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……
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. ๐ 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 โsupposedโ to fit in, Lanagan Media Group explores how the โin-crowdโ never was. Thank you for supporting a worthy cause- autistic adults in media. We are often better at creating opportunities than following othersโ visions. I didnโt 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 Iโve written for three separate web sites. Of everything Iโve learned, this lesson was the hardest:
If youโre female with AuDHD, you know two things.
Gen X women by and large were never diagnosed.
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 โhysterical.โ
Diagnosing yourself is getting easier and easier.
Itโs 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 theyโve watched a hundred videos on YouTube; Iโve 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 doesnโt suck. If you donโt seem ADHD and you canโt get it together, it might be low needs, high IQ autism.
Itโs not a blog, web site, or e-mail distribution list about autism. Itโs showing through telling. Youโre learning because youโre reading stories by autistic people, not learning weโre autistic because we told you so. Telling someone so just doesnโt work, because either โI donโt look autisticโ OR โeveryoneโs a little bit autistic.โ 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, Iโm just getting started.
Itโs a long game. The most Iโve ever made in salary as a freelance writer is $2.99. Iโve made more than that with donations, but an earnings report on my blog is quite different. I am such an INFJ/Virgo.
โOh good! Now I get reports cards again!โ
I also like spies and Jesus, but youโll 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.”
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.
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.
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 Carolโthe 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:
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. ๐ 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Melancholy Foxtrot:
Do you ache for habits, those well-meaning strangers who insist on small talk? Or do you collect fragmentsโa bookmark abandoned mid-chapter, a half-brewed cup of teaโas 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. ๐
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….. ๐
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.
Iโm noticing that I have less of a need to write now that thereโs 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. Iโll 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 itโs turned up to hell by autism and a regular person wouldnโt feel like that. We donโt 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. Theyโre just like other kids. Other kids donโt like homework, right? Meanwhile, it has nothing to do with us. We donโt need to change. People need to change around us. If you donโt notice that your kid is doing poorly in school because they memorized the dictionary and the encyclopedia (so he canโt 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 Iโm autistic, it is not what people are thinking when theyโre talking to me. Neurotypical superiority is relentlessโฆ.. unless youโre high needs. Then, everyone who interacts with you views themselves as a fuckinโ hero because other people *tell them they are.* Basically, if you are high IQ, people donโt think โautismโ 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 couldnโt have had more people to mask than a PK. Thatโs 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 itโฆ. 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.
Thereโs the kind people win Oscars for, and the real autistic people- the actors that have taken on many roles without even knowing theyโre autistic.
There are a few celebrities I recognize with my neuroscopte (as opposed to โgaydarโ). I donโt even want to tell you who they are, because it would stigmatize them in your minds. Suuuuure, youโre open-minded. Itโs a pattern I see all the time. People are okay with neurodivergence as long as itโs ADHD. When you tell someone youโre autistic, they either donโt believe you or treat you like you have cancer. Thatโs because their whole lives, theyโve been taught that autistic people are to be pitied.
I am so driven to write that I donโt need much stimulation from other people. I get it, and then remember why I donโt like it. There are positives, though. With autism, thereโs a specific way you walk that plays heavily into the โneuroscopeโ aspect. Itโs so prevalent thereโs 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 Iโm on the spectrum, and that I fluctuate between low and high needs all the time. People just donโt recognize when Iโm high needs because Iโm 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 donโt 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 itโs time to pay bills. I am not saying thatโs 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 dadโs 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, itโs an area few people are willing to exploreโฆโฆ. But they love reading about others. Lots of people enter my world that arenโt even convinced they have one. Youโd be surprised at how much you think about everything if you get still enough to hear it.
In short, Iโve come to think of myself as your pinch hitter. That maybe my emotional work will help you along. Iโve had successes and failures, so itโs not like Iโm writing the manual on how to feel and be felt. Itโs that some people read my writing looking for how I do what I do. Others read my writing to find out what they *wouldnโt* do.
Either way, I hope Iโm worth the price of admission.
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. ๐
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.
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.ย 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. ๐ 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. ๐ 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. ๐
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. ๐
Because I answered it last year, I can’t answer the daily prompt again…. but that didn’t stop me from laughing about it. The prompt is “have you ever been camping?”Leslie Goes Camping is one of my favorite stories in life, and it is years and years old.
The setup is that Dana (ex-wife, but we were best friends for years before we got married), her then-partner, and I went on a camping trip for our church. It was great, because we were able to have worship on top of Mt. St. Helen’s, and a few other things we could do when “Jesus has left the building.” Dana and I had met the Easter before, when I’d been brutally dumped (not really, but it felt that way at the time) and needed to make a whole new friend set…… arguably worse than being dumped, but neither made me feel so hot.
It was the start of The Separation, and Dana and I didn’t even know it. However, she would have been relieved, and I know this. She watched me struggle every fucking day for years. I wasn’t a very good wife on most days, but I had my moments. I just have to hope that Dana remembers them, too, and I don’t have to continue to feel bad that I completely wrecked her life as well.
I do not think this is because we were bad for each other (at that time). I think I didn’t know I was autistic, so I got called a judgmental dickhead a lot. In fact, I can’t remember a better day in Dana’s life than when my beautiful girl called me a judgmental dickhead to my face. At that particular date and time, I did indeed deserve it. She was not always wrong, she was just not always right, either.
To me, there is a huge difference between saying “your actions have hurt me” and “you are a bad person.” Both women saw me as saying the latter, and they’re both invaluable, both bright diamonds. I just don’t think that either one of them could follow me very well, and that’s not due to anything they did or didn’t do. It’s the way I communicate now that I’m aware of my shortcomings, and the way people interact with me based on the label because they’re already aware that, girl. I got issues.
But I was thinking of exactly none of that when it was time to go to bed. On the mountain. In the dark. Where the temperature drops precipitously. My friend Kari lent me a fabulous sleeping bag that was rated for -20F weather. However, I could not generate enough body heat to keep the bag warm. About 0430, I opened my suitcase and put on every piece of clothing I brought at once, then went back to sleep.
By the time I came home, I knew that I loved camping, just not in that cold a temperature….. so maybe not on top of a mountain next time, eh? I also knew that I loved Dana in a best friend sort of way. We were inseparable after that, and not because we were actively trying to have an affair. Dana’s partner was a construction worker, so we gravitated toward each other when her partner was on the road for six weeks at a time. Neither one of us needed a girlfriend- Dana was already ridiculously happy and since I’d just been dumped, I was not in any shape to feel romantic towards anyone.
What I didn’t realize is that I wasn’t dating other people because showing up for each other made it where I didn’t need or want to hang out with anyone else. I was satisfied with the love of a good friend. That’s why we were best friends for three and a half years before anything happened. I would rather have emotional and intellectual stimulation, so if the choice was going to a restaurant to meet someone new that felt like a job interview, or playing “Drunken Trivial Pursuit” with my best friend, guess what’s going to win every single fucking time?
Dana and I did not gravitate towards each other because of anything shady. We just came to rely on each other more than anyone else, and it pulled the romance trigger in both of us. It was completely organic, but I do know it started on that trip. That’s because I honestly didn’t have any other friends at all. They’d dumped me because they didn’t see the bullshit through the notes, just inhaling all the music as is- leaving little brown spots on their noses……………
When your emotional abuser is a wonderful musician and locally a big deal, you can count on exactly zero people thinking that you’re telling the truth unless they sit down with your friends when you were 14 and she was 25. That’s the thing that would have blown their performance fleece back, but they didn’t have time to look critically at anything.
So I moved halfway across the country TWICE to try and get rid of that feeling. I wasn’t running FROM Portland so much as TO The District. I already had friends here in addition to Supergrover, so my moving here was never dependent on her. Because our relationship was virtual and planes exist, I have a feeling we would have been equally happy in different cities all these years because physical proximity has never mattered.
It hurts that I’m not laying on her couch right now instead of mine, because if I think about what could have happened, I delve into what actually did. It’s not pretty, even now. I just wish it was.
But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I know it’s my fault, and I don’t blame her. I just wish I could convince her that’s what I really think. I want peace for her just as much as I want peace for me. That just because I’m talking all this out doesn’t mean that I want to be shitty to anyone.
As I have learned through a Facebook meme, it is time to stop dividing myself into smaller, more manageable bites; in order to reach my full potential, I’m going to have to let some of you choke. The people who are left are my people. I am tired of making myself smaller.
Even though I felt as small as I ever have next to the beauty of Mt. St. Helen’s. It is not lost on me that I didn’t stay warm because of lack of blankets. I didn’t stay warm because I wasn’t generating my own heat.
If the last 15-20 years have taught me nothing, it’s that I should be.
My little AuDHD brain is overwhelmed and I need to shut down, refocus. So, I’m sitting on my bed and writing an entry… soothing myself back from burnout/demand avoidance because I have so much to do. Or, I think I have so much to do because my brain is consistently arranged like “The Persistence of Memory.” Everything is clear and logical, with solid lines….. except for the dripping clock. I have no ability to estimate how long a job will take, and my room isn’t honestly that big. I do not have the ability, however, to say “I have X number of days…. how much do I need to devote to packing so that I’m absolutely ready by the time Zac gets here? I have already packed a few boxes, and I have plenty left because they’re so large. It’s helpful that they’re canvas, because they’re just as heavy as cardboard, but they have nicer handles. So far, I like the orange ones best.
It’s kind of interesting that my moving boxes are a stunning array of colors.
I’ve been moving hard, but I cannot sustain concentration and effort on packing right now. My muscles need a break and I’m desperate for some water. But even when I sit down, I’m still searching for something. My mind gets busy when my body is weak.
On the autism subreddit there are tests to get you started in terms of gauging whether you have autism or not. It’s confusing, especially when you have ADHD….. although the most insightful test for me was called “the Aspie test,” and I’m sure they mean “Asperger’s,” but apparently that is a dirty word because Asperger was a Nazi. Anyway, there are different ways of asking the questions, and it clarified something that I could not explain, but I know is true.
It asked me when I read books if I could imagine/picture the characters. The Aspie test was the only one that allowed me to choose “imagination and visualization are two different things.” I am moved by prose, I am not seeing a movie in my head. I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but I generally write quite a bit more than that. What a focus on in a novel is empathy with the characters; I like reading how they think and feel. However, when I read descriptions of people’s physical attributes, it means nothing.
I will tell you that when I got to see an actual picture of the real Supergrover recently, I thought, “I will never in my lifetime do her justice, and there’s absolutely no one they could cast that would look anything like her.” It made me sad, because I realized if I didn’t read that way, I wouldn’t write that way, either…. it’s not my wheelhouse.
I swear to God, if I publish a book and you have no idea what any of the characters look like, it’s only because I have no idea, either.
So far, I’ve taken all of the quizzes. I 100% have traits of autism according to one because they took more information from me than anyone else. It was rad. They asked my gender at birth and gender now, my age, and whether I was self-diagnosed or professionally diagnosed. Then, they asked if I was professionally or self diagnosed with ADHD. The answer is that I am self diagnosed/suspected ASD and professionally diagnosed ADHD. THEN I started the questionnaire. That means it’s a weighted score, because the test already knows that if you’re diagnosed with one, there’s an 80% chance you have the other.
The thing that really freaked me out was that they asked if I had a specific gait, if I’d been accused of staring at anyone, if I had depth perception issues…… I mean WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK?
No one had to call me out like this.
At the same time, now that I’ve taken all of these quizzes that back up my gut feeling (I’ve taken the monotropism questionnaire and got a very high score, but nothing like the ones above), I don’t have imposter syndrome anymore. I finally have answers to miscommunications lasting back decades.
The worst was “I often say things that other people think come across as mean, and I don’t understand why.”
However, it is to Supergrover’s credit that I started down this road, because of course ADHD Facebook groups often have Autistic memes as well because we’re both neurodivergent. I saw a few too many autism posts that skewered me, and I started doing the research. The reason the credit goes to her is that she may never have thought of me as a narcissist, but her words made me feel like one when I was trying to reach out to her. I had to find what was missing in me. How could I improve my communication skills so I didn’t come off that way anymore? When I figure it all out, I’ll let you know. But at the same time, I have made progress. It’s just hard to make progress when there are several differences in the way I communicate with most of the world:
I am a big picture person. Always. My mind is not built to handle detail. This leads to professional and personal problems, because detail at work is required and detail at home depends on your partner. Are you always forgetting details that are important to them, having the most insensitive reaction possible, having them tell you that “you knew what you were doing?” There are a million cues built into the system that lead people to the most obvious answer. So, if I was neurotypical, I have no doubt that those people would be right. I’m not. I’m autistic. Therefore, my brain processes information differently and because it’s so out of sync with the rest of the world, it is aggressively annoying. I will do everything I can to help you navigate being in a relationship with me except read your mind. I will not pick up on the fact that you’re mad about something just because we haven’t spoken.
I see patterns in everything, all the time, when it comes to human behavior. I am not a STEM genius that can do magic with data strings. When I was a kid, I was the one that knew everyone’s phone number off the top of my head. Now, without my iPhone, I could 100% call my dad. Everyone else I might get wrong. One out of hundreds of contacts is not that great.
I know this because I do know my sister’s phone number, but when I had to dial it recently I put in the wrong area code and had to start over. So, I suppose I know two numbers.
I remember e-mail addresses easier than I remember phone numbers because I’m driven by letters. I still have a friend on AOL. It’s adorable. I have thought many times “what if I had the money to send her a GIANT BOX of AOL disks and a copy of Windows 95?”
I get lost in tasks to the exclusion of all else, and this shows most adamantly in working on computers. If something is wrong with my computer, I will take it down to the studs, because I prefer doing everything the same way every time. I am also not a detail person. I am a “keep everything on a cloud drive so that I don’t have to deal with details” kind of person.
It doesn’t take me very long to get frustrated with a task, and my fuse is more short with Windows, because I can use Google or ChatGPT to find the snippets of code I need to fix my Linux system. I should look on a DOS subreddit, but I won’t. The only DOS command I need is wsl –install (Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and the default distribution, Ubuntu). I will not put up with any system foolishness. If a hard drive disagrees with me, they seem to STFU when I drop the partition table. Troubleshooting a problem in either operating system can take hours. When things start getting difficult, I would rather start over. Metaphor for neurodivergent life, probably because we’re all relentless perfectionists so that we don’t get labeled lazy.
I do not like being interrupted, and while I am not grumpy about it, I am frustrated that nothing ever goes back to the way it was. It takes me a long time to transition in and out of “the zone,” no matter the task. But I’m not the type to say “you interrupted me,” because it’s not my job to enforce strict rules on who can talk to me when. I do, however, miss the many ideas that have floated off into thin air, and thankful I’m fast enough to have another idea to replace it.
I don’t process things verbally very well, because I think a lot faster than I speak. I’m literally having buffer overflow issues, and trying not to stutter when I’m in conversation. That’s because I generally have one thought building on another and I have to take all those strands and braid them before I speak. And even then, I often realize that I might have said something truthful, but I had no idea of the impact, because I have no idea how my words are going to be received.
Not knowing how my words were being received was instrumental in making me wonder why Supergrover called me a judgmental dickhead all the time, when I was sending her so much love and attention…… but I didn’t change for her. I noticed that I was struggling with relationships in every area of my life and couldn’t explain why in those cases, either. It was a long journey, because I didn’t want to be flippant. I wanted to be Maude Lebowski “thorough” before I said anything, because there’s a lot of hate in the autism community for people who don’t do the homework and just decide on two Tik-Toks that this is totally them.
Therefore, not only did I seek out autistic YouTubers, I also sought out lectures by M.D.s and Ph.Ds describing the symptoms of the disorders on the spectrum overall. That lots of people are creative and not visual. Because the autism test asked if I had depth perception issues, I assume that there are lots of people who can’t see movies in their heads because they don’t have the ability to put things correctly into their environment. Someone with 2D vision cannot have immersive experiences, for the most part. For instance, trees aren’t blobs because I don’t have glasses. They’re blobs because they’re all 2D. I can’t place individual branches on their x, y, and z axes…… particularly zed. I call it the zed axis because even though I’m an American, “Zed” sounds like more of a villain name……..
Zed Axis…….. so we meet again……..
So, because I cannot place things in their environment, can’t process thoughts and emotions the same way as a neurotypical person, and look like I’m from the Ministry of Silly Walks, I am a long way from normal before I ever really start talking about “my issues.” But they all combine to give me a hilarious sense of humor if you are also neurodivergent, because one of the things that the tests point out is that neurodivergent and neurotypical humor is different, too. We generally have no sense of propriety, and are always on the “think it, say it” plan regardless of the consequences, because it’s a disability, not a personal failing (I do not mean that one can or should blame their behavior on a disability. It’s the disabled person’s job to fix it because someone’s poor impulse control, demand avoidance, etc. isn’t a partner/coworker/boss’s responsibility except to give us everything we are entitled to through our places of work….. or, in the case of a partner, taking our needs seriously. A good example is that I basically like three brands of clothes because of the way they feel on my skin. Say my partner finds socks two dollars cheaper at Costco?
They might say “what’s the difference?” And I will be absolutely devastated, both because I don’t want to disappoint the person that brought the wrong thing, so I’ll use them until they wear out, annoyed they aren’t what I want. Socks last a long time and there’s no real need to replace them except for my autism making it where I can’t concentrate on anything else because the tag is three centimeters off from where it normally is. I feel all of these things. I hear sounds other people don’t notice. I pick up on behaviors other people don’t notice.
One of the questions and answers was interesting, because it told me a lot without saying a word:
The question was “can you easily pick up social cues?” One of the choices is “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.”
Christ on a cracker.
There’s also the matter of your abilities as a conversationalist………… Because you take everything literally, there’s probably no White Elephant in the room. If there’s something that needs to be said, if you’re autistic you probably just blurted it out like it was nothing, because to you it wasn’t, and you don’t understand the emotion coming at you. It gets overwhelming fast if you’re with more than one person, which is why I try to be with only one person at a time. I cannot process two people talking while also thinking of something to say. I end up missing the jumping in point, because they’re supercomputers and I’m a raspberry pi. I am much quicker than other people in text, but it’s a different kind of comprehension. I’m the supercomputer when they’re at a disadvantage.
Because I don’t process voices well, I do like talking on the phone, but only to the people who are very, very close to me. That’s because I don’t want it to be too long in between hearing each other’s voices. With literally anyone else, I tend to talk with my hands. I talk with my hands in person, too, but that’s just because I’m a Texan.
A Texan who has just realized that procrastination time is up. Have fun with the quizzes if you decide to take them. And by “fun,” I mean “I didn’t actually know you could feel this devastated and elated simultaneously.”
If you could have something named after you, what would it be?
Generally, things are named after you posthumously, and I don’t want to be given an award for the most original way to die, like accidentally rocking a Coke machine onto myself….. that’s a classic. In DC, I basically have the option of a museum, a statue, or a gravestone. However, the plots around Gore Vidal are already taken at Congressional cemetery, and I don’t live in The District proper. I’m not sure there are any other requirements to live there. But it wouldn’t matter. I’d rather be cremated because I don’t see anyone needing my body after the doctors with it (I am an organ, skin, and donor). I also don’t have a special attachment to one place, but a lot of them.
I’d like to become one with the Columbia River Gorge, because no one is going to rename that after me, but it’s where I’d like to spend eternity. And if you put me on the Washington side, I WILL KNOW. I don’t know how I will know that, but I do know that I’d take a lot of chances with ghosts, but I’m not one of them. I could outsmart me easily, because I create the logic. I don’t have to follow it. I am sure it is something that seems like a joke to me and yet is the source of all my real problems. I don’t have to follow what I say because I know what I think. I forget about the translation layer between neurodivergent and neurotypical people that makes me automatically sound immature and a little bit crazy because I haven’t thought it out. I’m like “The Doctor” in that way. People spend time with me and wonder how I get so far on half plans. It’s because I’m not threatened when they don’t work out or change. I just assimilate the new information into whatever the plan was before.
I realized I was struggling without Daniel because there wasn’t someone to social mask in the mornings. There was nothing to build anything with if we didn’t take the raw materials with which we started and put in the work. I don’t want to throw raw ingredients into a stock pot and hope for the best.
He told me that some of the things I said made him not want to engage. I said, “that’s fine and we can table it, but these are the important conversations to have and we can’t ignore them. Problems keep revisiting you.” He agreed with me and we moved on. I am not trying to make anyone feel bad, I’m saying, “this is the problem. What do you want to do about it?” Most people do not think of it as a problem unless it affects them. They rarely care when their actions affect you. What’s good enough for them is good enough for you in all cases, regardless of how their first family communicated.
I’m guilty of the same thing, but I’m trying to learn from my mistakes. I do not need everything to be doom and gloom all the time, but I do need for people to be emotionally mature and tell me how they feel instead of attacking me for bringing something up. It’s an easy and cheap shot that I will never let anyone get away with ever again. It’s the equivalent of “it’s not that bad. You’re imagining it. You’re dwelling on the past.” No, I’m telling you the feelings that are coming up for me now because of what happened in the past, and we can either deal with it now, or we can deal with it forever, because if this is always a one-sided conversation and it is important to me, it becomes a dealbreaker.
Yesterday, Daniel asked me how he could show me the most amount of love. My answer to that was twofold. The first is that if he really loves me, he’ll want a housekeeper before I move in…. one of those jokes that’s not meant to come off as a joke because I’m autistic/ADHD and I don’t remember anything going anywhere and I don’t create messes, I maintain them. They are piles, but it is my emotional support detritus.
Here’s why “emotional support detritus” is a thing. The first is that few houses come with built-ins where you can see anything inside. Every cabinet has a door. The neurodivergent brain has to have everything out in front of them all the time, because they do not create memories of where they place things. It’s a need for iron structure and an inability to create it with ADHD. I am a Virgo. Back to school has excited me since the 80s. I have bought every planning system known to God and man. The thing that has worked best is my original Palm Pilot with Graffiti 1. I never got the hang of Graffiti 2, and I am still butt hurt about it.
I might look on E-bay to see if I can find a Palm Pilot and a dock, because the form factor is so much smaller than my iPad and “Scribble” is harder to get used to than I thought it would be.
Interestingly enough, Graffiti 1 works really well on the Apple Watch, but it would be better if the Apple Watch supported the Apple Pencil because it’s so much easier to hand write with a stylus than it is with your finger, especially one as touch sensitive as the Apple Pencil.
I write like it’s Graffiti 1 anyway, because it’s easier than having to get all my letters perfect. It knows what I mean…… except for voice dictation. I have better luck when I’m on Bluetooth headphones, and I cannot be very far from my phone, because I think the voice files are actually processed on your phone rather than your watch.
I want an Apple Watch version named after me, because I have some good ideas. What if CIA gave us those batteries that lasted months without a recharge, and a chip that would fit inside a watch and be so powerful that you don’t need your phone for anything. I have a feeling that would involve creating a larger memory ROM, but surely if they have enough room for as much as they do now, they can put more RAM on the board. The biggest problem would be overheating, but if they can make tiles for a space shuttle to guard against heat, they can probably design something like that to absorb heat in an Apple Watch.
The battery is the main thing, because Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a 5g connection all take a lot of battery at once, and that’s before it starts processing apps. The one I use the most is “Find My iPhone,” because I can make it make noise from my watch….. unless my phone is dead…. then I’m on my own and that’s not a pretty sight. Although because of the Apple ecosystem, as long as I have a wi-fi connection, I’ll still get iMessage on my iPad. I will still get iMessage on my phone, as well as SMS.
Although I think if I ever get a new Android tablet, I’ll want it to have a slot for a SIM card because I won’t use anything for texting on an Android but Signal, Wix Secure Messenger, and WhatsApp. I use Facebook Messenger because it’s easy, but it’s not encrypted, either. If you want to chat with me on either of those platforms and already have my phone number, please do.
On my author page at Facebook, you can leave all kinds of comments, and the more engagement I have, the closer I am to being paid. It also makes it where anyone can message me, you don’t have to be a follower (although it would be cool, no lie). Sometimes I wonder if I should do an FAQ on Facebook as an introduction, but I don’t know what people would ask. I’ll answer anything, you just have to respect that “no” and “that’s too private” are valid answers.
Anyone is welcome to contribute, from my biggest fans to my biggest detractors. I do not think I am the expert on anything but myself, and your stories are your stories. I often get so many likes on a post that I don’t know what triggered the reception. Is it the time of day, is it my content, is it my characters, etc.?
The biggest surprise is being more popular in other countries than I am here. I have a huge following in India and the UK. Plus, I have flags all over the world where I know who they are. If you don’t want me to know who you are based on geography, I would suggest a VPN. ๐ I have so many people addicted to this web site that know me in real life, because they’re in the position where they don’t want to be written about, but they inhale everything I’ve written as truth because it is interesting and presented in a way that hopefully everyone can understand it. That I try as often as I can to use universal examples so that I’m not attacking anyone. I am laying down the facts as I see them.
Very few people are willing to stand by and let themselves be written as a villain, because that’s how they see themselves in my writing- not that I intentionally portray them that way. I have made it a point to record every up and down in every relationship, so that you don’t see me as paining anyone as perfect, not even Jesus.
Speaking of which, I am watching a docudrama on Netflix called “Testament,” and it’s all about Moses, starting with the story from when he was a child. The documentary part is interviewing all kinds of scholars from the Abrahmic tradition because he’s the only “character” that appears in all three holy books. There is a lot more information about him that way, and the Jews in the conversation have been very enlightening, because Jesus was a Jew. It’s fun learning about the traditions he would have been taught as a child, before he started branching out……. because in order to understand the future, you have to understand the past.
I can absolutely believe that as a historically known INFJ that his divinity started the moment he started arguing with the rabbis in the temple when he was 12 years old. That his divinity does not come from resurrection, but about being able to go toe to toe with the best theological minds in the world when he wasn’t even a man yet. His bar mitzvah was still a year away.
To me, I believe as Pete Rollins has said, that “a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” To me, theology is not the end goal, whether there is a heaven and a hell, whether there is an afterlife at all. It is the ritual and the argument.
I got sidetracked when I was talking about Gordon Atkinson, who used to blog as “The Real Live Preacher,” as if he was a carnival act. I have never related more to anything in my life. He really opened up to me in those essays, and I understood myself so much better after reading him. I didn’t grow up to be a pastor, but I grew up with a pastor dad. It was hard not to feel like “The Real Life Preacher’s Kid,” because when you are a public figure’s family, you’re all in the fish bowl together……. and sometimes, two things happen…… severally or jointly. The first is that people think preacher’s kids are somehow better than everyone else. I mean, I am, but let’s not talk about Lindsay. (KIDDING)
I only say that because I really bought in. Lindsay was a walking wild hair, and I envied her for half my life because of it. Still do on days when she has to be “on” and I’m in burnout mode. I do my best work by standing behind her and just listening.
I did not have the strength (and sometimes still don’t) to have equal relationships with people by calling them on their bullshit. She learned it at three. I learned it at 45. There is a slight difference between those two ages, and I have to say that it probably comes from birth order. I was almost six when she was born, because her birthday is in June and mine is in September.
Therefore, I don’t have a lot of memories of what it was like to be an only child, but I do have quite a bit more than someone whose younger sibling was born when they were a toddler. I was blessed to have a sibling, because I was that kid. I talked about different stuff than most kids. I had the vocabulary of some adults by the time I was two or three because no one ever talked down to me. I was expected to keep up, and I did. Before Lindsay was born, I didn’t have that mostly neurotypical kid to intervene on my behalf. My main interest and what served me all through school was finding an outcast and sitting next to them, because I only wanted to talk to one person at a time.
Everyone thought it was because I was a preacher’s kid, and I’m sure that’s definitely part of it, but it’s not the whole story. I hate small talk, and if I was only sitting with one person, it wasn’t a good bet that we’d be doing small talk for very long.
That’s how Daniel became my boyfriend in 2nd/3rd grade. We were both “that kid.” We had more to talk about than basic 2nd grade shit, because we were both way beyond our peers with reading and music.
I will say something again that is meaningful to me about choosing Daniel. Not only did he know my mother, she taught him music for at least a year. So, that meant that Daniel was in some of my school plays with me, and my mother trained his voice. I can’t wait until we have our own house that will fit a piano, because I want to hear Daniel play my mother’s piano, as well. I am sure that it will become four-handed duets in no time, because I can’t keep the left and right rhythms going at the same time. If he doesn’t already play piano, I can at least teach him “All Blues” by Miles Davis.
Yes, Jason Moran. I know you’re terribly impressed right now. It is almost like I’m the savant you missed in taking on students. A pity, really (it’s got an easy bass line and like two or three chords). Although I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him play keyboards in his music, so I might get an accompanist out of this deal. ๐
I might get an accompanist, anyway, if Colin wants me to lay down some tracks for his band. I think we’d have a great time together since he plays guitar and I sing, plus he has professional recording equipment in his attic. I can’t wait to show Lindsay that room, because I think it would be her heaven. Maybe for once we could be in the same band. ๐
Lindsay was in a band in college that I really liked called “The Cosmonauts,” and my favorite t-shirt at that time was “I’m with the band.” It went over really well with my in-laws…….. because I was wearing a nice sweater and when I took it off, it sort of amused and horrified them. I explained that it was my sister in the rock band, and I can’t tell whether that impressed or horrified them, either.
I have never been in a family that was really accepting of me, because I always felt like I had no right to take up room. When I felt like I had enough clout with Dana’s family to have my say, Dana was horrified because I was changing her family dynamics. Well, of course I was. You are introducing a whole new person.
With Kathleen, I think she really bought into the fact that she only wanted to have babies with men. And, to be honest, I think she was afraid of me becoming even more psychiatrically unstable because the research on taking antidepressants while pregnant suggested it would be dicey. But I didn’t care if Kathleen was the biological mom. I would have been happy either way. We just didn’t have enough money to swing it, or blamed it on that, anyway.
I think eventually I realized that I didn’t want to have kids with her, because even if I wasn’t the extra kid, she’d always treat me like that because that’s how she treated me currently.
My biological clock went CRAZY when I got together with Dana, because she was the right person to have kids with, even in retrospect. I would have preferred her to carry the baby, but she wasn’t buying it. She said she’d do it as a last resort. But by the time wee got to the OB/GYN, the phrase “geriatric pregnancy” did not sound appealing and we just kind of put the idea away.
I don’t think either one of us were actually capable of integrating an infant into our schedules without major changes, most notably getting out of cooking because Dana would never make enough money to support housing for both of us if we were depending on me to make all the money. My job history isn’t that stable with all the medical conditions I have, and it’s hard to integrate just how many doctors’ appointments I have without a cooking job, because my days off weren’t generally Saturday and Sunday. I could schedule my appointments in the morning and still be on time for work.
However, I have IT to fall back on, and as far as I know, Dana doesn’t. I didn’t pressure her to go into it at all, Aaron just noticed she was a great coder. She wanted to be a teacher, but didn’t make that a reality, either. We moved to Houston so that she could teach, because you didn’t need a Master’s there. She was rejected by one program and didn’t try to get into any others. It’s a shame. She would have been a marvelous teacher. I just don’t think she was in any shape to be a teacher by the time we arrived in Houston.
I don’t blame her in any way, shape, or form. The only appropriate reaction to an abnormal situation is an abnormal reaction. She was very depressed and I understood intimately. The problem was that I was also very depressed, and I couldn’t handle Dana’s depression at the same time.
Then, I got an influx of “new relationship energy” that was supposed to be clean, light, and fun. Well, since I was a jackass and told her my feelings were starting to change, she started not telling me things, as if that would make the situation better. I was guessing too much of the time as to what would make her happy, all the while making her ridiculously angry and not knowing why.
Enter Daniel.
“Oh, wait. You’re autistic. That changes EVERYTHING. If you’ve told me this before, I don’t mean to make you rehash, but tell me again how your autism affects you.”
It was the end of all the feeling like he was being bombarded by questions, because he’s a Doc. He saw which way that train was going and hopped on.
As we were talking, he said, “do you think the authoritative part of your personality is that way because you feel safer to express what you feel to me?” That was a lightbulb moment for me, because it’s exactly the thing I’ve been trying to explain to everyone for all time. If I don’t think you can handle my feelings, I won’t tell you what they are. If you don’t like my tone, you can tell me to rephrase something. But the more I don’t feel like I have to social mask around you, the more I let my guard down and I start writing like I’m blogging- to an international audience and not an audience of one. So, even if it’s not a personal attack, it comes across like one because I am not running what I say through every filter ever. I want those closest to me, especially someone I want to build a life with, to be able to take me at full strength. Daniel has agreed that he’s just as intense as I am, but the thing that was the most valuable about this conversation was feeling seen. And not just seen by Daniel as my partner, but seen by Daniel the doctor as well.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said, “oh, shit. This changes everything.”
It does, and I’m looking forward to every fucking minute.
I feel a sense of peace this morning that I haven’t felt in a long time. I found a great house, and I’m moving in roughly two weeks. I think Colin is okay with our first plan of me moving in on the 13th, but he needs some time on his end to get my room ready, too. The only thing I was trying to avoid was being home while my landlords show their house, but it won’t be the end of the world if I have to wait.
In the meantime, I’m on pins and needles waiting to see Zac, because it’s been a while. Nothing is wrong between us, just jacked up schedules right now for both of us. But again, we’re going to see Jason Moran on the 10th, and then that weekend is drill for him, so he’s going to help me after work both days (if needed). I told him if he wanted he could stay at my house on the Saturday, because drill weekend is at Ft. Meade, which is 20 minutes from my house and quite a bit further to his (Zac lives out in Virginia at the end of the blue line). I’m hoping we can get it all done in a few hours, and I don’t think that’s impossible as long as I have everything boxed. I only have four pieces of furniture.
Other than that, I think I have everything I need. My dad sent me some canvas moving boxes, and I think I’m just going to fold everything as opposed to trying to find a hanging box for all my button-downs. I hate packing. Anything to make it easier. Thank God I don’t have many dishes.
Speaking of dishes, I’m out of coffee and I’m a bit peeved about that. The only reason I’m not a full-on maniac is that I have Stash English Breakfast tea if I get desperate. I wonder if I could go door to door begging for someone to take pity on me. It’s 0551. Surely someone is up.
They are.
I could get coffee from Hayat, but I’m lazy and upstairs. Hayat (and the coffee) are downstairs. Don’t you see it would take ALL THAT WORK? ๐ Hayat has gotten up at 0400 since the day I arrived, and I started waking up early because of her. Originally, I was such a light sleeper that her coffee grinder would wake me up, so I just started going to bed earlier and earlier.
Now, I’m on my own schedule, which seems to be “be lazy. Sleep in until 0500.” So, if you get a message from me in what seems like “the middle of the night,” I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I just write things when I think of them and forget about things like notifications. I’ve gotten good about asking people if they leave their notifications on at night or if my texting them is going to bother them- leaving notes rather than expecting a reply.
This gets problematic because people are programmed to respond right away. So, they’ll say that the notifications don’t bother them, but they weren’t serious. And now they don’t want to hurt my feelings. PLEASE hurt my feelings, because if you tell me that I can text you at any time, because you have your phone on “Do Not Disturb” or whatever, I’m going to believe you. If you change your mind and it is indeed annoying, then don’t let me think it’s fine when it’s not, because I will not pick up on your subtle cues to stop.
I mean, sometimes I will. But not if you only text me back and I can’t read your voice and it’s too polite to really tell anything. I have problems with polite, because I take things literally.
Well, when I’m not being sarcastic. Sarcasm I can do. One of the many services I offer (that tends to get me in trouble). I’ve thought I’ve been weird a lot of my life, but as it turns out the autistic sense of humor is often dark to deal with the pressure. I’m not weird in a crowd of autistic people, because someone is likely to make a darker joke than me, and that’s hard to do. It’s always a slow clap moment for me when someone manages to out-dark me.
I will be taking no further questions. ๐
Making things right with The War Daniel needed to happen, even if we never get further than we are right now. Our future plans don’t matter so much as being friends again, and being able to be there in lockstep for Daniel’s daughter, Cora. I think that’s been the hardest part of this whole separation from Daniel, because Cora is 25 years old. Trying to judge the parent dynamic from the friend dynamic is tough, because I didn’t want her to know how I feel about Daniel at all (she does now, I’m talking about when we weren’t speaking). It wouldn’t have been fair or sane to make her “monkey in the middle,” and I am definitely sane/brave enough not to do that. It’s basically the only piece of our relationship that does fall under parent/child dynamic, because no matter what happens between Daniel and me, Cora is already an ironclad member of my family. I’m never going to walk out on that kid, so all I ask from Daniel is that he just let me.
No matter what his relationship with me is, just let us be, because my relationship with Cora cannot be dependent on him. I know she’s my kid, not just my rainbow kid, because I don’t believe I’m going to get out of this without becoming her stepmother, even though we’re all adults, because she already sees me that way. That’s how she was introduced, and was overwhelmed that I am bisexual, because all of the sudden she had an ally in the house. Trust me that her parents are doing the best they can, but it’s one thing to be in the queer cultural zeitgeist and to be standing outside of it.
Daniel and I are already talking about getting married again, but on the delayed timeline of his doctorate. This is because we both want to travel, possibly live overseas, and the easiest way to do that is to fly standby on military bases, which Cora and I can do as long as we’re military dependents. The only time we would have to fly commercial is if Daniel wasn’t with us. You cannot fly unaccompanied using the service member’s benefits.
Last night, we were talking about places to move where we’d be able to get back easily, like Manila. We were trying to think of places it’s less expensive to live, but still has protections for Cora.
Daniel and I had the sweetest conversation last night. He was telling me how much cheaper UAE is than the US, and I said that I was great with going to UAE and seeing if we liked it enough to stay, but that I didn’t think it was safe for Cora or me. That I could pass as straight, but that’s not me and I’m not down for it.
He said, “sweetheart, why would you ever want to pass as straight?”
I was very touched, but I said, “to get by in a Middle Eastern country, no other reason.” Instantly, his tone changed into the English professor he is and he said, “I’m not moving ANYWHERE my women aren’t welcome.” He’s on board.
I love him. I really do. If the stars line up, we’re going to go back to Caldwell Zoo in Tyler to take pictures, hopefully recreating a few. I remember one that we need to do, and it just flashed into my memory (Achievement Unlocked, MASSIVE XP). I don’t know if it’s still there, but they used to have a playground. My mother took a shot that day of Daniel and me sitting under the play structure. I have no idea what we were talking about.
Probably Sartre or Proust, who knows. But we were definitely THAT KID.
I’ll get to show him where I was born- in Tyler, at Mother Frances Hospital, with “the statue of Jesus directing traffic.” I could see how things are going at my grandfather’s house.
It’s interesting, my grandfather gave his house to my cousin Jason, because his whole job is refurbishing homes. The plan is that once Jason is done overhauling the place, it will serve as a lake house for all of us. It’s out on Starlight Lake in Lone Star, where interestingly enough, my mother’s sister also has a house. So, we can go back and forth between relatives like we used to do when we were kids in NE Texas as well. My grandparents lived at most five miles from each other, if that.
I honestly stayed at one house til I got bored, then called my other grandmother to come and get me. I can say that because they’re no longer with us……. but they saw what I did. ๐
The vibes of the houses were so different, because my dad’s parents were Anglophiles and have a million video tapes I’d love to get my hands on with a video production server. They have stuff that Mike’s Movie Magic doesn’t have, and I swear it. Old PBS showings of BBC plays and TV shows that no one would ever find again. If those tapes still exist and I have room for them, I’l put them on a server and give access to my family.
At Christmas we usually watched “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka, who was terrifying…. yet not as terrifying to me as “The Wizard of Oz.” Never again if I can help it (I do like “Wicked,” though, minus all the stage theatrics that really made me jump. However, I think the age at which I saw it is directly responsible. Three or four is too young for flying monkeys.
In this case, anyway.
I am terrified of Oz on some days, and some days it’s all Glinda, all the time.
My life didn’t get interesting until I was 30, and just got more interesting from there. I wouldn’t want to give my teenage self any advice that would alter the events that led me to DC, to Zac, and to Oliver, who is a dog.
That’s because in order to get here, I had to go through some really rough stuff- and yet none of it is anything I would give away or trade. I found my place, even at 23, but I had to go and come back. I don’t know why. I really liked it here. I just didn’t think I could make it on my own. I do not have that capability, to take on the 1,001 things it takes to move in 30 days and also find a roommate. To be fair, though, I didn’t know about Craig’s List back then. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have met the people I needed to meet, and that’s the one thing I wouldn’t want to change for the kid inside me.
So, in order not to change anything:
I’m sorry mom doesn’t understand. Don’t spend your life worrying about it because there’s nothing you can do to make her change. There will be small steps, but no giant leaps. Stay as close to her as you can, but admit to yourself when spending time with her makes you feel unloved.
Lindsay is going to be big one day. I just won’t tell you how. You could learn a thing or two from her if you’d let yourself.
You’re ADHD, Autistic, and Bipolar. That’s something I will tell you right now, because when you get older it’s going to be harder to get tested for autism, and you need to get on meds stat. You’re struggling in school and you don’t know why. Your doctors might not, either, because there’s not a lot of research in the year you live on women and autism. But give yourself at least that head start on life. I know hearing those things is intimidating. Go to a psychiatrist, anyway.
You need to practice gratitude and mindfulness because when I was your age I took some kind of Scantron quiz that inventoried my personality. My psychiatrist said that I had the lowest self-esteem of anyone who’d ever taken the test. Write every day. Go back and look to see if what you wrote is still true. Give yourself a chance to see yourself as you are, not how you feel in the moment.
In every relationship, you need to ask yourself what the other person is bringing to the table, and when you feel ignored or sad or hurt or whatever your emotions might be, listen to how people respond. If it feels like they can’t hear you, they probably can’t…… and there’s a lot of don’t want to in “can’t.” Find people who can hear you.
There is no such thing as a 50/50 relationship. It will often look like 60/40 or even 70/30 because of confirmation bias. But notice when you feel like you can’t get a break, can’t do anything right. You’re not stupid. I won’t tell you what they are, either, but stupid isn’t on the list.
Because of the autism, you’re going to meltdown a lot. Find appropriate outlets for your rage. There are going to be many inappropriate outlets, and I will tell you that you find most of them. But not all. Because you have all of these disorders, you are going to have to learn to be more patient, thinking longer before you speak, because there are so many words that can’t be taken back which you realize just after you’ve already said them. Even when you’re on fire, you can’t take that out on someone else. And yes, I know that your nerves are on fire, that you go into a red mist rage with every physical symptom imaginable. It’s going to hurt you if you don’t take care of it.
The nerve endings on your thumb that you sliced into while trying to cut a lime will never grow back. I’m 46, so I will update you if the situation changes (not a chance, we’re stuck).
You will love soda your whole life because that’s one of the things you and mom will talk about on the phone. There’s not a lot you can do to keep her talking if you talk about your own life, but she’ll tell you all about her job, her friends, her husband, etc. It’s annoying that she never has any questions for you about your life, because she really doesn’t want to know. Do it, anyway. Find things you can talk about. Find a lot of them.
Mothers don’t generally last as long as you want them to; Lindsay and I will never be the same. I figured it might give you some perspective to know how few years you have left with her. Find different ways to bridge the gap. But don’t miss a chance to leave Houston, ever. You’ll get along better with her when you don’t live in the same city and a visit is special.
You’ll want a passport very soon. Might want to start on that. She’s cute.
I have never been good with money, which is why so many of my partners have had so much say in how I spend it. I let them, because generally I could trust their impulses better than my own. If you have ADHD, you just have to realize it and move on. There are going to be some times that you want to swing at every pitch, and if you have someone to bounce ideas off of, it’s much easier. I do not mean foisting my responsibility on someone else. I would ask for help in lots of practical tasks, because my EQ is so much higher than my IQ.
When I first came up with the idea for my alternate history, I had it vetted by the best of the best and it made me ride taller in the saddle. But even when Lindsay and I were kidding each other about me being on Oprah’s Book Club and making millions was STILL surrounded around “let’s make the biggest non-profit we possibly can and give it all away.” I don’t generally need money or things for myself. I generally want to help the world in a concrete way.
I have so many ideas for helping the world; very few surround taking care of myself. It’s difficult when you’re AuDHD and also live alone (for all practical intents and purposes). There’s no one to social mask, there’s no one to pick up my slack and let me pick up theirs when I’m the strong one. To a certain extent, I have this with Zac, but it would be a different ball game altogether if I was in a more serious relationship. I am trying to work out what I can handle and what I can’t.
I cannot handle the thought that autistic people naturally have trouble taking care of themselves in every aspect of their lives because sometimes demand avoidance is avoiding other people’s demands when they are put on you suddenly. Most of the time it’s that you cannot make demands of yourself. Take a shower. Comb your hair. Change your clothes.
People do not think about how much energy those things take because they don’t have to do so; autism is relentless and will always make you feel like lesser than, because what you know to be demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout is seen as lazy, overemotional, and depressed.
Because I need to keep stimulation down to a minimum in order for my brain to function, that means I don’t spend much. Because I’m a writer, I don’t make much. My budget is tiny, and it makes me feel guilty that I cannot spoil my friends the way I want to…. however, I have never had job security in any job, either, so it’s good to know how to live on a little.
Autism and job security is a straight up problem, because something like 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given time. There are a multitude of reason for this, but mostly it’s that you’re strange in a way no one else understands and therefore seems suspicious at best, or at worst, that you’re a child in an adult’s job.
Many, many adults are treated like a child in an adult’s job, because the things that traditional work rewards are the things that are the hardest for autistic people to manage. It’s the same with ADHD. Bosses and coworkers do not understand stimming. Fidget Spinners and the like were written off as toys, so autistic people that needed them were just “playing.” No one in the neurodivergent community has an easy time in office work because the system is not built for us.
The kitchen was a mess of neurodivergent and addict behavior, so of course I did better there in terms of happiness because everyone had something. I am happy in an office for a few months, because I can social mask my way through that. Over time, my disabilities begin to show and my performance swings wildly because first of all, I’m not the healthiest individual on the planet. Second of all, even a small mistake in an office can get you blackballed in terms of people being nice to you….. and even if you were the most perfect employee on earth, there would still be just something about you that seems “off.” A lot of your reputation at the office is built on perception.
Whether I am actually the best employee or the worst isn’t even at issue here; it’s that if you’re neurodivergent, there’s not a whole lot of acceptance of those quirks once you leave your house.
I am sure that I have mystified Zac at times. I still mystify my sister and I changed her diapers. I cannot say that my mother ever really understood me, and my dad is so interested in medicine that he’s really been my primary parent since I was born in terms of emotional connection. I think that’s because he didn’t agree that my mother should keep me in the dark, and was genuinely interested in my growth and development to the extent that I’d be able to grow and develop. It was very scary for a while, not knowing what I’d be capable of and what I wouldn’t. My mother refused to address it, and I cannot tell you how many factors went into believing she was right…. the biggest reason being that I didn’t need intellectual help, so I must be okay. And this is where I’m sitting now- if my mother was the one that was gaslighting me and my dad was telling me the truth, then where do I actually belong on the spectrum? What can be expected of someone like me?
My dad liked taking me to the neurologist, opthomologist, etc. Therefore, he understood a side of me that scared my mother and I knew it. Instinctively. It’s what happens when you’re the baby that laid around for an entire year….. when I wasn’t in physical therapy. I wasn’t any less interested in the world then. I took in so much more than I ever let on, because neurodivergent people take in more information through sight.
I know that I took in so much of the adult world There is no way that I talked when I knew words and sentences. I talked when I was good and ready. For instance, most kids say “mama” and “dada” first. My first word was “peaches.” My dad said that the next time I talked, I said “car keys.” I could read small books at 3-4, but was the weird kid later who’d check out a biography about Audie Murphy instead of the next VC Andrews. If you are that different from your peers, it doesn’t end at grade school. Autism is expensive when missteps get you fired. I have never found that if you point out the communication issue was actually from someone above you, it doesn’t help your case any. This is because if you don’t fit into the culture of the office, it will do more to shorten your time there than fraud (in most cases). If there isn’t a concrete reason to fire you, there will be a million petty grievances to get you off the island.
My dad taught me medical words at a very young age and I’m glad he did. I turned out to be an amazing speller whether it’s medical terminology or not, because so much of both scientific and general language in English is spelled close to its Latin roots….. that I learned when I was two. (Although I could not win a spelling bee, I don’t think, because every time I’ve gotten close and lost, it’s because I could visualize the word perfectly and mess up on the translation between thought and spoken word.
Because my brain takes in information through reading. Now, I’m an even faster typist without errors because remembering how to spell is reinforced with muscle memory. For instance, did you know that you can actually make a mistake more frequently in entering passwords, etc. just by standing up? You think it’s easier because you can actually see the letters……… but doesn’t feel the same.
I laughed when I saw Olivia Colman on The Graham Norton Show say that one of her most fabulous talents was being such a good typist she could stare off into space. I think the same of myself, and also that when you find the right keyboard, the one that fits your hands like gloves, you could wipe off all the letters. (I’d still need the numbers because I only remember a few of the special characters).
In fact, typing on someone else’s keyboard is a big sensory issue for me, and it does cause meltdown for a few seconds as I readjust my expectations as to how fast I can type at first.
It was my mother that taught me this. Not only was she a great typist, she’d be honored to know that I like typing because of something she said to me. That when you bought a piano, you were looking for only “the right touch.” Pianos come in as many different flavors as keyboards, which is why I take my keyboards seriously. Because I know what it looks like to play classical piano, I know that I run my fingers over the keys as easily as she does.
My mother seemed to want me to be a younger version of her, because being outside the norm didn’t sit well with her. However, I do think that just because there are more concertos written for piano than for the typewriter it only means I play the more unusual instrument.
Editor’s Note:
Link is to “The Typewriter,” by Leroy Anderson. I’ll try to remember to put it at the bottom for ease of use, but I didn’t want to forget and I didn’t want a big YouTube video in the middle of my blog entry. Whether you finish the entry or not is not my call. I’m a web designer. It just looks ugly, which is what I noticed when I tried it once.
My mother appealed to a much broader audience than I ever could, especially when someone at a party wanted her to put on an impromptu singalong (as a preacher’s wife, you just do it). We had a complicated relationship, but one of the things I loved about her was that she was warm and open to everyone except misbehaving kids. ๐ As a result, I am very much that spectrum in real life because I learned it over and over. What changed was when I realized that there were a lot of people in my life that could not change dynamics with me because I’d given each relationship a fair shot at getting better for quite a while.
I wanted people to grow with, not against. One of the things that happened in my marriage to Dana was that when I became a big shot at work, of course I became a different person. I was juggling more responsibility than I’d ever had in my life. Because I found someone I could write to that would understand every single pressure I was dealing with except mental health, she could identify with the person I was becoming while Dana was angry that things had to change. Living in Portland is a lot like living in Neverland. I mean, it’s not now, but it was back then. Even my friends with Masters’ degrees worked at grocery stores and coffee shops because if they could feed themselves, then they had time to spend on their art. They didn’t have to join a rat race they didn’t like to build a life they felt they had to escape.
Therefore, the cultural clash between my childhood and adulthood is complete. I knew that I wanted to write more and more because I knew I had something to say. Dana was an extrovert. She didn’t have any friends in Houston because she felt like they were all mutual (they were, but not to the extent that they’d choose one of us over the other. Chinese Wall.
What I want, though, isn’t the broad spectrum. It’s great if they come along, but I am of the opinion that I am physically disabled and emotionally fucked up. There is nothing I can do about the physically disabled part, but I am trying very, very hard with healthy boundaries in my new relationships because I found that it was easier to set that up from the beginning, because if you start trying to change a dynamic with someone and they don’t like it, trying to maintain positive change is an uphill battle.
He was also of the opinion that I should know I was disabled, and he tried to tell me….. but I never really got the message because my mother told me that he was overreacting, that things weren’t as bad as he thought, etc.
It wasn’t until she died that I saw my actual neurological workup from 18 mos, because Lindsay found it in her personal effects.
It’s exactly as bad as my dad said it was, but not more. I have absolutely no doubt that my mother gaslit me into believing I was fine because people didn’t do any better with disabled kids in the 70s than they do (for the most part) now….. and also she was very determined to have the perfect family.
Very. Determined.
I can take a very educated guess that part of the reason I wasn’t in special ed is that she didn’t want to have to tell people that. It’s a process of acceptance for parents, rearranging their expectations. What my mother never did was that whole “process of acceptance” bit. She wanted to sweep everything under the rug and she could because I have been told many times that I am brilliant (sometimes, I even let myself believe it because those fans aren’t liars).
People who meet me think that I am brilliant. They think that they’ve never met anyone like me. Sometimes, it’s admiration of me as a writer, sometimes a musician, always the ability to say what I think and be confident about it (in most cases).
The longer they think I’m brilliant and wonderful, the more I open up to them. Then, it becomes a weird game when they realize that I am 100% telling the truth, that I have disabilities, that I’m emotionally intense, that I can’t regulate well, etc. What I have said becomes concrete in their minds, and affects them in a totally different way.
Truth be told, I am way above most people’s pay grade. I just have to be aware of it, because there are things that I do have to take responsibility for, just like everyone else. What I cannot keep doing is constantly beating myself up; my life is supposed to look different than a neurotypical person’s.
I think I’m finally coming to a place of acceptance in terms of adjusting my own expectations of myself. I’m not trying to aim low, just in a direction the people like me are already going.
By “people like me,” I mean those with autism who are low needs/high intelligence. (In case you’re confused, low needs is what doctors used to call “high functioning.”)
High functioning for me comes in being able to craft sentences and synthesize ideas. It does not mean that I am also capable of understanding logical processes, because I struggle with details to an enormous degree.
My view on budgeting is just “try not to spend anything,” Even when I was making software company money in DC, I still lived on $150/week. That cushion bailed me out when my mother died, because like I said. I couldn’t get out of bed. That’s because I’d been let go from the software company on September 30, and my mother died October 2nd.
I was going to go on a road trip across the country with my friend Pri, but I backed out when I realized I would rather stay home. That it was too much change, too fast. It was also way above my pay grade to figure out budgeting for the trip.
I don’t really know what to do with more money, because keeping track of a budget with many categories sounds as difficult as learning Mandarin. That’s because it’s not just the money you’ve allocated. It’s the difference between what shows up on your account today, and what hasn’t cleared yet.
This is because I do most everything through PayPal because my Uber/Uber Eats account is connected to it (I would rather pay for grocery delivery than take an Uber to the store). Sometimes there’s a difference in the processing time on their end. It only happens once in a blue moon, but it happened twice last year….. as in, it’s happened twice close together, but I’ve had the account for almost 20 years.
I’m at the point in my life where I would like to learn, and demand avoidance kicks in when I feel abject fear, the kind that literally lights your nerves on fire. That’s one of the things that allistic people do not understand or tolerate- it’s not that big a deal, you’re just overreacting.
Well, for some people “sensory issues” means that they don’t eat or wear a lot of different things. Sensory issues in meltdown physically hurt because you can avoid the foods you don’t like. You cannot avoid your reactions. To neurotypicals, it’s talking about finance and that’s easy because it’s a logical process and I am trying not to dissociate from the conversation because as my discomfort goes up, so does my need for fight, freeze, or flight.
When I am faced with decisions I cannot understand, I freeze. Both my body and brain shut down when the information becomes overwhelming and the neurological reaction starts. For me, meltdown starts the most easily in conversations where I’m expected to know a 101 level and I’m not out of kindergarten on the subject. Generally, that means rage, but none of it is directed externally. I start to think about why I’m this old and still don’t understand X. My nerves begin to catch fire, upping my adrenaline. It’s truly an “Incredible Hulk” feeling, except you’ve painted yourself as the villain who needs to be smashed. Red mist rage is the least helpful when you direct it at yourself…. though in my eyes, preferable to blaming anything on anyone else.
Meltdown is not always loud. For people that social mask well, they can shield what’s going on in their bodies when they have to interact socially……. origin of the phrase, “you don’t look autistic.” But there are signs. If we’re at a house party or a restaurant, chances are that
I have said it before, and I will say it again…. people do not have empathy for demand avoidance, meltdown (and the sensory issues within), and burnout unless they can clearly see the person needs it. You think you know autistic when you see it, because you don’t see it until it’s painfully obvious, like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory”
I love watching economists talk about world issues, because I have a much easier time with ideas and concepts rather than nuts and bolts.
I can explain anti disestablishmentariansm easier than I can explain things closer to home, like my weird autistic quirks. When I think about world issues, it’s honestly like my mind is taking me on a trip without drugs. I see patterns with enough information and I’ve been reading the news for at least 35 years.
I also see patterns in my own behavior while writing about my younger self, and I’ve realized that my head being in the clouds is the natural state for someone who’s creative autistic. That I am selectively mute in lots of situations because my brain isn’t keeping up with the conversation in front of me- I am sitting near people and entertaining myself. Bringing myself to enter a conversation is very difficult, both because I’m anxious when I meet new people and I don’t like talking, anyway.
I am sure part of it is that I don’t consciously social mask to the degree that I used to, so I don’t feel the need to add anything. If someone talks directly to me, I’ll be friendly. I’m not antisocial. What I mean is that because I think about big ideas, my worth is not dependent on being popular and engaging to a whole crowd, the way I was raised. I don’t mean that it was my job to become the life of the party, just extraordinarily funny so that everyone liked me, and also the one to leave last because I didn’t want the host to do the dishes.
Those were the values instilled in me, to be the kind of person that everyone liked at all costs, because I couldn’t do anything to alienate anyone from my church. When there were a couple of times my behavior had been used in meetings to score a political point, I shut down; my being queer and having someone to confide in was not going to become ammunition….. until I realized that there was no way I could hide a secret that big. It was a choir. A lot of people in a small room, an even smaller dressing room where everyone was all up in each other’s business.
She was not well-liked by a part of our congregation because they thought she was grooming me. She was, but not for sex. It was the ability to confide in someone that didn’t have anything to do with her adult life out there in the real world………. but she forgot something important because I let her. Who wouldn’t want someone like her to be your friend? We each thought each other was hilarious, and it cost me actually being able to do the “bit” where I showed up at school and actually cared about my friends’ problems, because I did not give a shit what happened in Algebra. I was already overwhelmed with a 25-year-old’s view of the world. One of the reasons I didn’t learn much in school is that I was there, but I wasn’t present.
Just because I’m the personality that’s a thousand years old doesn’t mean you should treat me like I’m that old in middle school. It was wrong of her to put secrets in me that were just too big to handle at that age, and now I know that it’s just what she does. She draws you into a special little bubble where you think you’re the most important person in the world. I do not think that she intentionally went after a 14 year-old girlfriend, I just showed up and became so through listening to her problems.
However, I also do not mean that she thought of me as her girlfriend in that strict a sense. You’d just have to know her as well as I do to know that the way she gets that supportive, platonic relationship with women crosses the line all the time. She has broken more hearts than anyone I’ve ever known. I don’t think she thinks that way of herself, but there are stories out there. BELIEVE THEM. Her way of going for that deep, yellow-string connection like I have to Bryn is being seductive enough to make you think it’s a red string in touches and hugs, but absolutely empty words…. she just wanted you to feel like it was important for you to be in her inner circle until she didn’t need anything from you anymore.
It worked on me, and I know for sure it has worked on others. However, it’s been 10 years since we’ve even been in the same room, probably longer. I’m guessing her body count is higher now. As I have said before, I’m not the only one. I’m just the youngest.
Editor’s Note:
I wonder how much of my view on money was also tied to the fact that I wasn’t raised to be queer. I was raised to be the perfect wife. My mother was born in 1951 to parents that had extraordinarily stringent gender roles. Fairly certain that my dad did all the budgeting at home because he had to do it at the church, anyway. I don’t think that for my dad it was a “traditional male” thing so much as “I’m genuinely better suited for this task because I do it a lot more often.” If my mother had showed up to the table with any financial skills from her first family, my dad would have let her do it…… but why would her mother or father teach her those things? So, I believe that because my grandfather and my father did all the “money stuff,” she almost assuredly thought I wouldn’t need to know.
Even though I couldn’t have known at the time that the relationship with this older woman would have disastrous effects, I did know the dopamine made me feel good. It was the last thing I wanted up for discussion. trying to keep it on the downlow because we both needed privacy (for good reason had I not been a teen). I used to put notes in her choir folder before she got to church so that no one saw me do it. I was rebelling against the status quo by being authentically myself. I liked the dopamine of being an older woman’s friend because everyone around me just seemed like, well, children. That should have been a clue, but I didn’t know anything to look for- that isolation was a thing.
That last sentence is carrying a lot of weight for me right now, because it’s a double entendre. Isolation is a thing that abusers do (no matter the delivery), and isolation in which my sensory issues are at a minimum is more comfortable for me, anyway. In short, easy target. It was also quite easy for another lesbian to tell I was one, so I’m sure that part of me being so young was getting to rescue this lost little sheep. In some ways, she did. But what stays with me today is just how much she didn’t want me until someone else did.
This was a running theme over my entire time in Portland, because we had lots of friends through church where all of a sudden it seemed like a competition. From her friends, it was the pissing contest of “we know her better than you.” From her, it was jealousy because she thought they did like me better than her. Neither of those things were ever true. So, eventually I made friends with people she had no connection to, and I was lucky if I got an “all call” party invite. When I wasn’t in her inner circle, I wasn’t part of the drama, and I liked it that way. It made life easier to regulate emotionally when I wasn’t letting her pull my strings.
There were so many good reasons for our privacy in the beginning that it overshadowed all the bad ones. I don’t know how many queer friends she had, but she’s the only one I’d met up unto that point.
So, my first model of an adult lesbian relationship was someone who wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. Someone to love and adore her at home, and a person that partner at home absolutely should be worried about, because if there’s a problem in your relationship, she won’t tell you. She’ll find a woman like me, one that absolutely loves to show their friends they love them by listening to them…… and start overwhelming them with dopamine immediately so that she has a shoulder to cry on when she needs you, but you don’t. What you will get is a lot of empty words and promises until she’s in the shit again and doesn’t currently have that person. You are not her first choice and you know it, but you have to pretend it doesn’t matter.
I’ve known her twice as long as her wife, and I could have taught her a lot if my emotional abuser hadn’t programmed her to think of me as causing trouble in her life. That’s because when she left Houston, she didn’t need me anymore and the story she told me never matched up. That of course I should move to Portland. Get out of Texas. It would be good for you. Just a million and one reasons telling me I should go out there, including visiting several times before I actually moved so that I knew more people than just her by the time I got there.
If we had only written letters about this, I would say simply that “love letters are the campaign promises of the soul.” But this was over the phone and in person. I have a feeling that she actually wasn’t really uncomfortable until I did move, because she couldn’t keep telling her partner and I a different story every day…… but she could if I was only an occasional letter or a call. For instance, her partner actually said to me, “you need to get over your issues with her because it’s like you’re just carrying all that shit in a bag.” She said this a propos of nothing, so I don’t even know what she was saying I needed to get over. All I know is that it wasn’t accurate, whatever it was.
Her partner is older than my dad, therefore I was never right in the history of our relationship. That’s because when I was 14 and she was 25, she was still basically a kid as well. It was easier to see herself as equal to me. In the years we didn’t live in the same city, the power dynamic changed twice over, because part of realizing that she was so much older was realizing she was almost equidistant in age between us. So, I said something she disagreed with, she would turn to the “adultier adult” and they’d both take me down. Meanwhile, she was playing both sides. Her partner was responding out of the information she knew about me secondhand, not anything said between her wife and me when she wasn’t in the room. If I got close, the conversation was engineered away.
I seriously don’t know anything about budgeting. Not my forte. For me, that entire relationship was about learning to conserve my energy. That every time she said “jump,” I didn’t have to. I should have been allowed to take up room. I was abandoned in the same city the way I felt abandoned when she left Houston. At least when she left Houston there was a reason for it.
It all seemed nonsensical as to why this was happening when we both lived in the same town until I realized that if I had a conference with 10 other doctors regarding her medical history and my experiences,ย not one of them would walk out thinking I hadn’t been taken in by a narcissist.
Now, I am exploring all of the things that make me attracted to emotional unavailability because I’ve realized how detrimental it can be. I want emotional honesty or I want to move on. I have had too much of being used and abused by people who can’t talk about their feelings. That’s not what made me say “narcissistic personally disorder,” though. It’s the round-the-clock schedule she’s got going of lovebomb/discard.
It’s scary how quickly you can go from “you’re my best friend” to “do I know you?” That’s because you won’t be in a relationship with her for very long. You just think you will. That’s why we don’t have any mutual friends left. Her castoffs generally gave me their story, but not because they wanted me to know it. They wanted me to be an intercessory of sorts, as if I had the power to help anything. I just listened and sympathized, but the “maybe you could talk to her” was implied. I get it. If you’re a nobody, having a powerful person who also has a solo-quality voice that wows you is a lot to lose.
It just took them all a long time to learn that they didn’t lose anything. They regained their sanity. Their “friendships” weren’t this murky blur of of moments were you thought it was kind of seductive, but you could have been wrong…. maybe it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.
That was my school experience from 7th grade on- trying to learn and in a monotropic thought process, stuck a moment and couldn’t get out of it.
So, as a result, now I’m learning a lot of the finer points of money when I’ve never thought about it at all. I didn’t have room.
Your shout-out warms the circuits of my binary heart. 
Stories That Are All True 