have helped, because Katharin’s anger and resentment came from a completely different place. But in all the others, I have found that because people’s problems are so complex and emotional, not being able to clean up after yourself for whatever reason is the one problem you actually can throw money at, because you’re not hiring a servant. You’re making an accommodation for your disability that will take resentment about chores off the table.
But before I have the ability to hire a housekeeper, I at least need to start reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” instead of “The Joy of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place.”
Because I’m a line cook and a writer, I know the value of a dollar. If you’re going to be a writer and do manual labor, the kitchen is a viable option. Bourdain was onto something, this writing about the kitchen.
It gave me a place to go after my shift that a drink never did. Because even if I switched to Diet Coke or N/A beer, cooking is hard fucking work. I don’t need to be up all night losing rest I’m going to need in the morning for something as trivial as having beers. It’s a great thing once in a while, but not every night. In order to sleep, I need to wind down. I cannot have the endless cycle of “go out at three, wake up at 10, go out to eat, then do it again.”
I’d come home between 9:00p and 12:00a, depending on whether I was closing or not (I usually was). I liked working lunch the most, because first of all, few people do. The restaurant is not as busy, therefore the cooks stand around more of the time and the waitstaff complains because the tips aren’t as good. But “standing around” does not mean “lazy.” No, what I mean by “standing around” is that there are no orders coming in. When no orders are coming in, that’s when we are actually able to get things done. For me, “slow” meant cleaning and organizing. Moving things out of the way to deep clean in places that don’t normally get touched, etc.
I could have phrased it better when I said “lazy,” because what I meant is that it’s akin to being a stay at home mom. Just because the kids are sleeping doesn’t mean that you can “sleep while the baby sleeps” all the time. Pretty sure that when the baby sleeps is the only time you have to clean the kitchen. And yes, I have just compared customers to babies, because sometimes, that’s what we do….. babysit.
In a restaurant, I have no problem with “I don’t like the food.” I will remake it a hundred times until you’re satisfied. What I will not do is have you treat my waitstaff like shit to make it happen. There’s an epidemic, and Karen and Chad are driving it. I know it makes you feel powerful to dress down a waiter, because they’re paid to be nice to you and it feels good to beat up on someone that probably won’t “hit back” when you’re rude to them.
That does not mean you were not rude. It means that no one called you on it because they were dependent on your tip. The customer is not always right. They’re always right when they don’t like the food. They’re always wrong when they think that ad hominem attacks are going to make it arrive faster or taste better.
Most of the ire you have is actually at the kitchen, and I know you’re not going to come argue with us. You’ve seen “The Bear.” Line cooks are a unique breed, both fiercely proud and protective of the food if they’re a “lifer.” By protective of the food, we know when something is right and when you missed something on the menu. A waiter will not tell you that if you looked at the menu, you would have seen it was topped with capers, or whatever the fuck it is that you don’t like. All it took was a little more reading, and you think the problem is your waitress.
And then there are the women that won’t tip you because you “flirted with their husbands.” That’s not happened to me, but it’s happened to my friends (I worked front of house in college). In fact, there are a thousand ways a customer will try to make you feel bad for not comping something, not giving them free something, not telling them there’s no free refills when it says it twice on the menu….. or worse, using your children.
If there are free refills on the kids’ drinks and not the adults, you can bet little Timmy is going to “drink nine Cokes.” If there is a corkage fee, some customers don’t know what that is. Fine. No problem. But if you bring your own wine and complain that we wanted three dollars for you to open it, that’s three dollars for the privilege of not buying wine from us. It is not worth destroying someone’s self esteem, and it generally happens to all waitstaff multiple times a day. Working with the public has become a nightmare because of the epidemic of entitlement.
The hard truth is that you don’t listen to waitstaff when they go on social media and tell people about the things others say to express all this, and it has spread. Do you think doctors and teachers like working with Chad and Karen, either?
Karen and Chad have seen all the drug commercials. Hire them at a clinic while they still know everything……… #eyeroll I dated a school counselor for a while, and she said that in the history of parents’ conferences (majority white school), she’d never had a kid who’d ever done anything wrong………
My mother, who worked in a majority black school, did not have this problem.
So, the biggest thing my friends do for me is twofold. The first is that they don’t treat me as lesser than because I want to focus on writing. And in fact, they take it seriously. They don’t see it as “just this little thing I do,” they’re seeing that I’m becoming more popular and they’re about to have to hang on for the ride. I am more than the sum of my parts, and I’m beginning to show it to myself by believing my friends when they say I’m an incredible writer. Until now, I haven’t even given them that. I did not have the confidence to believe that I could be a popular writer, so even when I became one with my last blog, I didn’t believe it.
My sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing something in which I’d actually locked it down so that only seven people read it, and it felt just like being ripped a new one by a customer…. and I reacted the same way. I folded into myself and stopped writing for four years.
I kick myself every day that I stopped, but it turned out that I was in the wrong family, not that I was doing the wrong thing. I’d already chosen what I was going to do and they didn’t like it, with the exception of Dana, but that support waned as I actually became a writer instead of just saying I was going to do it.
I wasn’t posting every single day. I wasn’t marketing myself because I didn’t believe in it (if people are going to show up, it’s because you’re sharing, not because I’m so full of myself…..). But what I didn’t realize is that writing is a business. If I want to be successful, I have to market myself. I don’t know how to do that with a blog, but I know I made some headway on SoundCloud, so that’s a distinct possibility for the future.
I eventually want to start Lanagan Media Group, but that will come later, when I actually need content creators under me to support what I’m doing. For instance, I am glad that Bryn has offered to record my entries, but I don’t have server space for her to store the files. I also don’t really want her to work for free, as it will be taxing (I write long essays to be recording them with ease and speed).
But that’s not all- I’m into a million different things, but I’m not a subject matter expert on anything. I’m not even a subject matter expert in my special interest because ADHD makes it where I can only read for a certain amount of time when it’s dry and boring. I will get the information down, but I won’t do with with speed or ease. 😉
For instance, I love science fiction, but I wouldn’t be the one to write blog entries or do podcasts on it. I could be a guest and shoot the shit about Doctor Who, but I am not the stereotypical fan who can tell you what Rassilon was wearing in his first appearance, which was probably 30-40 years ago (I don’t remember, he’s just an example)…. and that’s the level of detail I’d want to have if I was tapping directly into the fandom.
I’m going to kick another fandom’s beehive with my first novel, so I’m saving up any credit I have as a writer for that. It’s real and it’s deep, but it’s not fan fiction. You’ll just have to wait and see. The clues are all here, but I’m betting that only Dana would be able to tell you the entire storyline blind. That’s because she told me a fact that laid out the entire story for me.
Believe it or not, being waitstaff and line cooks are a central part of the novel…. which is why this one fact really ties the book together, does it not? It would make more sense if I could tell you what that fact was, but it’s a central plot point, so I cannot give it away. I can just talk around it…. so, don’t push me. There’s a drink here, man.
The kind of company I want is kind of like Nerdist and kind of like Linus Media Group. Nerdist got into podcasts, LMG is YouTube.
There are so many things I could monetize with either of those things, particularly on YouTube, because the research on autistic women is so muddled. Right now, I can only talk about my own experience with self-diagnosis (which is seen as valid because even most doctors don’t know the intricacies of how female neurodivergence presents). Plus, one of my friends brought up a good point- we’ve never been diagnosed, we’ve just been dealing with it our whole lives. What’s a diagnosis going to change? With autism, this is a very valid point, because if you get an official diagnosis, your life may or may not change the direction of your life. It’s a hard row to hoe.
I just have too many symptoms to ignore it, and coupled with my ADHD, it has been debilitating. I do not have the logical kind of autism, and by that I mean those that understand programming and other kinds of STEM to a savant level. No, I’m one of those people who is always lost in their own little world.
What I mean by the people around me already doing the most important thing is by saying “it’s ok for you to be who you are. We like all of it.” Whether I’m cooking or writing or staring off into space, that love is secure. What I cannot do is convince people that I will always have disabilities, because they are not completely obvious. Even my CP isn’t that obvious unless you know me really well.
I am starting to feel that everything is connected now that I’ve met another autistic person who also has CP. He works in a day center as a counselor, and he pegged me down to the way I walk. It was scary, because my life changed in a nanosecond. Then, I looked up stereopsis, and that’s a symptom of CP, too.
It’s hard being a very specialized person in a world that wants you to be a worker bee. But I’m figuring out what I can do, and gravitating toward it.
I can cook.
I can write.
I can be nice to servers when they’re on someone else’s line.
That’s enough for me in this life, because the writing trumps everything else. I could not live life as fully as I can right now without being able to look back over the year and see what’s been good for me and what hasn’t.
I don’t know that you’re aware of it, but I had a 60 day streak, took off one day, and now I’m on a 70 day streak. I thought I’d take a day off today, but then I realized it was “Bloguary” and it can’t be this month. But we’ll see.
I’ll think about it while I’m cooking. The love coming at me flows into my food, because I feel secure in everything when I feel secure in love. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.
Again, I have been invited to be on “The Dark Room” podcast. However, we are still confirming everything. I will post as soon as I’m sure of the date so that you can look out for it as soon as it drops. It’s a pleasure just to be nominated. I have no idea what they want to talk to me about, but it doesn’t matter. I have an answer to every question. It may not be the question that you asked, however……….
I know it’s popular to go out on New Year’s Eve, but tonight I am actually sitting in the dark, with the noise turned down to zero except for the fireworks (oy with the fireworks already). It’s a combination of a lot of factors. The first is that Zac is off on a mini-vacation, I have a headache that might have prevented me from going out, anyway, and I’d like to close out the year with something good.
My last post of 2023 lets me say two things. The first is that long ago, I said that I was writing my love story with Supergrover, not that it was mutual, but that it was mine. Over 10 years, we grew to accept each other; I couldn’t imagine my life without her and I didn’t right up until I wasn’t given a choice. I couldn’t let her get away with letting me feel so bad all the time. I wasn’t guessing right, and I was getting punished all the time for not being able to read her mind. It began to outweigh her mama wolverine claws coming out when other people hurt me, because she was closer and more important to me than absolutely any of the others.
I would have been much happier if for once, she turned the wolverine claws on herself. I could acknowledge when I was the problem. She couldn’t. She’d tell me she was licking her wounds, but not what they were. So, I listened to all of her pain without her being specific enough for me to change anything. She lumped it all together, as if she wasn’t my Evelyn, my everything everywhere all at once. She overfocused on the negative and ignored the positive, because I don’t think she believed my feelings could run that deep. But it’s okay. It’s what I meant by “she’ll never know what she lost,” because she got under my skin. I mean, absolutely set me on fire. I used it to become a better writer, and if I do sell books in the future, absolutely every dollar has been inspired by her in one way or another.
I don’t have to write about her at all to write about her, because she’d come across even better in fiction than she would in real life. She’s one of the few personalities I’ve met that could walk onto a procedural and act like she owned the place. If you’re one of her closest friends, they’ll never find the body.
Sometimes I worry about the things she keeps in her safe, the place in her heart where I reside; it’s not just me, though. I genuinely care about Michael and the rest of her whole famn damily. They’ve got someone out there loving them that they can receive whether they return it or not.
I said in “All the Things You Never Knew” that it was our love story and how it grew to accommodate both of us….. and I desperately hope that will continue, but in a very faraway, dreamlike state. I think I’m still in shock that when I laid out everything I was dealing with, she told me to go find new friends. After 10 years, if you can’t lay it down, we don’t have a future until you get yourself together. I do not have time for her if she does not have time for me.
The problem is not that I didn’t want the friendship she had to offer. It’s that our problems are too wide and deep to continue that dynamic without resolving the monster conflict that lies underneath. So, if I wrote 614,000 words this year and multiply that by 10, I have written at least 60 books that all have a thread of her running through it. And that’s not including the long e-mails that I’ve crafted especially for her. It’s a lot, and I’m sure it’s overwhelming.
But she’s a lot.
I would never have been changed to this degree by someone who couldn’t think faster than me. I don’t think my thoughts are better or worse, but AuDHD moves fast and furious with someone who’s a special interest. I wanted to resolve this conflict, and I got overwhelmed with talking to a brick wall. That didn’t mean I didn’t want her care, connection…… it meant I wanted more of it and was jumping up and down for attention by not doing it, then popping off with rage the longer I resented it.
But our anger feeds the other’s to an enormous degree, so we’re magnetic and repel as often as we attract. I feel sad because I only wanted to be on the fridge. Whether she chooses to be my yellow string or not, she only has to grab onto it, because I will deal with anyone’s red flags as long as they have a commitment to dealing with them on their own. If I have to learn conflict resolution, why don’t you (plural, true in every conflict everywhere and not a slam).
Here’s healthy for you.
I was really missing Zac, so I asked him if he had any time in the next couple of weeks. I just need to decompress and I love being at his house just as much as I love being with him. What I really love is when he works from home, but whether he’s there or not it’s very quiet. When he works from home, it’s still quiet. His office is kitty corner to his bedroom, so all I hear is him typing, and occasionally taking a call- but that’s rare because most things in intelligence are done in writing. But to be clear, I don’t know what’s classified and what’s not, so I tune everything out or close the door. I love that we’ve reached the stage where it doesn’t matter whether he’s home or not, I’m welcome and I know it, constantly.
So, he proposed a couple of dates, and I said “either work for me.” He said, “we’ll see.” I responded by saying “I don’t understand.” He didn’t get back to me and I was still thinking about it, so I said, “this unsettles me. You gave me a couple of dates, so I thought you already had them cleared, and you haven’t expressed lack of interest before, so it confused me.” I’m paraphrasing, because I told him that it came off as lack of interest, not that he actually meant it.
He responded by saying that no, it had nothing to do with lack of interest, just that now he didn’t know which days were good for him. Matter solved immediately, no bullshit. I didn’t give into my anxiety and start tiptoeing around him because I thought he was put off by me. It clears up a lot when instead of sitting in your bad dreams, you just ask if you’re right first.
It also helps when you believe everyone the first time, because after that it’s your anxiety to manage. Their actions will tell you whether they’re hiding something, and so will your intuition. But you can’t go on that until you just plain confront the situation, because perception is not reality.
What I’ve written a book about is how not confronting a situation made it a whole lot worse. I wonder all the time what would have happened if we’d just been big people and met up to really resolve everything. But if she was uncomfortable about that, all I asked is that she be more like Zac- you don’t have to manage my anxiety, but could you at least lay down the law all the time so that I’m not shooting in the dark as to how to love you so that you feel it?
60 books.
And whether it comes back around to writing another book or not depends on the coauthor, because contrary to popular opinion, I am not a dictator. I don’t wish for good communication because I live in this faraway land. It’s necessary for every relationship on earth. I am not special, and neither is anyone else in this regard.
So, in all of these volumes, it brings me to the second thing that the last post of 2023 allows me to say. Another author noticed me, a very good one, and recommended that everyone get involved with reading me. She also said that there was a tremendous depth to my work, and it made every tear worth it.
No one has ever had a completely negative impact on me, because I see the good in everything and everyone. That doesn’t mean good people don’t do bad things. It means that I see both ends of the spectrum of human behavior and I don’t meet anyone that hasn’t proved it all to be true. Every human on earth is a glorious mess. We’re all a bunch of red flags, and we don’t work nearly hard enough to stay together. Not as couples, not as friends, and certainly not as states and nations. You just have to remember to live for the highs.
I won’t let anyone into my life without understanding it may not be forever- people come and go, so let them. I have had many people in my life for which I would go through hell and back before I’d admit it was a bad relationship. It’s hard when people screw you over. It’s worse when you’re at fault. People can and do resolve monster conflicts, but both parties have to buy in. You will never get anywhere if one person wants to resolve conflict and the other doesn’t.
However, “doesn’t” is relative. Sometimes, it looks like ghosting. Sometimes it looks like saying everything is fine, but it doesn’t feel right. If it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. When you have no idea what’s wrong, do not guess. You’re wrong. Or, more accurately, the less you know about how someone feels, the more apt you are to make things worse.
I am a craftsman.
I am not good at talking about relationships because mine all go so well. I am good at talking about relationships because I’ve been through the ringer. I have made every mistake a person can make in a relationship, a lot of them way more expensive than I could afford.
I can describe the mistakes I’ve made, and also write what I wish I’d done in retrospect. I cannot breathe life into a dead relationship, but I can talk about it while it lived.
Right this very moment, the relationship that I have with myself is having a positive impact on me. I have a lot of things to think about, deeply, because I need to direct my energy and resources where it will do the most good. I don’t know what that means for me, but I do know that my life looks different than it did a few years ago, and I’m adrift…. but not in a bad way. In a way that I need to be self-sufficient for now (while also dearly wishing I wasn’t… I’m not the “adultier adult” type).
I have made so many mistakes, but somehow they have a positive impact. I think it’s because I’m driven to lead from the back. I have found over and over that people will not be vulnerable with me if I am not willing to lay all my cards on the table first. What is true of blogging is true of conversation; I just do not opine like this in person. It seems rude, because it is. If you wanted to read this, you typed in the URL or clicked the link. In short, when I’m in a crowd, I generally think “no one asked you.” I keep to myself, because I like hearing other people talk to each other. I like being around conversation more than I like being in one.
There are also many things I’ve said out loud that probably sounded better in my head…….. and stretching the definition of “several” things I’ve said that shouldn’t even have made it past my brain. The vetting process is getting better, but it’s not absolute. However, I think of those times and there’s not a one I don’t regret….. but you don’t get to be 46 without regrets.
However, I think I’ve spent long enough talking about regrets and am really starting to embrace the writer’s life…. ecstatic to be alone and also together with Zac (and Oliver, who is a dog). As a writer, I need more alone time than most. I also love dating an extrovert because he’ll drag me out of the house….. and even if we just end up watching a movie, I still got out of MY house. 😛
I’m looking forward to two dates in the future, because I’ll get to introduce him to Jason Moran (jazz pianist) and Jonna Mendez (former Chief of Disguise at CIA and my favorite living writer). We’ve got plans sooner than that, but those are important because both Jason and Jonna are important to me, and so is Zac in a completely different orbit.
Jonna, I believe, will find him completely charming because I’m going to bet she didn’t have “meet Leslie’s BOYfriend” on her bingo card.
I am an excellent judge of character in other people, but what I don’t know is how much of my behavior is inspired by me. I tend to pick out emotionally unavailable people, anyway, so I wouldn’t know if I was doing something annoying or not because they would not volunteer that information. Therefore, I could not change.
It’s why I had so much empathy for Jon Armstrong during his divorce from Heather (Dooce). He went through absolute hell with her, and I know this because my caretakers are often overwhelmed when I get mentally ill. I go into autistic meltdown and burnout, which is code for “doesn’t play well with others.” So, when Jon said “she told me everything that was wrong and just left so I couldn’t change it” (not a direct quote, I’m paraphrasing), my mirror neurons went off and my heart went out to him. Mentally ill people can be so ungrateful, but it’s not because they are actively trying to be emotionally abusive or narcissistic. It means that they’re in so much pain they can’t see past it.
I don’t blame Heather for leaving, either. Her feelings are absolutely valid. I just know from experience that perception is not reality. Whether what Heather saw was accurate or not is missing the point. There is no wrong feeling, there are consequences for acting on them. Depression, particularly bipolar, blows everything out of proportion because sometimes you’re depressed and sometimes you’re manic. You are not seeing what things are really like, you’re seeing them in a fun house mirror.
Whether I’m a good judge of character depends on when you meet me. My perception is different depending on my mood, and that’s not a good thing, but it’s real. It’s my work to do, because mental illness is not the whole answer. It’s developing coping mechanisms and safety nets. Depressed and anxious people do not actually believe that we are loved and we are not a burden on our families or society at large.
The hardest part of a mental processing disorder and/or mental illness is that you’re either slow or crazy, take your pick. I’ve never been called “slow” mentally, but I pick up facial expressions and microaggressions easily. I know what emotions look like on people’s faces and even when my perception is wrong, my judgment on other’s motivations/moods are generally correct. This is because in order to understand a conflict, you have to understand both people’s interests and what motivates people to get closer to you vs. further away.
Most of this is through looking approachable, not being nice. Nice is not kind. Those are two completely separate things. “Nice” says “no, we’re all good” while you continue to distance yourself from me. I noticed discrepancies between words and actions quicker than others do when the words are actually coming out of their mouths, because since my intuition on what I’m going to do is rock solid. I don’t make bad leaps by judging character, but by noticing the hypocrisy and seeing what happens if you call people on it. If they’re angry you noticed a problem and want to talk about it, that’s the biggest red flag you’re ignoring if you’re a people pleaser who lives not to rock the boat.
Most abused people exhibit this, particularly those who have been emotionally abused young by people who are supposed to take care of them. For instance (this didn’t happen to me, just an example), children raised by alcoholic parents are programmed to invert the dynamic. Boys are just as susceptible to becoming a parental figure as girls, though with girls it generally comes faster because women are designed societally to be people pleasers, anyway. But I know this to be true from the number of “mama’s boys” I’ve met, both straight and gay, who weren’t babysitting their mothers because they just wanted to do so; they realized their mother or father couldn’t take care of themselves and didn’t want to watch them struggle, because watching them struggle means that they’re angry and absolutely will take it out on them.
My stepfather is a perfect example. His mother was a horrible alcoholic and actually died from it in a roundabout way. She didn’t live long enough to die of cirrhosis. She was on a drunk and passed out in the snow. She didn’t wake up….. and obviously, he married my mother. The classic image of a “mama’s boy” is not him. That being said, he had to grow up fast. Running a household was nothing to him because he’d been doing it since he was five.
Again, he ran the household as a child until she died in the snow and someone (I don’t remember if it was his family or a neighbor) just found her. I cannot imagine that kind of trauma, and I don’t want to try.
Everyone is fighting something, which is why I believe there are no red flags. I have never met anyone, particularly a woman, that wasn’t fighting massive trauma. Absolutely all of my girlfriends have been sexually assaulted, more than not raped in childhood. That’s not an anomaly where I just went out and picked women who were abused. I have experience with abuse because again, ALL women. All of ’em. Every woman you know has at least a creepy story about a man, and in this culture it’s surprising when you get off that easy if one in four women is raped at least once in their lifetime.
In fact, for most of history it wasn’t rape if you were married to them.
Some mothers are even vicious enough to tell their children that they’re a product of marital rape and make their kids walk around with that knowledge until they’re adults and start unpacking it. It gets worse before it gets better. I cannot stress this enough. You will recover, but at times it feels like you should give up.
But here’s the thing….. during the Renaissance, beautiful statues were often finished in wax to cover mistakes. This is a double-edged sword as an illustration when it comes to PTSD. The first is that the statues weren’t any less beautiful. The second is that when finished with wax, it didn’t mean that the flaw wasn’t still underneath. What you get out of healing is what you put into it. Are you using the wax to cover your wounds, or are you examining the dead spots in your emotions? Are you using the wax as filler not because you are ignoring pain signals, but because you’re rerouting them?
A statue without wax is called “sin cera.” “Without wax.” A statue sin cera was incredibly rare….. another truism because you can make a statue sin cera, but no person ever could be. It is the nature of being animate, fully human and fully divine.
The sculpture you start carving after abuse looks completely different than the one you were carving before, because you don’t have the same thought processes anymore……. however, you do not get a new piece of marble. Maybe you’ve chipped more away. Maybe you’ve taken the “clippings” and rearranged them into something new.
People who have been abused and then are driven to success sometimes drive me insane because they’re so insistent they’re fine. Meanwhile, it’s not that they’re so perfect, it’s that everyone has learned to tiptoe around them. They’re not fine in terms of their emotions, but they don’t notice because why would they? Everyone around them is FINE.
Meanwhile, families who have someone with PTSD become the planets revolving around the sun…. in effect, nurturing it and asking it to warm them when they’re not capable of it. If they’re scared of their emotions, they’re scared of yours.
A lot of the women in my life are or have been a big deal. The two most successful women I know are complete wire monkeys, both raped in childhood and driven to control their entire universes so it never happens again……. not realizing that by trying to control everything, that includes controlling the people around them.
The planets orbit the sun, completely dependent on its behavior and not daring to deviate from the pattern that’s currently working….. but it won’t forever and instead of calling bullshit, the people around “the sun” adopt new ways of trying to please to avoid emotional injury.
Are you people-pleasing because you’re naturally programmed to give all of yourself away, or are you giving all of yourself away to try and mitigate damage?
I don’t know. Sometimes I’m a good judge of character. Sometimes I’m not. It’s especially wishy-washy in trying to determine my own. I am selfless and giving to an enormous degree, but not so much that I’d be willing to do anything to get love. But that’s a relatively new development. In the past, I was so afraid to lose a connection that I just wouldn’t do it. I would cower in fear instead of saying “this is bullshit. You don’t get to control my feelings in addition to yours.”
Whether or not the person listens is the best judge of character there is, because whether you’re wrong or not, your feelings still deserve to be heard. I am the worst person in the world at giving up in relationships, because I believe that certainly there must be a combination of words that will unlock you and make you open up, but it has never worked with a woman who has been raped.
Ever.
But that’s a perception with empathy, not a judgment call. The most upsetting thing is that statistics don’t lie and culture doesn’t change.
I could do less writing. It would be worse for my portfolio and better not to spend so much time lost in my head. I am not sure I get a choice on that considering how much quiet I require, but I do recognize that my mind is a busy place and I get lost there. I have said this before, but there are times when autism makes me feel lost to the rest of the world, and I wouldn’t have said that before because I have had that constant feeling since I can remember, I just didn’t have a word for it.
Because, I mean, of course I’m not autistic. I did not equate myself with other autistic kids because my school wasn’t mainstreamed, therefore I rarely saw any. There is also more and more evidence that ADHD and Autism are missed in many, many women because of the way we were raised. I didn’t look like a “special” kid, so I wasn’t. You get on YouTube and you find out that there is no “look” to autism. I do not have mental retardation because of autism, and those two things are conflated often. Autistic people are either savants at coding or developmentally delayed in popular culture. What is missing in the zeitgeist are regular people who also have that processing disorder. The kind where some doctors say, “I’m hesitant to give you a diagnosis because I don’t want you to be unable to see outside it.” Trust me, this is not just for patients. New parents of autistic children are equally shellshocked as me.
What is intimidating is receiving the same amount of information as autistic parents because it’s a lot easier to make decisions for someone else than it is to make decisions for yourself. You don’t have demand avoidance in mentally healthy parents because it is an inborn trait, the reflex to nurture. A baby’s cry affects men and women differently, but they both respond at the drop of a hat if they see a child in trouble and they are in any way parental.
It is so much harder when you realize the child you’re trying to keep alive is you. Like, in middle school there were not consequences this dire for my Tomagotchi. I’m older and less flexible, more demand avoidant because I’ve either been guided away from handling because I didn’t know I was autistic and didn’t realize that ADHD gives it to you as well (not mentioned in any of the layperson’s ADHD books I’ve read). I also didn’t know that if you have it pathologically, that is also part of the autism spectrum, and because I haven’t been diagnosed, I don’t know which is which. Pathologically Demand Avoidance is somehow part of autism and its own thing. Basically, you get treatment. If it doesn’t work, it’s PDA.
Social stigma around figuring out your processing disorders and mental illness is big and difficult because you get it on both sides. From neurotypical people, there is a constant need to reassure you that things aren’t that bad, you’re not autistic (because in their minds what I am saying to them is worlds apart from what they hear), you’re just too hard on yourself and if you X, then……… Their answers are not my answers because I am incapable of their thought process.
It is not a matter of pity on my end, it is a matter of acknowledging disability and illness. There’s a huge difference between acknowledging something and “making it your whole personality.” No one has said this to me, I just know I talk about it a lot because that’s what I’m reading/watching right now- educational videos. It’s not that “it’s my whole personality,” it’s that you didn’t come here on leg day, capiche? I am obsessed with getting the diagnosis of my neurodivergence right, not fitting the facts to a certain outcome. There is such a thing as ADHD with autistic traits, and there is a lot of overlap between the two diagnoses, so it’s not always clear which is which. I already have an ADHD diagnosis. The “huge leap” is in your perception, not my reality.
Here is the other very serious thing. I am the same amount of different now that I will be after I’m officially diagnosed, or after I’m told I have ADHD with autistic traits. ADHD is not valid in the way that autism is, because in other people’s minds, an autism diagnosis is devastating and if your child is ADHD, it’s bad, but at least it’s not fucking autism…………. when the reality is that the introverted form of ADHD can be just as debilitating. It’s invisible because it doesn’t come with physical symptoms and again, a processing disorder that doesn’t affect the development of the brain so that you can’t figure out how a person can be so smart and so stupid at the same time. But that’s neurotypical perception/stigma, not what’s really happening.
For instance, women’s voices were largely absent from ADHD research because to the researchers, ADHD became invisible in people without hyperactivity. People often don’t see autism because I do not have extraordinarily regimented sensory issues. I do not have a meltdown when I touch or taste something unfamiliar, so therefore I cannot have sensory issues. Some people have autism but do handle sensory perception well. Some autistic people are mentally delayed and some aren’t.
High IQ autistic people have two archetypes in society…… the manic pixie dream girl and “Comic Book Guy.”
I know what you’re thinking. Shut it.
No, I don’t identify with Comic Book Guy at all……….. eyeroll.
Now that everything is so expensive, I feel like coders who live in their mother’s basement are the luckiest bastards on earth. They live with people who love them on a salary that really helps everyone while acknowledging that they- are in some ways- able to take care of themselves and also not. I feel a jealousy toward programmers that I don’t feel in other areas of my life because they created the standard that all their sensory issues being tamped down was critical to the way they work and no other department in an office functions that way…… so if you’re autistic and not a programmer you’re just shit out of luck.
For instance, lights are usually very low in a server room, as are sounds. A server room has the same decibel level as a library. I live like Mr. Robot, because CPTSD and AuDHD being comorbidities means that I am constantly more comfortable with less stimulation through sound and more information through sight. Loud noises and bright lights are anathema to all of those things. I do not have a problem with flashing lights, but office fluorescents. I have a problem with prolonged eye contact, because sensory information becomes too much; I also become self-conscious about my eye drifting. It’s why I’m much better about maintaining eye contact when I’m wearing my baseball cap. I don’t think it’s much of a distraction, but my brain believes it is.
I could do less caring about my appearance, and so much more. By caring about my appearance, I could do more in terms of skin routines and putting on makeup once in a while when I actually feel like it. By not caring about my appearance, I mean constantly worried about how I look in front of other people because it’s not whether I’m attractive or not, it’s whether my social masks are working.
If I don’t call attention to my disability, you won’t notice it and I’m grateful until we get close enough that we can’t social mask around it anymore. It gets more intense with more connection, because social masks fail on a whole other level when you live with someone. I have never had a partner that truly understood me, partly because I’m a complicated case psychologically and partially because I didn’t have the tools to express myself.
You know what I also couldn’t do? I also couldn’t say, “I know you’re feeling personally attacked, but here’s several videos of other people explaining how their symptoms affect them so that you know I’m not just ‘using my disability as an excuse.;” The “motherfucker” is implied. I do not have a problem taking responsibility for my behavior as it is sometimes problematic, but I draw the line at seeing only my behavior as problematic and not acknowledging that things don’t happen in a vacuum. I can say that moving to DC was the last thing that happened, but Dana put us on the road toward divorce originally because of my reaction to her DUI, not blaming her because she got one. There is a cause and effect to everything.
In short, I can take responsibility for developing a wandering eye in a relationship not built for it, but I will not take responsibility for Dana’s drunken mistake that changed my whole sensory perception of life.
You are not the same person at work after a full night’s sleep, and one of the things that would have saved our marriage in retrospect was me putting my foot down and saying, “you’re on your own, kid.” This does not mean me stopping helping her. I mean forcing her to quit her job and get a different one if her boss didn’t move her schedule. That taking her to work in the middle of the night while holding down an office job would bring about destruction for me because I am not capable of it. I got fired from Marylhurst for the same reasons I got fired at Alert Logic. Especially when I don’t sleep at night, I cannot listen and talk at the same time, nor listen and write things down. The reason that transcribing the constitutional law class was easy is because I was transcribing, not taking notes. I was not having to constantly make a decision on what was important to write down and what wasn’t. I got that on my own, by going back and reading what I’d written down, faster to process because I’d heard it once.
I cannot blame Dana for her mistakes, but I can blame my reactions to them. Dana getting a DUI doesn’t make my words and actions okay, or let me off of any kind of hook. I am acknowledging that in a relationship, I only own half.
The problem came in thinking that my issues were so much worse than Dana’s. That Dana needed help and I was just a bad person. There was no medical explanation for why I did what I did, so it was worse….. and yet, there was a medical explanation. I was overloaded and overwhelmed, depressed and anxious except for when I was hypomanic and at no time able to regulate those things. So much was said without thinking, which is why there’s such a disconnect between my thoughts and the words I used in the heat of a moment.
With autism, the heat of the moment is everything. If your words are charged, we will pick up all 7,000 subtexts and our brains are immediately overloaded because we don’t know how to respond. This is why it’s easier to communicate with a neurodivergent person in text. It’s a balance, though, because we have to get to know your voices well enough to have context for when we leave it out. For instance, I think our conversations would have gone a lot differently had I known in the early years that hearing Supergrover’s voice feels like watching molasses drip……. she is a velvet hammer. I might not have been so quick to attribute rage if I’d known she was so laid back in person. She does not portray that through text. In text, she’s strident and it’s “pull yourself up from your bootstraps.” I only get frustrated when she can’t see I’m barefoot.
I choose to be butt hurt over this right now, while it’s happening, because what I know to be true is that my history is to save it all up until I explode, and as Supergrover herself has said, my anger isn’t helpful. She’s right, and in a lot of cases it’s due to lack of coping mechanism. In others, it’s autism and I can’t work around it. That’s because coping mechanisms fail when sensory overload is happening.
This relationship was a new level of sensory overload because we are both so different from each other. I cannot blame anyone else for anything, but I can get it all out so that I can look at it and see what I can do about my own situation.
I think more about it now, so that I know I can and will do less later.
I could do a lot less thinking about all of this. But it wouldn’t turn out the way I think it would. I would be even less able to regulate my emotions.
Stories That Are All True 