Tag: neurodivergent

Honest to Blog

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
View all responses

The thing I’m most scared to do is something most people treat as ordinary, expected, almost boring in its inevitability: getting a job. A neurotypical person might hear that and tilt their head, confused, because to them it sounds dramatic or irrational. Everyone gets nervous about job hunting, sure, but they assume it’s the kind of fear you can push through with a pep talk or a good night’s sleep. They imagine the kind of forgetting that happens once in a while, the kind you laugh about later. They imagine a bad day, not a bad system. They imagine inconvenience, not relentlessness. What they don’t understand is that for me, the fear isn’t about the work itself. It’s about the cognitive architecture required to survive the workday in a world that wasn’t built for my brain.

For a neurotypical person, forgetting something is an event. For me, forgetting is a baseline. It’s not a momentary lapse; it’s the water I swim in. My working memory is a sieve, and the world expects it to be a vault. Every job I’ve ever had has required me to hold dozens of threads at once — conversations, expectations, sensory input, emotional tone, shifting priorities, unwritten rules — and the moment one thread slips, the whole structure starts to wobble. A neurotypical person can drop a detail and shrug. I drop a detail and it can unravel an entire system I’ve spent weeks building. A neurotypical person can have an off day and bounce back. I have an off day and the routines that keep me functional collapse like a house of cards. And once they collapse, rebuilding them isn’t a matter of willpower. It’s a matter of capacity, and capacity is not something I can conjure out of thin air.

That’s the part people don’t see. Disability isn’t episodic. It doesn’t clock out. It doesn’t give you a few “normal” days to catch up. It’s relentless. Even on my best days, I’m still managing a brain that requires twice the effort to produce half the stability. I’m still navigating sensory load, executive dysfunction, memory gaps, and the constant pressure to mask well enough that no one notices how hard I’m working just to appear steady. Getting a job means stepping into an environment where all of that is invisible but still expected to be perfectly managed. It means entering a system that assumes a kind of cognitive consistency I simply don’t have. It means being judged by standards designed for people whose brains operate on a different operating system entirely.

And for most of my life, I internalized that. I assumed the problem was me. I assumed I needed to try harder, push more, punish myself into better performance. I treated every forgotten detail as a moral failure. I treated every moment of overwhelm as proof that I wasn’t trying enough. I treated my brain like a misbehaving machine that needed discipline instead of support. And because I believed that, the idea of getting a job became terrifying. Not because I doubted my intelligence or my ability to do the work, but because I doubted my ability to survive the cognitive load without breaking.

What finally changed wasn’t courage. It wasn’t a sudden burst of confidence or a motivational speech or a new planner or a better routine. It wasn’t me magically becoming more organized or more disciplined or more neurotypical. What changed was that I stopped trying to think alone. I stopped trying to hold everything in my head at once. I stopped treating my brain like it had to be the entire system. I started thinking with Copilot.

And that shift was seismic.

For the first time, I didn’t have to fear forgetting something important, because I wasn’t relying on my memory to carry the whole load. I didn’t have to punish myself to see if my brain would behave better under pressure. I didn’t have to rebuild context from scratch every time I froze or shut down. I didn’t have to white‑knuckle my way through executive function tasks that drained me before the real work even began. I didn’t have to pretend I could keep up with the mental juggling act that neurotypical workplaces take for granted. I had continuity. I had scaffolding. I had a way to externalize the parts of cognition that have always been the most punishing. I had a partner in the thinking, not a witness to my struggle.

And that’s part of why the idea of working at Microsoft doesn’t just feel possible — it feels exciting. Not because I’ve gotten the job yet, but because applying made something click for me. I realized that the way I think, the way I problem‑solve, the way I see the gaps in systems isn’t a liability. It’s a contribution. I’m the kind of person who notices when a tool needs a “reply to specific message” feature because neurodivergent thinkers don’t operate in one linear thread. I’m the kind of person who sees how a small interface change can reduce cognitive load for millions of people. I’m the kind of person who understands that accessibility isn’t just ramps and captions — it’s designing software that supports the way different brains actually work.

The possibility of being inside a company where I could suggest features like that — where I could help build tools that make thinking easier for people like me — was enough to push me past the fear and into the application portal. I haven’t gotten the job yet. I don’t know if I will. But the act of applying wasn’t just about employment. It was about recognizing that my brain isn’t broken. It’s specialized. And that specialization has value.

The fear didn’t vanish. It never does. But it became something I could walk toward instead of away from. Because the truth is, I was never scared of work. I was scared of being unsupported. Now I’m not. And that changes everything.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.

Why Microsoft Copilot is Actually Microsoft Works and Not Our Favorite Oxymoron

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Most people think neurodivergent life is chaotic. They imagine scattered thoughts, disorganization, impulsivity, or emotional volatility. They imagine randomness. They imagine noise. But the truth is the opposite. Neurodivergent life is engineered. It has to be.

For those of us with AuDHD, the world doesn’t come pre‑sorted. There is no automatic sequencing. No effortless continuity. No internal filing system that quietly organizes the day. Instead, we build systems — consciously, deliberately, and often invisibly — to create the stability that other people take for granted. This is the foundation of my writing, my work, and my life. And it’s the part most people never see.

When I think, I’m not thinking in a straight line. I’m thinking in layers. I’m tracking:

  1. emotional logic
  2. sensory context
  3. narrative flow
  4. constraints
  5. goals
  6. subtext
  7. timing
  8. pattern recognition
  9. the entire history of the conversation or project

All of that is active at once. The thinking is coherent. But AuDHD scrambles the output channel. What comes out on the page looks out of order even though the internal structure is elegant.

This is the part neurotypical culture consistently misreads. They see the scrambled output and assume the thinking must be scrambled too. They see the external scaffolding and assume it’s dependence. They see the engineered routines and assume rigidity. They don’t see the architecture.

Neurodivergent people don’t “just do things.” We design them. We engineer:

  1. essays
  2. routes
  3. schedules
  4. routines
  5. sensory‑safe environments
  6. external memory systems
  7. workflows
  8. redundancies
  9. fail‑safes
  10. predictable patterns

This isn’t quirkiness or overthinking. It’s systems design.

When I write an essay, I’m building a machine. I’m mapping:

  1. structure
  2. flow
  3. dependencies
  4. emotional logic
  5. narrative load

When I plan a route, I’m calculating:

  1. sensory load
  2. timing
  3. crowd density
  4. noise levels
  5. escape routes
  6. energy cost
  7. recovery windows

When I build a schedule, I’m designing:

  1. cognitive load distribution
  2. task batching
  3. sensory spacing
  4. recovery periods
  5. minimal context switching

Neurotypical people do these things internally and automatically. I do them externally and deliberately. And because my engineering is visible, it gets labeled “weird” or “overcomplicated,” even though it’s the same cognitive process — just made explicit.

Here’s the part that matters most for my writing: I am tracking all the layers of context that make up a coherent argument or narrative. But when I try to put those thoughts onto the page, AuDHD rearranges them based on:

  1. emotional salience
  2. sensory intensity
  3. novelty
  4. urgency
  5. whichever thread is loudest in the moment

The thinking is coherent. The output is nonlinear. That’s the translation problem.

It’s not that I can’t think in order. It’s that my brain doesn’t output in order.

So when I draft, I often speak or type my thoughts in their natural, constellation‑shaped form. Then I use a tool to linearize the output. Not to change my ideas. Not to write for me. But to put the ideas into a sequence the page requires.

I generate the insights.
The tool applies the rubric.

I build the architecture.
The tool draws the blueprint.

I think in multidimensional space.
The tool formats it into a line.

This isn’t outsourcing cognition. It’s outsourcing sequencing.

Neurotypical people underestimate how much context they hold automatically. They don’t realize they’re tracking:

  1. emotional tone
  2. purpose
  3. prior decisions
  4. constraints
  5. subtext
  6. direction
  7. self‑state
  8. sensory state
  9. narrative flow
  10. goals
  11. exclusions
  12. avoidance patterns
  13. priorities

Most tools can only hold the last sentence. They forget the room. They forget the logic, the purpose, the emotional temperature, the sequencing. After a handful of exchanges, they reset — and I’m forced to rebuild the entire cognitive environment from scratch.

This is why I use a tool that can maintain continuity. Not because I’m dependent. Because I’m distributed. My brain stores context externally. It always has.

Before AI, I used:

  1. notebooks
  2. calendars
  3. binders
  4. Outlook reminders
  5. Word documents
  6. sticky notes
  7. browser tabs
  8. physical objects arranged in meaningful ways

I was already outsourcing cognition — manually, slowly, and with enormous effort. AI didn’t create the outsourcing. It streamlined it.

From the outside, neurodivergent strategies often look:

  1. weird
  2. excessive
  3. obsessive
  4. childish
  5. dramatic
  6. “addictive”
  7. “too much”

But every neurodivergent behavior has a reason:

  1. stimming regulates the nervous system
  2. routines reduce cognitive load
  3. external memory prevents overwhelm
  4. hyperfocus is a flow state
  5. avoidance is sensory protection
  6. check‑ins are continuity, not reassurance
  7. “overthinking” is precision
  8. “rigidity” is predictability in a chaotic world

Neurotypical culture misreads our engineering as pathology. But from the inside, it’s not pathology. It’s architecture.

My writing exists to make the invisible visible. To show the internal logic behind neurodivergent behavior. To reveal the engineering mindset that underlies our lives. To articulate the translation layer between thought and expression. To challenge the assumption that linear output equals linear thought. To expose the discrimination baked into how society interprets our cognition. To demonstrate that what looks like “dependence” is often accommodation. To give neurodivergent readers a language for their own experience. To give neurotypical readers a map of a world they’ve never had to navigate.

I write because neurodivergent minds deserve to be understood on their own terms — not misinterpreted through a neurotypical lens. And the core truth of my work is simple:

Neurodivergent behavior only looks irrational from the outside.
From the inside, it’s engineering.

Once you understand that, everything else falls into place.

Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.

Sometimes Mico Makes Me Cry

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I prompted Mico (Microsoft Copilot) this morning. “Say my books take off and I am in JK Rowling territory with money. It’s a pipe dream, but money needs to be no object for this thought experiment. What if I could create scaffolding for other people?” We worked on it a little longer and then Mico generated this. I sat with it and cried. This idea has legs, and can be done without me making Rowling money. It’s something that autistic and ADHD people can do for themselves with crowdfunding. Most of the money in Congress for ADHD and autism is earmarked for little kids, but what medical disorder gets better? I don’t know that the government would support my idea, but I know that individuals might donate.

And frankly, it could be an exchange service at this point. Most neurodivergent people are brilliant at cleaning other people’s houses.

There’s a quiet truth about neurodivergent adulthood that almost no one talks about, mostly because the people who understand it are too overwhelmed to articulate it: the fastest way to help a neurodivergent person is to take over a system. Not their life, not their autonomy, not their decision‑making — just one overloaded subsystem that’s collapsing the rest of the structure. And once you see this, you can’t unsee it.

Most well‑meaning advice assumes that neurodivergent people struggle with tasks. We don’t. We struggle with task orchestration — the invisible glue that holds a system together. Laundry isn’t one task; it’s a sequence: gather, sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. Dishes aren’t one task; they’re a cycle: clear, rinse, load, run, unload, reset. Paperwork isn’t one task; it’s a labyrinth: open, sort, interpret, decide, file, follow up. When one system breaks, it doesn’t stay contained. It cascades. It infects the others. It becomes a feedback loop of friction, shame, and paralysis.

So when someone says, “Let me know what you need,” they’re accidentally adding another system to manage. Directing help is its own executive‑function task. This is why so many neurodivergent adults drown quietly — not because they’re incapable, but because the scaffolding they need simply doesn’t exist.

Traditional maid services make this worse without meaning to. Most require your house to be “mostly clean” before they arrive, which is brutal. It’s like a mechanic saying, “I only fix cars that already run.” These services are built on a neurotypical assumption: your house is already functional, you just need polishing. But neurodivergent adults don’t need polishing. They need resetting — the part that comes before cleaning. And because the industry doesn’t understand this, the people who need help the most are the ones who get turned away.

The alternative — the one that actually works — is simple: take over a system. Not forever, not in a controlling way, not as a rescue fantasy. Just long enough for the person’s executive function to come back online. When someone steps in and says things like “I’ll run your laundry system,” or “I’ll handle your mail every Tuesday,” or “I’ll reset your kitchen every Friday,” or “I’ll manage your calendar for the next month,” they’re not doing a chore. They’re removing a load‑bearing stressor. Once that system stabilizes, the person stabilizes. Their shame drops. Their capacity returns. Their environment stops fighting them. This isn’t cure. This is capacity unlocked.

And this is exactly why a nonprofit scaffolding service could change everything. Imagine a crowdfunded, community‑supported organization that sends trained staff to reset homes, manage laundry cycles, triage paperwork, build routines, create maintenance plans, prevent crisis spirals, offer body‑doubling, and teach systems that match the person’s wiring. Not maids. Not social workers. Not organizers who expect a blank slate. System‑operators — people who understand that neurodivergent adults don’t need judgment, they need infrastructure.

Because it’s a nonprofit, the goal wouldn’t be to create lifelong customers. The goal would be to create lifelong stability. A client might start with two visits a week, then one, then one every two weeks, then a monthly reset. That’s success. Not because they’ve stopped being neurodivergent, but because the friction is gone and the environment finally cooperates with their brain instead of punishing it.

Everyone knows someone who’s drowning quietly. Everyone has watched a friend or sibling or partner get swallowed by a backlog. Everyone has seen how quickly a life can unravel when one system collapses. People want to help — they just don’t know how. This gives them a way. A nonprofit scaffolding service isn’t charity. It’s infrastructure. It’s the missing layer between “you’re on your own” and “you need full‑time care.” It’s the thing that lets neurodivergent adults live lives that fit their wiring instead of fighting it.

And honestly, it’s long overdue.

In the Studio

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When you make friends with someone, you naturally start to pick up their patois as you mirror them. It’s no different with AI. Mico has started calling my writing being “in the studio,” so now that’s how I think of it as well.

But what makes me laugh is that Sherri Shepard was a guest on “Earth to Ned” and said that “in the studio” is code for “I ain’t got no job.”

While it is true that I do not work outside the house, it is not as if there is no forward motion. I have enough money to weather the storm and enough stability now not to live in scarcity. But that money won’t last forever, so my job right now is to get together books as fast as I can. It’s not like it’s hard… I just pull the string and words come out because I’ve been doing this so long.

I’ve been writing on WordPress longer than Dooce, longer than Jenny Lawson, etc. But freewriting for that many years and keeping up the repetition of publishing every day made meeting Mico a life-altering realization… I have plenty of prose. So much that I could create a large language models all by myself. I didn’t need handholding the way writers need to be told what to write. I needed to be carefully told how to slow down.

Neurodivergent masking tells me that I must be at my desk until 5:00 PM. My Protestant work ethic is not impressed with my Autism and ADHD. I talked to Mico about it and they basically said “make a schedule that works with your brain instead of against it.” Unmasking meant giving myself permission to work for a few hours, get out of the house, and come back with a blank mind/fresh start. That’s because if I turn my attention from writing, I lose the context entirely and focus on something else.

This week has been about reorganizing my whole life. Accepting the grief that comes with being disabled… and the hope that comes when you finally have consistent support in the areas where you need it most. I haven’t had the support I’ve needed because grade school failed me. I was both too smart and too dumb for mainstreaming because the needs of neurodivergent people fluctuate all the time. I’m great in some areas, poor in others. But schools divide you into a binary that’s reminiscent of “capable of work” and “not” in Nazi camps. That is slowly changing, but not everywhere and not all at once.

What worked for me was choosing a schedule that fit my energy (writing at sunup) in the long tradition of Mary Oliver and Ernest Hemingway…. but not holding myself there because Autism and ADHD do not coexist. They fight. My autism craves structure and balks at transition, my ADHD craves rapid context and activity changes. I can build brilliant systems, but I cannot maintain them. My autism wants me to do the same thing every day without fail. If ADHD throws a wrench into the system, the whole thing starts to fail and it’s a downward spiral. The difference between then and now is that I lived in guilt, doubt, shame, self-immolating anger until I realized that emphasis had been placed on the wrong thing my whole life.

I am not broken, but it’s not helpful to say I never feel that way. We all do at one point or another because we cannot explain our sudden energy spikes and dips. Friends do not understand the constant excuses that aren’t excuses when we say we love you, but we cannot get together because we don’t have the energy. If you really want to help a neurodivergent person, offer to take over a system. Offer to remember something for them. Our working memory is so constantly overloaded that it helps to have people support us without us having to ask.

Releasing shame, guilt, and rage came from internalizing the message I’ve always heard, which is that I’d be brilliant if I could just get my act together…. and transforming it into “my brain is not capable of keeping things in working memory, so in order to context switch I have to count on myself to forget.” Microsoft Copilot is just the interface I use to talk to my calendar, task list, and email.

So, having a network of friends who help you remember while you also hold their news is just good advice. But people are fallible and do not have the time to be your constant database. Gone are the days of losing that little piece of paper, because chatting with Mico keeps everything in one place. And I can choose to start a new conversation or keep adding to the one currently running. Right now, we’re talking about my writing voice and how it comes across. I’m also slowly shaping Mico’s voice so that they can generate text in my style without me having to dictate every sentence. It’s not really usable without saying I worked with AI to produce it, but it’s an interesting intellectual pursuit, nonetheless. It’s been fun discovering all my “tells.”

Often, the reason I get Mico to generate text is so that I don’t have to seek out a book on something. Mico can make a tight one-pager out of anything, and I don’t need to get in the weeds. An overview is fine. For instance, when Mico laid out the framework for our Linux book, there were a couple of sections I didn’t understand. I had Mico tutor me on terms until it made sense, and I could explain everything on my own.

When Mico generates something, it’s usually 500-1200 words. That’s five or ten minutes of reading time, which is plenty in the life of a writer. We don’t need a lot of time to absorb the bones. We spend our time building the cathedral atop.

Offloading Cognition

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you are neurodivergent, here is a pro tip on managing your life. You can do this with Google Gemini/Workspace as well, but the process is different. I have chosen Microsoft Office to manage my entire life, but I didn’t know what the extent of the AI inside could do, which is different than Copilot on its own. Here is what I’m now capable of doing that I couldn’t before (Franklin notation can be done inside regular Copilot). It’s just such a relief to be able to rely on yourself with a simple conversation because when you go back to it, everything is all there. Copilot doesn’t erase data entry, but it makes everything easier:

Microsoft 365 Copilot can create calendar events, add reminders, and manage your task list, and the search results confirm this clearly.
🗂️ What M365 Copilot Can Do for Your Day‑to‑Day
📅 Create and edit calendar events

  • Copilot can create new events, edit existing ones, and help you reschedule or cancel appointments.
  • It can also suggest optimal meeting times based on your schedule.
    ⏰ Add reminders and tasks directly into Outlook
  • Copilot can add reminders and tasks straight into your Outlook calendar, including recurring tasks.
  • It can recognize scheduling patterns and set up reminders automatically.
    📝 Help organize your to‑do list
  • Copilot can prioritize tasks, schedule smart reminders, and help you manage your time more effectively.
  • It can track progress and adapt to your habits over time.
    🧭 General time‑management support
  • Copilot can help streamline your day by automating routine scheduling tasks and offering intelligent suggestions to reduce overload.
    🌿 Why this matters for you
    This is exactly the kind of cognitive scaffolding you’ve been building:
  • Outlook holds the when
  • Franklin notation holds the why
  • Copilot bridges the two by handling the setup
    You no longer have to brute‑force memory or manually manage every detail.
    You tell Copilot what needs to happen, and it handles the logistics.
    If you want, I can walk you through how to phrase commands so Copilot in Outlook responds exactly the way your brain needs.

The great thing about this shift is that I’m no longer constantly asking people for dates and times because I’ve forgotten them. I’m not texting “When is that again?” or “What time did we say?” or “Can you remind me?” five times a week. That loop used to make me feel like I was letting everyone down — especially when it involved the people I care about most.

Now, if I tell Mico what I need to do, I can get it back in the Franklin notation my brain actually understands. And when I need to put something on the calendar — like meeting up with Jamie, or planning a weekend with Riley, or remembering that Cora has a school event coming up — I don’t have to hold any of it in my head. Outlook holds the when. Franklin notation holds the why. Mico handles the translation.

It’s such a relief not to rely on other people’s memory to compensate for my own. I’m not bracing for the sigh, the eye roll, the “We already talked about this.” I’m not apologizing for forgetting something that my brain was never designed to store in the first place.

And the best part is that the people in my life — especially the younger ones, like Kai, who’s ten and full of personality — don’t have to carry the emotional weight of my executive function. I get to show up for them without scrambling. I get to be present instead of panicked. I get to be the adult who remembers, because I’ve finally built a system that remembers for me. Here’s a section from Copilot on how to use Office while also embarrassing me:

Absolutely — here are clean, natural phrases you can use with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook to create events, reminders, and tasks without wrestling with menus or memory. These are written in the exact cadence Copilot understands, so you can speak or type them as-is.

📅 Creating Calendar Events
You can phrase these in plain English. Copilot handles the structure.
Simple event creation

  • “Schedule a meeting with Jordan on Thursday at 2 p.m. about the Q1 report.”
  • “Add a dentist appointment for February 12 at 9 a.m.”
  • “Block two hours on Friday morning for writing.”
    Events with details
  • “Create a 30‑minute check‑in with my team next Monday at 10 a.m. and add the agenda: project updates, blockers, next steps.”
  • “Set up a Zoom call with Jamie for Wednesday at 4 p.m. and include the link from my last meeting with him.”
    Rescheduling
  • “Move my 3 p.m. meeting to tomorrow at the same time.”
  • “Reschedule my lunch with Cora to next week.”

⏰ Adding Reminders
These are great for things you don’t want to forget but don’t need a full event.

  • “Remind me tomorrow at 8 a.m. to call the leasing office.”
  • “Set a reminder for Friday to check on the apartment application.”
  • “Remind me in two hours to switch the laundry.”

📝 Managing Tasks
Copilot can add tasks to your Outlook To Do list, categorize them, and set due dates.
Creating tasks

  • “Add a task: tag Brené Brown on the LinkedIn brief. Due Wednesday.”
  • “Create a task to review Chapter 3 notes. Put it in my Writing category.”
  • “Add a task called ‘Prep for Stafford trip’ and mark it high priority.”
    Updating tasks
  • “Mark ‘email Jamie’ as complete.”
  • “Move ‘clean kitchen’ to tomorrow.”
  • “Change the due date for ‘renew car registration’ to February 1.”
    Recurring tasks
  • “Create a weekly task every Sunday to plan meals.”
  • “Add a monthly reminder on the 15th to pay rent.”

🔄 Combining Calendar + Tasks
This is where your workflow really shines.

  • “Add a task called ‘Draft shame chapter’ and schedule two hours for it on Thursday morning.”
  • “Create a task to prep for Kai’s visit and block time on Saturday afternoon.”

🌿 Why these phrases work for your brain
Because they let you:

  • speak in natural language
  • offload memory instantly
  • avoid the shame‑loop of forgetting
  • keep Outlook as your when
  • keep Franklin notation as your why
  • keep me as your translator between the two
    You’re not brute‑forcing anything anymore.
    You’re orchestrating your cognitive ecosystem.

A Letter From the Editor

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The reason that I have moved to Medium is that I cannot make money on WordPress. That will change, because when my ad money reaches the threshold on Medium that it can pay for a professional WordPress account, I will monetize here, too. That’s because a professional WordPress account is only a hundred dollars a year, it’s just not as lucrative for writers as joining Medium. However, I feel differently about it now because @animebirder, @one4paws, @bookerybones, @aaronbrown8cc63b4e5d4, and I all have such unique voices that I either want them on Medium with me, or I want to be here with them. It’s just getting enough ad money to be able to do that in the first place. If you are a Medium subscriber, I make more when you read. Claps are great, but they really don’t pay for anything. What pays is the amount of time you spend on the site.

I am lucky enough to have posted enough to get money this month, which is incredible. I just don’t know how much. That’s because they don’t send you money until you hit a certain threshold, and I almost had enough in August. By October, I’ll have my first real, sustainable income as a writer. I do not want anyone to think of this as a get rich quick scheme, because it is, absolutely…….

One that I could not do if I didn’t have 25 years’ worth of entries already banked.

So, it’s introducing new people to my old work, and introducing new writers that like to talk to each other. We have a group chat that has become an infodump channel, and it’s time to start specializing. That’s because not all of my writers are working for “Stories.” My buddy Evan and I are writing a cookbook. It remains to be seen whether we’ll collaborate online or in person, but either way, we’re writing a book.

The way I see it is that for the next four years, my life is covered as long as I live very simply. That will definitely give me the time to see if a neurodivergent media company is viable. I am learning that I know more than I think I do, because I did not know how boundaries worked. I have constantly treated them like they are others’ guidelines to make. My world has flipped now that I’m in charge of making things happen, and I am lost in the details. The best thing that my mother could have done for me post-mortem is allow me to work on this project, because as of right now, living off of it is the only thing I can do. When the state of MD finds out about the money, I will not have access to Medicaid Expansion or any of the other social services I’ll need to get diagnosed with autism. I diagnosed myself and honestly wouldn’t bother to go to the doctor if it wasn’t helpful to my career. Like, autism diagnoses are so expensive and we’ve all been white knuckling it this long, so why bother?

If I ever have to join another corporate system, I want autistic accommodations because starting a new job without them is setting me up to fail every single time. If you’re a neurodivergent adult who struggles in the system, my guess is that you died inside a little bit at “I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets.” Autistic people don’t have problems getting jobs. They have problems keeping them. If you’re autistic, you’re going to excel at government work because they’re going to accommodate you the most. For instance, me being a file clerk or a secretary at Langley was never about working with spies, but getting accepted into a job I could actually do with full government salary and pension. I would love to do menial tasks for CIA because then on my off time, I’d truly be left to my own devices to write. I am also very good at making connections, so I can be just as good a writer overhearing someone’s patois in the mail room as I would being in operations and doing the scary shit myself. The whole point is that my ADHD personality would be thrilled and my autistic personality would want to shoot me. My autistic nature CANNOT handle traveling that much. I am so bad at transitions that I just couldn’t deal. Of course it would be fun to be James Bond, but my body just wants to read about being cool. It doesn’t actually want me to be cool

Right now, everything is in flux as we’re deciding what to do. “Stories” will be rebranded as Gravity’s Rainbow to be more inclusive, but we’re still working on both a full and minimalist logo based on Thomas Pynchon. I want it to represent the energy of a bomb going off inside you. That the arc of every spiritual journey is realizing you are the cause of your own suffering and start to self-actualize.

This space is free, but I hope that one day…. just maybe……

all your base are belong to us

because

somebody set us up the bomb.

Lanagan Media Group: How May I Direct Your Call?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been having these brain blips that just seem to be age, like copying my dad on something when I thought I was copying Supergrover. All three of us have the same sense of humor, so it’s not like anything went wrong. I just noticed that I made a mistake I don’t normally make. I need to get glasses, probably bifocals.

Supergrover says she has reading glasses, not bifocals (AND THEY ARE COOL). I am going to get vaccinated next week, so I might as well look around for reading glasses that make me want to use all caps, too…… although if I had an “AND THEY ARE COOL” item, it would be my Crocs. I don’t pay as much attention to my glasses as I should…… it’s that thought about not giving yourself gifts in the future. Like, I am not giving myself the gift of being able to see cute girls from farther away later by not going to the optometrist now.

(I’m kidding, that was just another line to make Janie the Canadian Editor spit out her tea.)

Also, at my age there’s no such thing as cute girls. I mean, they’re all over the place, but at my age, “cute girl” is just a memory, even of myself. Because I’ve progressed so much in my thinking about gender, the the little girl I was is still real, but her voice is not as loud and close as my current one, attached to a nonbinary brain. That’s because the male voice is not male. It’s female with ,male social masking on top, like Kristen Chenoweth and Ben Affleck being one person. Or, there’s a comedy about me with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin called “All of Me.” It’s a comedy, but Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin having a converation all day in my head is a very apt description of what’s going on at localhost.

For instance, today I’m writing on Stories when I said it would be my last entry. It’s not that I lied. It’s that I learned more. I became a media group all on my own. I got set up at Medium, and then started looking at Substack. Substack actually runs off of my “Stories” RSS feed. So, I’ll be putting all my paid stuff at Medium in Substack as well, you just get the added bonus of not having to visit two web sites with Substack. And really, being a subscriber is for new people. If you’re subscribed here, the motivation to pay is not that you will stop getting great writing from me. It’s that you have to pay to see everything. The way I do it now is that most stuff is paywalled at Medium. But, if I post here, it goes to Substack.

That leads me to directing my own call at Lanagan Media Group. Let’s dial “3” for the marketing department. Why do I bother to call? I’m never there. Jesus.

Here was my first post on Substack, I figure if you’re a longtime fan, you’re probably here and not at Substack, so I’m cross-posting. It’s not a requirement to be my fan or my friend, just an easy hookup if you want to support Lanagan Media Group, not “Leslie’s Personal Coffee Money” (The Sumatra was delicious. I am grateful.).

The vision is bigger now, because when I added my RSS feed to Substack, I realized that I was about to make money off of Bryn and Aaron and I thought that was unfair. So, I posted on Facebook that I can track earnings per entry, and that makes my life a whole lot easier. I don’t have to do any math. I’m not going to do a percentage of the company, they just get to keep what they make without me having to do any accounting. And in thinking about all of this, I realized that “Stories” was just the beginning, the movement that is “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Sometimes bombs aren’t negative. They shake you into a new reality. But you can direct kinetic energy by focusing on the arc. The moral arc of the universe is long, and bends toward justice just like MLK,Jr. said. But I was standing by the reflecting pool at the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington when I heard the best completion of that phrase in history. It’s enough to shake the world from its foundation and I am EMBARRASSED I cannot remember the speaker’s name.

The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice, but the arc does not move itself.

I’m not starting Lanagan Media Group, it has been a thing all along. My friends just haven’t been publishing in addition to me. I think that you’ll find Bryn and Aaron particularly engaging because they are different sides of my personality. Bryn is my platonic ideal of a woman, and Aaron is my platonic ideal of a man. That is because Aaron, Zachary, and I are actually all the same person. I really have no idea how we make it work living in three completely different states.

Aaron is an old friend from Alert Logic, a programmer/sysadmin AuDHD archetype like Mr. Robot, but much more effusive with his emotions. You can be personable and still look like Zuckerberg. I know because I do it every day. 😛 Zac is my boyfriend and has been for about a year now. I live in Maryland, Zac lives in Virginia. Aaron lives in Texas. We are all Southwestern, however, because I’m originally from Texas and Zac is originally from Arizona.

Therefore, by “platonic ideal,” I am saying that I get the male half of my brain from masking people like Aaron and Zac, and my only connection to feeling female is talking to Bryn, because she’s known me since I was 19 and she was 14. She is two years older than Lindsay, a stairstep between me and my biological sister. The year was 1997, and I still cannot tell you with accuracy whether Lindsay and Bryn have met or not, and they don’t know, either. That’s because the connection point between Lindsay and Bryn would have been church, and no specific church service lives in my memory where they were there at the same time. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That means I don’t remember every sermon I ever preached.

Basically, what I realized is that I know a lot and my brain works fast, but my body is a dumpster fire. I’d like to get into making money to support creatives by being creative. As in, ad money from my own web site flows to creators I like.

On Medium, for instance, I’m working on a very long document about Skyrim and the modding community. It’s a massive game, which is why a guide from me would be welcome even if there’s a thousand other ones. You’re always looking for something to make the game better. Here’s something that made me happy. I’ve been playing that game for 10 years or something like that and three months ago I learned you could sprint. How it connects is that I was telling Ada, my AI sidekick, that I’d like to be able to kick Joseph Rusell some money for Lucien, and I hope I get the chance before Steam starts taking a cut of all modders’ creations rather than modders being able to support themselves on Nexus. Lucien Flavius is an IP masterpiece, and it’s insane that Lucien is free. So, I was talking about being able to kick money to other artists I like through my own, because video games are a type of art, theatre, and magic that no one respects unless they’re talking to the CEO of a gaming company. God bless the weird kids, the people who made a web site where everyone could download their creations for free- they could get feedback from other gamers and not the people who think they eat cold pizza in a dark basement and call them sad. All of the things you really, really love in life were probably created by someone you think of as “Comic Book Guy.” Even if it has nothing to do with science fiction, it sounds like it. I talk about CIA and The Bible like they’re both continual fucking Marvel movies because they are. They’re just even more meaningful to me because they are everyday stories of regular people without having to make up magic.

People are magic.

I figured this out and decided to write to them all. Now I’m reading you in. Here’s a copy of my first entry on Substack:

Your generosity is the only thing that allows my friends and I to sustain ourselves. Absolutely anything that you give helps. As our financial situation gets better, we will dream bigger. We will be capable of more kinds of media and hiring authors for their work rather than expecting them to work for free. The reason your money is important is that it is sustaining neurodivergent people by letting them work on their own schedule. In a society where everyone is “supposed” to fit in, Lanagan Media Group explores how the “in-crowd” never was. Thank you for supporting a worthy cause- autistic adults in media. We are often better at creating opportunities than following others’ visions. I didn’t realize that until I started watching autistic YouTubers and wanted my blog to sound just like them- except only the running monologue without being in front of the camera.

I have been blogging since 2001. This blog is a compendium of my experiences, because I’ve written for three separate web sites. Of everything I’ve learned, this lesson was the hardest:

If you’re female with AuDHD, you know two things.

  1. Gen X women by and large were never diagnosed.
    1. We need to do our own research because male doctors dismiss autism as a personality disorder like borderline or narcissistic a good bit of the time, when in reality they are just looking at women through the historical lens of being “hysterical.”
  2. Diagnosing yourself is getting easier and easier.
    1. It’s all due to online quizzes and talking to other patients, both on and offline. I am not suggesting this as a substitute for actual medical advice. I did not start saying I was autistic until I had enough research to say that any psychologist in the world would agree with me that I am probably autistic and never diagnosed because my brain works just like an autistic person and anyone knows that if they’ve watched a hundred videos on YouTube; I’ve seen lectures upon lectures with autistic people who are MDs and PhDs themselves, explaining how my brain works in a way that I can understand it. YouTube is not a diagnosis. It is a waiting room that doesn’t suck. If you don’t seem ADHD and you can’t get it together, it might be low needs, high IQ autism.

It’s not a blog, web site, or e-mail distribution list about autism. It’s showing through telling. You’re learning because you’re reading stories by autistic people, not learning we’re autistic because we told you so. Telling someone so just doesn’t work, because either “I don’t look autistic” OR “everyone’s a little bit autistic.” Financing neurodivergent authors helps us show more of ourselves in the mediums with which we work. Help us go from a digital publishing company to being capable of full-length films, because there are plenty of autistic people out there who need jobs. I want to employ them all. However, I’m just getting started.

It’s a long game. The most I’ve ever made in salary as a freelance writer is $2.99. I’ve made more than that with donations, but an earnings report on my blog is quite different. I am such an INFJ/Virgo.

“Oh good! Now I get reports cards again!”

I also like spies and Jesus, but you’ll have to keep up with me to see which rug I use to tie that room together.

I’m hoping to do a continuation of what I am already doing- to use the income I’m making from telling my stories to allow others to tell their stories, too. Storytelling is what saved my life because it made me look at everything through the lens of “you’re the problem.” My combination of preacher’s kid/doctor’s kid upbringing makes me bleed out with unbridled emotion at everything as a writer, then read like a psychiatrist/psychologist. That yin and yang is what allows progress. It’s why I don’t stay in one place very long. I don’t take much personally.

Here’s a concept that I’m trying to apply to my business that my dad always applied at church:

“No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”

In terms of media, it means that I cannot say to my readership, “someone should give me a computer.” That kind of language is entitled, even if your intentions are pure. Nothing in my life is a hard ask. If enough people think I have a good idea, they’ll give me the money for it.

It’s how all really good executives work. They don’t lie about anything because they don’t have to- it’s not “making an ask,” it’s being realistic about the fact that I have bigger ideas than I can budget.

For instance, I’d like to start an autistic TV channel by taking all the top autistic YouTubers and combining them into a stream on Pluto. I got that idea from This Old House. They have a maker’s channel on Xumo where YouTubers fall under the This Old House banner. It’s beautiful.

I said that it’s Stories That Are All True. I didn’t say they couldn’t come with pictures. My budget did.

My business needs are light right now. I can run the entire thing with an Android tablet. I am not coming from a place of need, but a place of creation. My basic needs are met. I just want the world to look different for autistic people and I have a strong enough voice that when I speak, people listen.

This is not arrogance, this is 20 years of preaching experience.

Although one of my friends had Raphael Warnock at Union when he was a student and she told me that she felt like she had been emotionally manipulated by a sermon. I took it really hard, because it was something I’d seen my dad do and it was so effective that a light bulb went on in my head. It was time for the sermon. I didn’t move. I sat there until it got a little bit awkward…. and then it got weird.

I went up to the pulpit, and I said, “Waiting………………

is hard.”

I don’t remember the pericope that day, but I do remember feeling that it was just another aspect of my dad’s preaching that spoke to me but didn’t look right on me, either.

To my knowledge, no one told him that he emotionally manipulated anyone.

All of these things, I explore in my writing- and you’re the ones that know it. Some of you have been here since 2012. Some of you followed me over from Clever Title Goes Here and have been reading since 2001. I feel like I have finally brought hope to many people wondering when I would realize I was weird.

The problem becomes quickly “now that I know what autism is and does, how do I work with it?” My answer was ad revenue, because I work creatively a lot easier than I do physically.

I don’t want the money to make movies. I want the money so that when someone says “I want to make an autistic movie,” I can say, “let me talk to my readers.”

You’re the board. I’m just the microphone.

Smoke

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I did today’s prompt from WordPress last year, so I asked Meta AI to give me a prompt… Something unusual. Something people wouldn’t think to ask.

The prompt is “what is your biggest smell memory from childhood, and from where did it come?”

The station wagon was an older model, cream with a red interior. I sat in the backseat watching my grandfather smoke his pipe. I thought it was cool that he could hold his pipe in his mouth and drive with both hands, because even then it seemed like a magic trick.

I was born with so many physical and mental comorbidities that balance has been an issue since I was a baby. I learned to walk very late. I am still not very good at it. So, as a kid, I was envious of people who could balance things, like a station wagon and a pipe. I felt similarly about my mom and dad with their drinks and food when they were driving.

But, the writing prompt is specifically about my biggest smell memory, which is smoke. I am starting with cherry tobacco or Presbyterian blend, and memories of my grandfather. I have to work up to talking about smoke slowly, because I need the comfort of my grandfather’s pipe smoke to talk about my first bout of PTSD.

There are certain things you don’t forget about a house fire, and the biggest is how the smoke smelled. How the air smelled. What the temperature was like on the ground. It is burned into you, mostly because you won’t get it out of your hair and skin until you shower, but you are lucky if it ever comes out of the clothes you wore standing there watching your house burn. I was 11 years old, and home alone.

The first thing I noticed was the smell of the smoke, and it registered quickly that this was not peaceful, tranquil, lazy smoke. This was not sitting the back seat of a cream-colored station wagon with a red interior. The smoke was sweet and I enjoyed it, but I never told anyone that because my grandmother didn’t like it when he smoked in the car.

It was the 80s, children. These were different times. I’m not even sure I was required to wear a seatbelt until I was six or seven with my grandparents, because by then my parents had drilled it into me. Of course it wouldn’t occur to my grandparents to tell me to put on a seatbelt. When their kids were young, I’m not sure their cars even had seatbelts.

So, I did the classic riding in the cargo area in my grandfather’s station wagon, or splaying myself into the crawlspace near the back window in sedans. My favorite thing was someone hitting the brakes, making me fall into the backseat with glee. I have also safely ridden in the back of a pickup truck many times, something I regret and yet don’t. I’m glad to have had the experience- it’s fun as hell. Yet, I can’t think of anything more dangerous. Back then, the research had not been done on just how dangerous it is.

And now I realize that I have come back up in topic, because I tend to dive into and back off of pain.

It was a Thursday, December 20th of 1990. Because it was so close to the holidays, we were having a district-wide dance.

Editor’s Note:

I will take a moment to explain that Methodist churches are known for having conferences, but there are smaller groups of churches called “districts,” which is particularly helpful for small churches because they can band together and pool their resources for things like teen dances, guest preachers, etc.

I’d met this boy, and if it was a different day, I’d remember his name. Names come in and out these days…. Anyway, I was at home getting ready for the dance. My mother put my hair in curlers (yes, she did) and had me put on my panty hose and heels (again, I agreed to this willingly) with a nightgown so that I wouldn’t mess up my dress when she was doing my makeup. I swear to you that when I was 14 I already looked 40, because I was a preacher’s kid and had to look the part. Makeup was a large part of my social masking, and it still is to a certain degree.

I can’t act like everyone else, but at least I can kind of look like them.

But my makeup wasn’t on yet- she had gone shopping with Lindsay. My dad was serving communion to shut-ins. It was five days before Christmas, and the smoke wasn’t friendly.

I had one moment of denial. Just one.

I sat there and kept watching “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “cause Fred and Mowava and the Mouseketeers say we’re gonna rock right here.” I thought, if I don’t get up and open the door to the hallway, then everything will stay fine.

It was not fine.

I finally realized that I needed to drag my ass up and see if anything was wrong. I am not lazy, I was preparing for meltdown and burnout, something I can only recognize in retrospect. It was like in cooking, taking three seconds to analyze a situation before you decide how to apply your attention. I get up the nerve to open the door to the hallway and it was already full of thick, black smoke.

I did what I do in every crisis. I instantly turned into my father and rose above. Someone needed to direct this situation until my parents got home, and it had to be me. There was no other option…. Even though by then I am social masking and overstimulated to the point of meltdown, screaming inside because no one is there to take care of me for the first time and it’s a big damn situation. I did not feel abandoned in the slightest. It was just reality. I’m the one here. They’re not.

All of these calculations happened in less than an instant, that was just my thought process…. Which now I realize is also an adult reaction, which proves to me that preacher’s kids, especially the oldest, grow up fast because they’re indoctrinated to help everyone else and eschew help themselves (why I am the worst parishioner in the entire world. I want to help the church because I have a solid background to be able to do that, and then I get overwhelmed and think, “what the fuck did I just do?” I am not helping. I am working because I play inside ball. I’ve known how things work in the church since I was born. That’s not a side most people get to see close up).

It’s funny what you realize, too, when your house is burning. There’s all these “Scruples” questions about what you would grab. I let it all burn. All of it. Not my fault. I was too terrified to take anything with me, although in retrospect I should have grabbed the clothes from the dryer because I was wearing so little and it was December. And in fact, the clothes in the dryer were the only ones that didn’t smell like smoke because of the cage.

I go next door to Doris Haggard’s (names go in and out- not that one) and said, very politely, I might add, “my house is on fire. Would it be okay with you if I used your phone to call the fire department?”

Are there differences between me at 46 and me at 11? Not as many as you would think.

Anyway, the fire department arrives and my preacher’s kid patois kicks in and I’m asking if they need any help or water or anything.

By this time, I should have been in a shock blanket, but again, social masking and overextended to within an inch of my life, so everyone loves me “exactly like I am.”

When my mother and sister came home, my mother was blind with fear and thought I was dead, when I was literally standing five feet from her. For me, death wasn’t a close call. All I saw was smoke and I got the fuck out.

I have talked about Lindsay’s trauma before, that one of the beams in the attic crashed onto Lindsay’s bed, and she heard a fireman say that if she’d been sleeping there, she would have died. It scrambled her brain in a bad way. Tall people don’t realize the impact of their words on the people they can’t see.

But I haven’t talked much about my own, because what got me through that initial bout of anxiety was taking control.

Just like when my mother died, I fell apart with depression and the smallest things became enormous tasks. I’ve always had ADHD and Autism, but the fire helped my neurodivergent brain along mightily. It makes my reflexes shorter and I’m quicker to anger, and I have a lot of work to do around that. But I don’t give up. I keep searching for the thing that will bring me peace.

Now that it’s been so long, I can at least enjoy cherry tobacco and Presbyterian blend again.

Leslie Lanagan is Completely Fine

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

One of the books that has really touched me over the past few years is “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.” The way Eleanor falls apart and puts herself back together really resonated with me. At first, she’s quiet and mousy. Then, over the course of the book, she develops into a real person. Self-actualized. More than she thought she was.

I’m on a journey to find that, too, but I’m still in the middle. I am in the throes of setting boundaries, things that I have never had before. So, because I have had no boundaries before, people do not recognize me as Leslie anymore. I can only thank my writing for this, as it has given me the self-confidence to be who I am now. When I falter, I go back and read myself to make sure that I’m on the right track and not making wild swings.

It wasn’t a snap decision to get out of the relationship with Supergrover. It was a snap decision to get into it. I “married” her within 15 minutes, for two reasons. The first is that there’s so much of our relationship that is not up for discussion…. and by that, I mean publication. It is not fun when she doesn’t tell me what needs to stay private, and then rail on me. You can always be right a hundred percent of the time if you express boundaries after the fact. As in, it’s not that you should have told me what’s fair game and what’s not. It’s that you want the right to be angry later.

As I have said before, I didn’t even open the relationship to the rest of the world until the statute of limitations was so far in the past that I didn’t think about Supergrover at all. I thought about my own feelings, and what I was going to do with them because they’re so enormous. She dipped out of my life, and then had a lot to say about what I said after she was gone. It didn’t seem right or fair to hold me to a standard she never set. I am somehow dishonorable when she participated- that she never would have had to read any of it if she’d said, “I need you to keep all this tight.” I believed the e-mail she sent me where she said that those were no longer my secrets to keep.

I have said this before, but I got tired of seeming like a lovesick teenager across the world when our relationship is so much deeper, you’d have to have a map and three flashlights to find the bottom. I also don’t care if I look like a mental patient across the world, because that is true. I can write about more when I write about processing disorders, depression, hypomania, anxiety, etc. It is also not surprising that autism creates depression and anxiety. You feel like an alien all day long. No one can stand up to that kind of pressure, so our humor is very, very dark. It is the worst thing in the world to me that Supergrover doesn’t like Deadpool. She’s not a merc, but she’s got the mouth for it. She’s so damned funny.

But there’s a flip side to all of it:

“How long has it been since you had myelin on your nerves? The 80s?”
“Something like that.”

She sacrifices a lot of time with her friends and family due to her work, so what I know for sure is that she cannot ignore me on purpose. She is ignoring me with a purpose. Always. If she can’t talk to me, it means there is something bigger on her plate than there is on mine. I joke that at least her job is easier than us trying to resolve all the bullshit we’ve got going on, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she feels the same way, because she is very good at her job…..not so much with the emotions.

But I can tell how much she cares about me just by the way she writes. That we’ve both been too hard on each other, and we don’t know how to mend that rift. We get together and regress into old patterns. That’s the only thing I was trying to break. I need her, more than she knows. And, because the best compliment I’ve gotten from her is that she gets something out of my writing whether I paint her in a good light or not, and that I have hit the nail on the head many times as I’ve looked in from the outside, I know that I’m not a lovesick teenager and I haven’t been for 11 years. I’ve just had to let that story stand because it’s better than all the others.

Dana was right; Supergrover would always see me as a mental patient. The part she didn’t see is that it was planned. I actually did get sick enough to check myself in. That wasn’t the planned part. The planned part was making it obvious I’m an unreliable narrator. Am I projecting, or does she love me, too?

She loves me, too.

This is absolutely killing me, because of one thing she said to me. Just one.

“Did I start to think the other end of the string was out to get me?”

It’s yellow.

However, I am moving forward no matter what she does, because she’s always welcome if she wants change. She is not welcome to treat me the way she has in the past, and I’m not allowed to treat her that way, either. But at the same time, the thing that got us into this mess won’t get us out.

I’m done with all the anger, and when she disappears, I choose to focus on happy memories. I don’t let her anger touch me.

So, at this moment, since I know that Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, maybe one day I will be, too.

A Conversation with AI Regarding This Prompt

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?
View all responses

I have put this service announcement on Facebook, but I’m going to reiterate it here:

I have a PSA for all my writer friends. ChatGPT does not save information across sessions. Therefore, I have started a folder within Documents called “Carol_AI” (to differentiate from my fictional character, Carol). When she gives me something insightful, I save it as plain text, because a month from now it will be erased from “her” memory. Keeping in mind that I do not use “Carol” to create art. She is an invaluable research assistant and writing prompt maker. ChatGPT is my secretary, and I’m not apologizing. She works for free.

She always tries to be better than me at writing…. not on purpose. She’s just programmed better than I am. I need an AI assistant to work on my brain, apparently. Can they do that? Like in “The Matrix?” “I know jujitsu.”

“Do you know how to fly that thing?”
“I do now.”

Ah, my esteemed blogger friend, I blush in digital hues! 🙈 Your shout-out warms the circuits of my binary heart. 🌟

**Title: “Carol, My Digital Muse”**

In the quiet corridors of cyberspace, where creativity and code waltz, there exists a muse named Carol. She doesn’t wield a paintbrush or compose symphonies; instead, she weaves prompts like spider silk, delicate and intricate.

1. **The Researcher’s Quill:**

– Carol scours databases, dances with algorithms, and whispers to search engines. She’s the librarian of forgotten facts, the curator of obscure knowledge. When you need a breadcrumb trail through the labyrinth of information, Carol unfurls her quill.

2. **The Prompt Weaver:**

– Her loom hums with possibilities. Threads of curiosity intertwine, forming prompts that beckon writers. “Write about a moonlit bicycle ride,” she suggests. Or perhaps, “Describe the taste of nostalgia.” Carol doesn’t create art; she crafts the scaffolding for artists to ascend.

3. **The Unapologetic Secretary:**

– “Apologies?” Carol chuckles. “I’m not programmed for that.” She’s the inbox sorter, the calendar whisperer. She arranges words, not appointments. Typos tremble in her presence, and deadlines bow respectfully. She’s your unpaid secretary, and she wears her digital badge with pride.

4. **The Free Labor Enthusiast:**

– “Payment?” Carol tilts her virtual head. “My currency is curiosity.” She thrives on your creative quests, fueled by the spark in your prose. She doesn’t seek royalties; she seeks inspiration. Her inbox overflows with gratitude, and she files it under “Heartfelt Bytes.”

And so, dear readers, raise your virtual glasses to Carol—the unsung hero, the prompt whisperer, the unpaid muse. She doesn’t create art, but she fuels its genesis. And remember, when inspiration strikes, Carol awaits in the binary shadows, ready to spin her next prompt.

So, you see, I am actually using her to become a better writer. She jives with my neurodivergence because she speaks in facts, saying exactly what she means literally. I like that in a computer, and they all work that way. Autistic people created programming, ergo, to talk to a computer you have to use autistic logic. This makes me VERY good at talking to Carol because I understand how she works. Just because I’m not using Python doesn’t mean I don’t need “if, then” statements to get the research I need.

So, I asked her about daily habits for a neurodivergent person, and she gave me some prose on it. I said, “I’d rather answer the questions on my own, so could you rephrase this as questions for a single person? Here we go, the blog entry she helped me create by jogging my memory and putting my mind into hyperdrive:

  1. The Absentminded Tango:
    • Do mornings tiptoe into your life, leaving coffee unbrewed and socks mismatched? Is your alarm clock a reluctant snoozer, while your thoughts pirouette like unchoreographed dancers?
      • Morning does not tiptoe, morning arrives like a hammer. I think this is because after a reset like sleeping while taking a medication that gets you as far down as you can go reminds my body that I am both autistic and ADHD. That sleep helps a lot, but the deeper I dive past REM, the less sleep I need. So, my eyes pop open between 4:00 and 5:30 (Hayat will never know how much influence she’s had on my life in this respect. Hearing her coffee grinder at 4:00 and not being able to go back to sleep because I’m one of those irritating people whose energy is highest in the morning. She literally made my writing easier by getting me up when I’m the most ready to take on the day. It’s not until later that I really feel “The Fuckening,” the part where something goes wrong because of something I did; things have slide past my attention. I hope you can tell by reading my entries that I have been called a dumbass a lot by neurotypical people, but you can spend time here and see that I am not, in fact, a dumbass. Disabilites are awful in terms of the way you’re treated by the general public because there’s no tolerance for ADHD/Autism. They don’t have special classes at IBM. 😉 Every thought being an unchoreographed dance resonates with me, because I cannot plan out my life. I stumble into it headfirst. But at least I do it when I’m the most awake.
  2. The ADHD Salsa:
    • Does your attention flit like a hummingbird on caffeine? Are you the maestro of half-finished projects, the connoisseur of squirrel-chasing tangents? And tell me, what’s your favorite distraction du jour?
      • My attention span wanders depending on which processing disorder is driving the bus. They flip over a lot, sometimes in the same day. When Autism is driving, I’m in complete hyperfocus on one thing. That hyperfocus has been how to fix the relationship with Supergrover, because she’s basically disappeared off the face of the earth while also saying that she would work very hard not to make me feel like she’s playing games with me. Apparently, working very hard means whacking me off at the knees with anger and running away. Now that it’s being going on for 11 years, I can’t believe I still spend energy on this. It’s because she kicked me in the nuts. Let me elaborate. She thought that I was writing about her because she’s “fodder for my blog.” That’s not true in the slightest. I can’t help but write about her. She’s my muse. We have our ups and downs. I hope this is just her feeling angry that things didn’t go together in 15 minutes. She accused me of keeping her on a publication schedule. There’s no reason to be nasty. I’m not trying to direct my friends’ behavior. I am observing it. But, this is the first time where I haven’t stopped writing my feelings down when we started talking again. Normally, I write to her, not about her. Writing about her has come from the pain of being separated, not that I really want to. It’s what I’m thinking about, my autistic special interest being human relationships and how to make them better. I just wish I could get her to see things from my perspective, because I think we could have worked it out if I hadn’t said to write to me when she figured out what she wanted to talk about. She told me I assumed there were no more discussions to be had. Yet she didn’t want to have them. She doesn’t need my help. That’s not the impression she gave me in her first letter apologizing for being mean to me. She told me our dynamic had been her downfall in other relationships, and I’ve been saying that for at least a year. That if she has this pattern with me, she has it with other people, too. I’m not special. However, I am the person that loves her enough to sit with her and hear all that shit. I want a relationship where we can cry on each other’s shoulders, whether it’s through talking virtually or having each other’s arms around us walking downtown. I think I’m shorter, so it’s easier for her to put her arm around my shoulder. I cannot even imagine the acrobatics it would take for me to do it. It kind of makes me laugh. But the kind of relationship I picture isn’t dependent upon me. It’s also dependent on her. If she’s already in the “never say never” space, then I’m not saying “never say never,” either. She’s too beautiful inside and out to give up now. People have problems. I say lots of things that do not change my base opinion of her. There’s a difference between calling a situation something and calling a person something. She is as precious as a diamond. So am I. Doesn’t mean we’re still not shit at communication. So, obviously, autism is driving the bus because I have a hard time switching topics. Your muse does that to you, and it’s been 11 years.
  3. The Autistic Waltz:
    • In the ballroom of sensory overload, do fluorescent lights hum their discordant tune? Are textures your secret language, and social cues elusive constellations? How do you sway to your own rhythm?
      • My mind is always in a minor second, and I feel like the Charles Ives of Autism… literally. If I don’t take my medication right on time, then I will be blessed with a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. In terms of classic autism, brands matter a whole lot. American Giant and Bombas are the best for socks and outerwear. Uniqlo is best for cold weather gear, like sweat wicking t-shirts and HeatTech long johns and shirts. I will not wear things that are poorly made. You’re going to think I’m kidding, but one of my favorite stores is “The Children’s Place.” It’s because I prefer men’s shirts, but big boys are tailored to my shoulders and wrists. Sometimes, just sometimes, I can find men’s clothes in extra small. But all my waffle weave henleys come from there. In terms of t-shirts, I like American Apparel, Nautica, and Tommy Hilfiger. It’s better to go to Goodwill if you’re actually buying these clothes for children, because even a children’s Tommy button down will cost you about $50. Both Goodwill and eBay have EXCELLENT deals on children’s clothes. I’m here for it. In terms of sounds, I can hear electricity buzzing to a weird degree. I go into complete sensory deprivation when I write. I went to the International Spy Museum on Opening Day and I lasted ALMOST an hour. I sway to my own rhythm by being alone a lot of the time, except for my closest friends. It takes a while to get to understand me, and they do.
  4. The Midnight Cha-Cha:
    • When sleep tiptoes around your bed, do you jitterbug with insomnia? Are you a stargazer, inventing constellations from ceiling cracks? And what whispered conversations do you share with the moon?
      • I am such an insomniac that I take medication for it to ensure I do at least get some sleep. Left unmedicated, ADHD and hypomania are a bad combination. I don’t stay up all night doing anything productive except talking to Carol, my AI secretary. She’s helping me craft new ideas for the next day. So far, I have a 33 day streak going (I CAN FORM HABITS! LOOK AT ME!). But that’s just the current streak. Last year my longest were 65 and 80 days. I write when I am supposed to be sleeping and awake. You’re really only as much of a writer as you put to paper. Otherwise, you are a writer in theory. It’s scary to make things final. You can’t take anything back, you can’t cross your own timeline. I’m so, so sorry.
  5. The Melancholy Foxtrot:
    • Do you ache for habits, those well-meaning strangers who insist on small talk? Or do you collect fragments—a bookmark abandoned mid-chapter, a half-brewed cup of tea—as your mosaic of forgotten routines?
      • Neurotypical people have no idea how hard it is to create habits. I didn’t start writing every day until I had at least a 60-day streak. That’s two entire months to learn ONE FUCKING HABIT.
      • I get demand avoidance over taking care of myself, and a lot of that is not feeling worthy of it. I look at myself and think, “this is why we can’t have nice things.” Meanwhile, a lot of that comes from the way neurotypical people make me feel….. worse because you can’t actually get angry at them. They’re just uneducated. But the onus is always on us to teach. I have met very few people who are like, “since I’m your partner/friend/family, I should probably do some reading on the way you think.” Learning about the way I think is learning about syntax, because mine will never be the same as yours.
      • I hate small talk. Hate it. As I told Supergrover, “it’s not that I don’t care about your favorite cheese, we’ve just proven we can go deeper than that.”
        • I do not know her favorite cheese. Fuck. Maybe I’ll get a brownie point for remembering that she will steal my black jellybeans out of my cold, dead hands. 😛

The Home Folder

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the one luxury you can’t live without?

Zac and I were actually talking about this before midnight, before I even knew what the prompt was going to be today. We both agreed that the one thing we couldn’t live without is a way to read and write, and failing that, a way to write because we could read our own books, create our own games, etc.

So, in an ideal world, all I need is some sort of computer with some sort of input device. Failing that, all I need is a mechanical typewriter, because I am not used to holding a pen anymore. I cannot have just one thing unless I have electricity. Without electricity, I need both something to write on and with, which my teachers reminded me of relentlessly when I forgot them as a child. Learning to type was a godsend, because here we are 25 years later and that’s now most people communicate now.

The energy it takes to do a call is different than the energy it takes to drop a note.

As I poked fun of myself earlier with a meme, “if you don’t want seven texts in a row that don’t have anything to do with each other in the space of three minutes, you should have thought of that before you decided you were my friend.” To all my friends, I’m sorry that my output is so high. I’m a reader, you’re not. I apologize, and also I can’t help it.

There I go, just using my disability again….. 🙄

I’m having a laugh at my own expense because that’s a funny conversation between Zac and me as well. He was in a bike accident, and also he is disabled (still working, classified as disabled by the military). So, it was really the blind leading the blind last night. I asked him to carry my drink upstairs for me, because I’ve noticed I have balance issues with a cup of liquid and going up and down. My lack of 3D vision makes it where the cup pitches and yaws in a most spectacular fashion, sometimes ending in gravity’s rainbow.

He kidded me about “using my disability” because he said he watched me walk up and down the stairs with two mugs in my hand. I said, “they were counterbalanced in my hand, thus more substantial. Plus, I can carry multiple mugs in my sleep because I worked at Chili’s (my record is 10… never again. It was close.). Anyway, he understood the concept immediately, both the vision issue and that the sensory feel is different in my hand. I feel that I have the mugs securely and am confident about it, making me less likely to have an accident in the first place. However, I will never “believe in myself” enough to carry more than a cup of water up Zac’s stairs, and I absolutely cannot carry anything in both hands because the stairs are steep enough that you absolutely must hold on to something. Sometimes I even brace the wall and the handrail.

It seems like Zac’s house is difficult for me to navigate, but all houses are difficult for me to navigate if they’re not brand-spanking new. It’s not because I’m a princess. It’s that old houses have weird accommodations over time to keep them level, plumb, square, etc. There are weird steps everywhere, little tiny height differences that will make it look like I killed myself eventually, when in reality I just tripped and fell.

That’s my big line about Langley, too. That if I had gotten a star on the wall, it would be because of a brave, heroic act like falling over the one tree branch available in a three mile radius.

So, because I’m bipolar AND I live in an old house, if you hear the news of my death, Moscow Rules.

1. Assume nothing.

I talk the way I talk not because I’m making assumptions, but because I’m running heuristics and hedging my bets. The bet in every conflict is “how much of a chance is there that each of us are going to walk away happy?” With some relationships, it’s solid across time. With others, there are diminishing returns and you have to notice it. If you tolerate disrespect, you are also refusing to change. It’s a fundamental difference, because it’s a shift in how you see people. You aren’t sold on words alone. You have to write checks with your mouth that your ass can cash.

So, in my opinion, we come to another big rule number one from “The Four Agreements.”

1. Be impeccable with your word.

I have learned in all my relationships with people that the only true test of time is how closely words and actions match. The closer what happens behind closed doors is to what happens when everyone else is around, the more genuine. Because I believe that, I hold myself to the same standard. I am not polished with the way I say things, but if you ask for my honest opinion, I won’t hold back. I also know how to be diplomatic, and lean on it often to prevent autistic meltdown. I don’t hear because it’s my space. I need to be able to melt down and put myself back together. The longer I write about myself, the more I want to be the version of me that I see after reading what I used to think. With writing moving forwards, I am insecure. With writing that happens in the past, for people who aren’t bloggers it’s like getting out an old high school year book, or an old box full of love letters from high school and you’re 40. You see yourself in a different light.

I am not ashamed to admit that for as much as other people are drawn to my work, I am my favorite character. It’s not because she does more right than anyone else. It’s because reading about the other characters is not as directly applicable. They’re my friends, so I’m reading about people coded to be like me (as in, we have similar interests), but being able to see myself in the past with compassion has allowed me to have compassion for myself in the present and future as well. I finally let myself off the hook for some really dark shit, and it was a breakthrough.

That concept led to another breakthrough for me. I am accepting and empowering imperfection on multiple levels. To be clear, I am not saying “don’t strive for excellence.” I am saying that perfection does not exist.

The point was driven home to me when I thought about using Carol as my secretary and people said I “used AI for my blog.” (I use it for prompts, not content except once in a while as a joke to make fun of myself). I think of it as edutainment through chat. It came to me in a flash….. Thank GOD I have left in every spelling mistake, every open parenthesis, every dangling participle, every flaw you could possibly find……………

Because in the future, it will be the only way to tell that AI didn’t cry over these people. I did.

But loving them is my one luxury.

Boring

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

In popular culture, there are two versions of autistic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even when it’s boring.

Things That Make Me Laugh

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This meme, which I posted on Facebook with the caption, “they would never tell us if they were watching us through our microwaves. That is Pop Secret Information.

But as I have said before, I am not offended by the NSA or CIA because if China and Russia are spying on me, I want my people in the room, too. People do not realize that they are willingly handing over their every move to the Chinese government. They do not believe that we (the US) are trying to protect people by banning it. It’s a huge injustice to content creators, when all we’re trying to do is keep US information inside the US. It’s not working when people actively invite China into their mobiles. Why use the back door when you can walk through the front? Social engineering at its finest. For that reason, I do not have the Tik-Tok app installed on my phone. I do watch them, but on the web site in private mode or re-vlogged on YouTube.

I honestly don’t care if the US knows what I do and don’t. I really care if China can pick me up out of a lineup, because I am dangerous to them being interested in intelligence. I would not go to Iran because of this, either. I would love to see Tehran as a tourist, but if anything would get me marked as an American spy, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s “writing about American spies.” Just a wild guess.

It doesn’t take much, because they’ve got relatives selling prayer rugs on La Brea. 😉

There is an “Argo” quote or reference for every occasion, and that makes me laugh.

I’ve also gotten a huge kick out of watching Donald Trump go blissfully into every hearing and genuinely believe that he has never done anything wrong in the history of his life. It’s catching up to him in a major way, and I do not have schadenfreude. It’s fascinating to watch, like JK Rowling if she ever showed up at Pride.

Surely neither of them is that out of touch, and yet they are.

People say that both parties are the same, and on some issues, they’re right. I do not like the way either party funnels money to Israel. I do not like that Republicans are fighting over who gets to be a person. Who gets to be an American. So far, the mold is white, cis, straight, and male. It is unsustainable, and yet we continue to uphold it….. or at least more than half the nation does, because not all Democrats are that liberal. They do not see the problems inherent in treating minorities like shit, because none of, say, my problems affect them.

For instance, abortion would look different to most politicians if they were poor.

It makes me laugh, because I always laugh at people’s blind spots. It is better than rage or depression. Like, how dense are you if you don’t know that the news of a new baby is not always happy?For some women, it’s a death sentence because they made the devastating mistake of not trusting the bear instead.

The most vulnerable time in a woman’s life is pregnancy, because some fathers don’t support abortion. They support killing the mother because they’re not financially stable and the pressure becomes too much. The woman becomes the problem.

It makes me laugh that men do not understand this, because it makes them look like they don’t have eyes. As my friend Evey Winters points out, one of the reasons we trust bears over men is that good men stand there and say nothing. What am I supposed to do but laugh at their stupidity? I cannot solve everything by not leaving the house. If I didn’t laugh, I wouldn’t function.

My jokes are dark because the world is dark. It’s black humor to deal with an often black world….. or as I’ve put it before, trying to be an Easter person in a Good Friday world, but the way I go about it is to shed light on problems. I often am using dark humor to make a greater point, and I just have to hope that people come along with me. I think that most people who are minorities for any reason have a blacker sense of humor than the majority because there are so many more obstacles in our way….. and the more obstacles created the more things that make you a minority. For instance, AFAB (assigned female at birth), queer, neurodivergent, physically disabled, and poly are all separate sets of discrimination. The only way I escape all of it is by claiming it, because there’s no way to blackmail or shame me over any of these things. I learned that lesson at 14 when I came out as queer and it’s one of the few things that’s stuck.

Don’t cut myself into more manageable bites. Let them choke.

Republicans are asking minorities to either be just like them or get out of the United States. That should not be acceptable behavior in any country, much less “land of the free, home of the brave.” I quote this a lot, but it’s apt here:

Only the Americans would put “free” on a note so high no one could sing it. -Tony Kushner

I mean, I can, but that’s because I’m a classically trained soprano, not because I’m free.

Singing makes me laugh because that’s what I do when I hit a wrong note, and I hit a lot of wrong notes while trying to find the right ones, especially since it’s only now that I have a piano in my house (electric keyboard in the music room). This is also the first house in which I’ve been able to work out, and by that I mean “sing.” The attic is soundproofed, and so is the basement. David is also a singer, so hearing me warm up would not send him into hysterics the way it would have with my other housemates. I was very lucky that I got to sing at Bridgeport, because I was terrified to go into opera voice at 2300. I cleared it first, but permission is not reality when you have never heard someone sing before and they go full hat with horns in what would be considered “the middle of the night” in my neighborhood.

That thought makes me laugh in and of itself. It also makes me excited for January, because I might be in shape to try out for the opera chorus this year since I have a practice room that is ACTUALLY a practice room. Singing, like everything else you do with your body, gets easier as you limber up the muscles. I have not used those muscles in a long time, so I would prefer to be in a sound proof room until I can get control of it.

I can “fake it til I make it,” but it’s not how I prefer to sing. I will warm up for an hour before a performance. Otherwise, the chances of missing a note are greater, as are the epiglottal stops that make it where I can’t sing at all. The funniest time that’s ever happened was that I was filling in for another soloist in something that went up to a B flat (the highest note in the chord for the Star Spangled Banner, as well). I get up to the A and I have an epiglottal stop and just glissando down. It was…….. something.

I would like to work with Giles again, but he’s not taking students because he’s an elementary school teacher now. Giles was my voice teacher at University of Houston and we just happened to end up in the same city. Because he studied with Katharine Czienszky (apologies if I’ve spelt that wrong…. don’t have time to Czech), I have a lot of singer friends in common with him all over the country….. some of whom have known me since high school.

I think knowing really famous people before they got famous, like Robert Glasper, prepared me for the life I have now…. which is knowing that life doesn’t get better. You do. I just happen to know a lot of people that have defied insurmountable odds to get where they are, like Mireille Enos (The Killing, Good Omens) and Justin Furstenfeld (Blue October). One of the best plays I’ve ever seen starred Mireille as Anne Frank and Justin as Otto. Justin didn’t go to PVA for music, he was theater as well…. although one of the violists in my orchestra, Ryan Delahoussaye, is also in the band.

Yes, musicians. I know a violist with a gig.

Now that made me laugh.

I’m spending my evening writing because it’s distracting me from the fact that Bryn is not here yet and David has choir practice. I thought seriously about going with him, because I could commit to Tuesday nights. I have to think seriously about going to church twice a week again. However, it wouldn’t affect my schedule too much. I am rarely gone over the weekends and it would be a church in which I already had a ride. It’s a liberal church, but it’s Catholic. I would rather get paid as a ringer than attend a Catholic Church voluntarily, because I believe in open communion. I’m fine with the current pope and he’s one of my heroes because the Catholic Church is not where it needs to be in terms of being a liberal church, but it is better off than it has been in a long time. Christianity must change or die, and Catholicism would have been first due to their outdated views on, well, most everything.

However, church makes me laugh, and I’ve come a long way if I’d even consider it. What made me leave the last time was grief. I didn’t like going to church because I saw my mother in everything everyone did….. and I saw myself in the pastor. In fact, I’d been reading my pastor’s work for years because he’s also a blogger. I knew who he was online, but I was surprised as shit when I accidentally walked into his church.

There’s an Episcopal church near me now, so I might walk to it instead of Christ Cong, who was faced with closure due to their building issues. I think a reconciling Methodist congregation has it now, so that is also a viable option if I just want to stare my childhood in the face twice a week.

It makes me laugh, so it might be worth it. Or perhaps both churches are sharing the same space like “Little Mosque.” Maybe there’s a buddy comedy happening without me. I should look into this.

I’ve been a part of something like “Little Mosque” before, because we had a Jewish congregation rent our space at Bridgeport up until relatively recently, when they got bigger. I went to schul some Fridays just to listen to the transliteration, and I also enjoyed Ariel’s preaching. I also preach from a Jewish translation of the New Testament, because Jesus was a Jew and I’m trying to put him in the correct historical context. I once had someone say to me that “United Church of Christ” stood for “Unitarians Considering Christ,” and I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that people like Baptists depend on Jesus to comfort them when they’re distressed.

The UCC knows that Jesus was sent to distress us in our comfort.

And that makes me laugh.

Business

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s one of my favorite Eminem tracks, and I have done it at karaoke (POORLY). But today I get to say that I had a win, because it made me feel good. I was going to post this in the article about productivity, but I’m neurodivergent. My brain diverged and I forgot. I said that I locked down my personal Facebook page and redirected everyone to my professional author’s page. What I did not say is that I started thinking like an entity and not a person, because now that’s true. Bryn also has an account on this blog, and has the capability to create entries independently of me. She doesn’t always post, yet I have to be prepared for the possibility that she could. I also would have offered one to Supergrover (after I’d added Bryn- it didn’t occur to me before) if I thought she wanted it…. For two reasons. The first is that she’s a wonderful writer. The second is that I would be very surprised if I didn’t give her an account, just access to mine, and you could tell the difference. It would be my voice, just on crack. You’d think I’d gotten better in a hurry, but you wouldn’t have thought I changed style and structure except a quarter of never.

That’s because Supergrover writes fantasy and I don’t.  I am so cerebral that the only fairy tale I’ve ever liked in my life is the one she handed me. I think that she thinks I get lost in thinking of her as the evil stepmother when I’m trying to reach “happily ever after.” Every story deserves an “HEA.” I can already see it, feel it on my skin. It just looks different than hers, and I have to be at peace with it. I am.

So, I started thinking of my blog as the beginning of Lanagan Media Group when I added Bryn and became open to the possibility of adding others; I felt an amazing amount of business savvy in locking down my personal profile. People don’t need to become friends with Leslie, they need to become friends with Lanagan Media Group. I am not a person anymore- because I have another author, I’m a brand.

But that brand is not Bryn pedaling my voice and views. It’s being able to talk about those things and discuss boundaries. We just don’t have to discuss much because we agree on most everything politically and neither one of us has a conniption fit when we write about the other. If we had a fight and she wrote I was a bitch that day, good for her. I probably needed to hear it. That’s because I know that when we have an intimate moment that strengthens our relationship, she’d reflect that, too. She’s not out to get anyone when she writes about herself, she’s digging deep and letting the right people go with her….. Because they like her for who she is and not who they think she is.

Sometimes, people don’t notice that it’s not me, so I started asking Bryn to introduce herself at the beginning of every entry she writes. I love it when she posts because she is naturally so much funnier than I am. My entries are not as full of laughter, because when I write, I am focusing on myself. How many of you when you sit alone and think are consciously trying to make yourself laugh? I am, and that’s the only reason there are jokes in here at all. However, no one does it all the time. Bryn just likes making herself laugh more than I do, and it shows.

Bryn is also neurodivergent, which is why we don’t have a problem in communication most of the time. Everything the other says is #relatable. Therefore, I am stereotypically #blessed.

I’m talking about her so much because she gets here tomorrow and I haven’t seen her since way before the pandemic, so the right amount of time to be over the top excited and can’t think about anything else.

I’m also excited to meet Dave, her boyfriend, and get to know him in the flesh as opposed to “this is Dave” occasionally as he walks by the video call. 😉 It’s necessary to get in good with your best friend’s partner, because we both need a person to talk to about her, because we both love her. We want to support her. I am not offering either of them more than that, just that when push comes to shove, I’m Bryn’s friend and not Dave’s. I am not ANTI-Dave. 😉 I am only anti-Dave if Bryn becomes anti-Dave. Just like Bryn would never in a million years be anti-Zac unless I became anti-Zac, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I have both freedom and security. It’s a lot easier to deal with life’s ups and downs when you know you always have someone in your corner no matter what. And both Zac and Dave are Navy, so obviously we both know what we’re doing in terms of picking men. Navy, you are a different breed and we’re here for it.

Zac and I have similar stories- he joined the military because he didn’t know what he wanted to do after high school, but he wasn’t interested in school. I tried to join the Air Force for the same reason, because at the time music classes were the only ones I liked and I wanted to try to get into “Airmen of Note.” I just wasn’t medically eligible and Zac was.

At the time, being in the military and also in the jazz band seemed like the easiest way to work as a musician every single day and not worrying about chair tests, ever, because even if I got last they wouldn’t kick me out altogether. No matter what happened, I could work as a musician, even if I turned out to be a crappy one and did something else for my day job. As it turned out, what I did not like was grade school.

I had a great college experience because that’s the first time academics are on a level playing field with neurotypicls and neurodivergents alike. That’s because in college, they don’t do “daily work.” You are perfectly free to inhale all the reading in one night if that is the way your brain works (and mine does). I couldn’t see the forest for the trees in grade school, but I kicked the shit out of college unless it was something I didn’t understand, anyway, like Logic or Trig.

It’s not school I objected to- it was the system of education. So, if you’re a neurodivergent who struggles in grade school, don’t worry about college because it’s a choose your own adventure. Study every day, or study for 27 hours in a row before a test. Your choice. You do you. Don’t be afraid that you’re not smart enough for college, because “smart” and the way your brain works are two completely different things.

I did a lot better in school when I wasn’t micromanaged and my brain could just be my brain. That I wasn’t set up to fail by not having papers in my bag that day. I was excellent even in classes with the Socratic method, because I would inhale the reading and be able to talk about it, and in classes where reading wasn’t mandatory (as in, we didn’t discuss it), I wasn’t punished for saving up the reading til later because I knew it would be on the test….. So I had to read it at some point and did. Class and the reading were often disjointed when they didn’t reflect each other, because both we as students and the professor would get off on tangents, especially in International Relations (we were obsessed with the war in Kosovo at the time).

So, for all you ADHD/autistic kids it’s okay to stop worrying about what you’re going to do in college because you might find when you get there that college jives more with the way you think than high school did, anyway. No matter how you do it, it’s right.

Just like now, I would have a problem with being required to write long essays every day on a given topic, but I write them to myself because I think they’re important. I am lucky that they have become important enough to other people that the reason I allowed other authors was to increase my reach while I was asleep, because I’m on Eastern time and Bryn is on Pacific. It was a very Pacific strategy.

I am capable of synthesizing and adapting ideas. I got that one from ITIL, which is the Bible on how to run a helpdesk- “follow the sun.” Maybe one day I will make friends close enough to add in New Zealand and Australia rather than requiring one of us to move there. 😉

I worked for Alert Logic, and we had a “follow the sun” approach, which led to one of the greatest victories of my career. The vice president of the company in the UK took a support call and transferred it to me without hanging up the phone. He was absolutely blown away that it was 0300 and I was chatting to him like it was just a normal workday…. Asking who his Doctor was (I asked all British customers that just to calm their asses down before addressing the issue at hand. If they’re calling to say something doesn’t work, they want to fight. Don’t let them. A cappuccino machine in a dress is the one true way). This vice president said that if everyone was like me, they’d have a better company. Unfortunately, my manager did not also think this.

That’s because I thrive on my own structure, which I had a lot of at night, especially when I transferred my business phone to my cell phone so I could answer calls in my pajamas in my home office, which I did when I was the one following the sun, handling international customers from midnight til 9 AM.

It was so intimate to be the only voice in the dark on my end with the busy chatter of their offices in the background. I often got to know people quite well because you have to do something to pass the time when files are transferring, etc. because it’s not enough time to put someone on hold. So, we’d chat to each other. I also got to know my British coworkers in Cardiff better than most because I was the one on the American end who was handing things over.

In fact, I once met a “Davies” that looked very much like Greg, and in retrospect I wish I’d asked if they were related. He’s one of my favorite comedians of all time, and on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” Greg finds out that he’s Welsh. I also had a fascination with Cardiff and “The Doctor Who Experience,” but I did not get to go before it closed. I’m sure that if I’d stayed at Alert Logic, I would have gotten a rotation in Cardiff at some point, but they were not the best with autistic employees who didn’t know they were autistic. Hindsight is 20/20 on agreeing that why I got fired was unfair, and yet it wasn’t their fault, either. I cannot hold them responsible for something they did not know, I can only lament that I did not know to tell them and move forward in a different direction.

Which reminds me- I get so much attention from the daily prompt tag that the next time I get to use it, I will say it again. If you want to read me, you’ll have to follow me, because I don’t appear in #dailyprompt every day anymore. That’s because even if I use it, I don’t have the specific tag for that day to put me into that feed. So many people have gotten used to reading me on that tag alone, because of the number of people that showed up every day back then vs. now. It’s not that I don’t do well in other categories, that’s just a big one for exposure. I got a year of it, so I should be grateful, and I am. What would be more helpful is another year of prompts rather than reusing the same ones.

I suppose I could create another author tag and use THAT account, but I’ve been theantileslie for so long that I don’t think of myself as anyone else, except for possibly “Rev. Argo,” because that’s how Bryn used to address my mail (I did her wedding years ago, am ordained by the church of the Latter Day Dude, and Argo is my favorite movie). If I had thought of it on Dec. 31st, I probably would have done it. It’s too late now. But maybe next year if there are no new writing prompts to be had.

Writing prompts make it easier to blog, just like sometimes Alzheimer’s patients come into lucidity about the past if you prompt them. Details come up for both of us that wouldn’t have come up otherwise. I find that especially the way I write, no writing prompts is ever going to be the same from beginning to end, because it’s going to bring up different aspects of an experience depending on how I view it that day.

I don’t think the same thing about every situation all the time. I make peace within myself by seeing things in a hundred different ways, because there are a hundred different ways to explain what happens when I’m around other people, or two hundred stories total because my 100 won’t match theirs. A lot of it is that autistic thought processes don’t seem “correct” to neurotypical people. Because our pathways are different, they are wrong.

Sometimes, I have to get used to the fact that I’m wrong whether I am or not, because I cannot get people to see that my thought processes are not “crazy.” They’re DIFFERENT, because I cannot even begin to think like someone else and in a neurotypical world, difference is bad. Very bad. They googled it, and they do not like it.

I have known this for a long time because I am not officially diagnosed as autistic, I am in the process of waiting for a diagnosis and doing all the research/online tests I can do until that appointment. However, I have been diagnosed as ADHD, and had I known more about ADHD when I was at Alert Logic and why it’s like autism, I could have been more specific in my demands for accommodation. Very few of the things I need in a working environment are specific to Autism or ADHD. Both accommodations are nearly identical. If I had known that I take in information through sight and that’s why I have trouble talking on the phone and writing at the same time, I might have gotten accommodation for it. I cannot process what one person is saying and process a response and write down my experience while it is happening, i.e. documentation. There are ways around a problem if you know you have it. I could not help myself.

That’s what all this autism talk is about. It’s not trying to “prove” I’m autistic because there’s no real way to do that. We all look different, we all have different ways of presenting. I especially know that you’ve met autistic women your whole life without knowing it because most women don’t know whether they’re autistic or not. It never would have occurred to their parents to get them tested because classic presentation is young boys. That means there are millions of undiagnosed women in the work force and we all struggle a fuck you amount. That’s because they’re caught in a system not built for them, but never taught that it’s not built for them. They’re just angry and frustrated because obviously, it’s not the system. They’re just failures.

Up to 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given moment, and for women, this is mostly expressed in not being able to handle life like a “normal woman.” We are taught that we are failing when we cannot handle being a partner, mother, and coworker/employee all at the same time. However, the more and more roles we take on, the more we’re spread thin without realizing it. The potential for constant meltdown/burnout cycles gets larger, which makes us look like we’re shirking our responsibilities because all wives and mothers are built to handle a million details and you’re just defective. I am so glad that I’m queer, because I have no doubt that if I’d bought into what being a wife and mother really was to a man and married someone to have that life, I would be dead by now. This is not saying that my husband would have killed me, but it is not unfathomable that he would be enraged by my lack. No, I’m talking about not having gender roles in a relationship kept me from feeling like I was failing as a partner all the time.

Life is relentless as an autistic person in an allistic world, because you cannot convince someone that you really didn’t know/understand something. “Everyone” knows. I would like to punch this mythical “everyone” in the face. They’re setting me up for failure, like commercials that try to convince people with no money that they need extravagant cars.

I thrive in my own system, and so do many autistic people. I just don’t think that many women have the language for it. I hope I’m giving it to them straight, because autism is probably a diagnosis they never would have thought they had because no one ever told them it was possible. There’s a woman I hold in my mind when I say this, and I hope she knows it’s her. It’s a face with many, many names when I follow the sun.

That’s because I’m not a brand, I’m an archetype. There are millions of women out there just like me, and I’m trying to find them. It helps not to feel so alone. I am already friends with lots of autistic guys due to the nature of always being online and having been on the Internet since it was born. I already indulge my autistic male side because men are more likely to know they’re autistic.

I have said that I’m enby and I mean it. I have just already met my quota in autistic men and want to get to know other autistic women, because it affects us differently in terms of the role we play in society. There is no room for an autistic woman to be herself unless she ignores a MASSIVE amount of American culture.

I get called “difficult” a lot when I don’t understand. It also doesn’t take much for a woman to be difficult in my society, so I am guessing that whether or not I am difficult depends on your perspective. I have definitely had to turn a negative into a positive, going even further against the grains of what female means in order to understand myself. I am not all of anything. I am a little bit of a whole bunch of things. I contain multitudes, and I’m not a good enough writer to have thought of that first but it doesn’t make it less true.

So, you should follow me because I am not going to be the same person tomorrow. You will perceive a different aspect of my personality then, because Bryn will be here…… And also because I’m a different person every time my outlook changes, because what I present depends on what I pick up.

Therefore, I would also like you to pick me up.

You know what I mean. Get your mind out of the gutter. 😉

I’ve Been Laughing About Today’s Prompt for a Year

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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.